Family Peek!

Hello Everyone!

It's time for a...family snapshot!

Seriously. The difference between picture size large and x-large is too big! Do enlarge the image for better view. X-large ends up in the side bar and large is this. Doesn't make sense! Minor rant there hehe. Let's see...I drew and painted this a while back and I figured to show it to you before I start showing peeks of new art. Migwi has a mom, dad and baby sister. It's going to be interesting to draw the entire family of Migwi and giving them their own characteristics ^_^.

Hope you all had a great weekend and a great start of the week. This week is going to be really busy for me, so wish me luck!

Take care!!

Ciao

Cute Litte Animals

Hey Everyone!

TJ here! Apologies for the lack of posting. For this post, I wanted to show you some little characters I drew a while back. It was to see how cute the characters had to be, but no doubt they will change slightly to fit Migwi. We can't have a cute main character and realistic friends hehe. I will do separate post about each friend as well, where Susanna and I tell more about the character.

You know, between the holidays, organizing my admin work and finishing up my own projects, I had to set Migwi aside for bit. I'm currently thinking of a schedule to work on the Miwgi project, but balancing my time between all my projects and everyday life still proves to be difficult. It annoys me that I am not doing as much for this project as I'd like, but I can only do so much. It sucks though.

The annoyance aside, it's a slow start, but I'll show you little bits of doodles every now and then, because I know that this book will eventually be completed. So big big Thank You to the people who are following our journey already and support this little blog.

The plan is to combine the animal sketches with another project of mine, so all the sketch work won't go to 'waste'. It's quite easy to keep the focus for sketch work on only one thing, while an image can be used for more things.

This is it for now! Till next time everyone :)

Ciao!

Character Design: Migwi

Ciao! TJ here!  

So the journey regarding the drawing element shall start with this post! I'm still at the beginning phase of the character design and I'm learning a lot and probably will learn a lot more the upcoming weeks. But if you stick around, you will see and read about it all.

First thing that I did? Lots and lots of research and I am still in the middle of this. As you know, the setting of the story is Africa as Migwi lives there. Africa is known for beautiful landscapes and many animals, but before I even look at this, I have to tackle the main character and capture his essence as a believable and fun character.

When Susanna first told me about the Colobus monkey, I didn’t know what type of monkey it was.  The fur is what struck me the most, so pretty. After googling a bit more, I fell in love with this little monkey, simply because it's not your typical monkey for a story (you can read a bit more about the Colobus monkey in the previous post).

However, creating a stable character to draw many times in different poses, isn't something I have done a lot so far, so it's a challenge. A fun one though. The drawings you see here, they have been drawn very quickly and normally I'd never show these to a big audience as they are just for myself to see to what extent I could capture what I had in my mind back then. Also to see what I find difficult and how detailed I want to go.
   

You know, the header monkey is the very first Migwi I drew and so far the favorite amongst many I know. The Migwi you see know, seems a bit older, but I didn't pay that much attention to the monkey in general.

I have to keep this in mind as baby Colobus monkeys are white and Miwgi isn't that young, but not that old either. Plus, I have to keep his parents in mind as well and...he has a baby sister.

So my tricky points so far are as following:
- The fur as the color palette is very limited, only black and white. For the monkey anyway.
- Making sure it doesn’t look like a skunk. Seriously.

Do enlarge the picture for a better view.

You will see the character change over time as I still haven't found my perfect Migwi. However I'll keep in mind how most people like the header Migwi! I probably ask you for advice as well ^_^

Till next post, everyone!

Character Introduction: Migwi

Hello Everyone!

It's been a while since the last post, lots to do and to arrange, but we're back. So, since you know us a bit better now, let's have a closer look at the main character. Oh! If you don't know us, please have a look at the About Us tab.

The main character is a little Colobus monkey who will go on a journey to find a new home for his family. Why? You will find this out soon! As time passes you will get to know more and more about Migwi and his friends.

Isn't the fur just gorgeous? Photo from AWF.org

Why a Colobus monkey? The Colobus monkey is an endangered species that lives in the forests of Africa. Our little character is the Black & White Colobus. The fur is amazing and these monkeys mainly live in the tops of the trees and to move around they jump from branch to branch. Which is quite an impressive sight! They have 4 fingers, so no thumbs and this makes them different from other monkeys. They love to chew leaves all day long, a Colobus monkey looks very sweet when it stuffs a large amount of leaves into its mouth. We also found that the monkeys look very cute, especially their little white babies, that we just had to write a story about them.

Photo from Zooborns.typepad.com

By choosing an endangered animal, we want to shine some light on them and make people aware of their situation. Once you find out more about our story you will learn more about why they are endangered.You see, it’s not going to be a pretty story alone, we hope that whoever reads it, learns a bit more about this animal as well.

Munch, munch, munch! Photo from westsidesafari.com

Why the name Migwi? The Colobus monkey lives in Africa, so an African name made sense and Migwi appealed to us from the start. We looked for the meaning and it seems it means ‘arrows’, but then again on some sites it said it had no meaning. Oddness.

Fly, fly, fly! Photo from africa-expert.org

Next post will be about drawing!!Stay tuned for this. Also, if you know people who would like to stay up to date feel free to forward this to them :D.

Till next post everyone!