Lester the Lizard Learns to Love
Lester the Lizard is having a bad day. But with a little help from his Grandlizzy Lou, he learns to turn his frown upside down and share some much-needed love with the world.
Written by Lindsay Lemley
I absolutely loved bringing the story of Lester to life. Drawing anthromorphic animals is so much fun. And this cute Lizard made me so happy every time. It was a joy to work with Lindsay, everything went so smoothly and I think together we created a beautiful book.
The story of Lester had to take place in a tropical place. With lots of leaves, bushes and vibrant colours.
Process
Character design
Lester needed to be a sunny cheerful fellow. A good character design has personality without standing in a scene. Therefore I gave Lester a bandana and a tiny vest. We went through several rough coloured versions to get to the right one. He needed to stand out with colour or pattern. The orange and blue colours went very well together. And we settled on the striped tail.
Storyboard
For me it's important to have a character design sheet before I start the storyboard. Because the storyboard is very rough looking. Especially Lester looks sometimes more like an alien than a Lizard. The character design sheet should help Lindsay to look through the roughness of the storyboard and see what compositions I want to use.
Colour sketches
After the storyboard I create the final sketches. To choose the colours of the book I pick one sketch and create multiple rough coloured versions for this to see what our starting point with the book is.
Rough colours
Now that we found the colour palette I could create the rough coloured storyboard. To balance out all the colours I used a light background on almost all spreads. Of course not every page is going to look the same. Especially in the case of Lester the Lizard, where I chose to make use many different colours for each page. But still this first rough coloured sketch was my base and everything had to match with this sketch.
Flat colours & Final rendering
The final phase is to colour everything in the "flat colours" version. Here I will add all the foliage and draw out all the colours with textured brushes.
After the flat colours are done I could finally start on the lights and shadows. I love this part of the process because I get to bring the illustration to life with lights, shadows and textures. Especially the textures have become my favorite part. These textures give my illustrations that hand drawn feeling. And of course I add the magic in this final stage.
