Creating a cover picture for my cartoon

 In this post I will look into creating the main image for my cartoon that consists of all of the characters and the logo. It is there to portray all of them in one and to present the characters. I kind of thought about it as creating a family photo, where all of them are lined up and posing as if there was a picture being taken of them. 

At first I simply copied all the characters to one canvas on Procreate and started lining them up. I wanted to make small changes in their poses, but I did not want the changes to be gigantic, just some small touch-ups, for example getting rid of some props they had in their hands or creating some sort of interaction between the characters. 

I started by positioning the mom and the daughter. Firstly, I have gotten rid of the attributes the mom was holding, by that I mean the paint brush and the palette. I also needed to change how she was holding the hands because if I just lest them as they were, it would be highly odd and unnatural. At first I wanted her to keep her hands down, but when I was adding the daughter, I came up with a new idea. I decided to show some sort of interaction between those two characters and place their hands behind each other's necks (as shown in the picture below).

This is how I decided to show the human interaction between the mother and the daughter. It looks like a friendly relationship and I like that they are not just lined up next to each other, but there is something going on between them. 

With the rest of the characters, I tried placing them so the photo looks like a family picture. I obviously decided to put the main character in the middle. At first I wanted to make illustrate him sitting down, but it did not look quite as good. I got rid of his magnifier and put his hand down so it looks natural. So the character ended up just standing there with one hand on his hip and the other hanging down. I wanted it simple and realistic. 

Next I placed the dad next to the son. At first I wanted the dad to have some sort of interaction with the son. I was thinking of making one hold onto another or just visibly one putting their hand on the other's shoulder but when I drew that out it simply looked weird. It looked staged and fake. I could not imagine a single person ever doing that kind of pose for a family picture. Then I decided the dad would hold their hand up as if he was showing the logo of the cartoon that would be above them. When drawing that out I noticed a tangent point. 

The part of the son's crown blended into the dad's sleeve which made it a tangent point. It does look as if it was glued together so I needed to find a solution. Finding a solution to tangent points is never difficult. The design just needed me to move the sleeve to the one side or the other and that is the only change I needed to make to solve the problem. 

I erased the hand and drew it with a little bit longer sleeve to avoid the complications caused by a tangent point. The next character I positioned in the family picture was the grandma. I did not really change anything about her pose, because I thought it was perfectly showing her character. When placing her where I thought would be the right place for her, I have encountered a problem with the shoes. 

As seen in the picture above, the grandma looks as if she was levitating, so I needed to fix this problem. I could have done that by lowering the grandma, but I really did not want to do that, because I have already worked with the top part of her body not to leave any sort of negative space that would be small or weird or unattractive. I needed her to be at this height but the shoe situation needed to be solved. In this sort of design no one is looking really closely at small detail, therefore I decided to cheat a little bit and just erase the bottom part of the dad's shoes, so it does not look as if the grandma was flying. 

Lastly I made sure the pet is positioned when I wanted him to be - so next to the main character because they are best friends and the dinosaur always follows the son. I have added the ground and the sky - using the same shades I used in the background drawings for some of the characters.

I have added the logo above them, because there were a perfect spot for it. 

My very last step was to establish where is the light source and how would the shades work. I needed to do that because I placed the characters outside. Since I did not place the sun in the background, I needed it to be somewhere in front of the characters. If the sun is somewhere in front of the characters - so where the viewer is, the shades would be behind the characters. It is pretty straight forward. 

 As mentioned in one of my previous posts, shades do not need to be perfect and they can be deformed. This is how shadows work, so they are not a perfect reflection of the character's posture or body type. I think keeping that in mind makes the process of drawing shades a little bit easier and more enjoyable. I used a darker shade of purple to just draw the shades behind them.  

Here is a video showing the entire process of creating this final cover image:

This video shows the process of my work in the software Procreate. I am very happy with my final version of the image. I like that there is some interaction between the characters and that they all still look like they should with their features expressing their personality. 

This is the cover mage for the cartoon called Amethyst Planet.