Beauty

I don't know if it's because I'm using an aging Emac since my own laptop died, because my scanner is getting on, or because my work is difficult to photograph/scan (the latter is definitely a factor) but these images a re extremely not good. At least they give the general idea.

Anyway. As I already mentioned, striking the right balance in telling Beauty And The Beast to young children is a challenge. With Beauty, you want to make her look young so a young readership has sympathy with her, but at the same time you don't want to depict someone who looks like a pre-teen falling in love with a big, bestial male.

My thoughts, as usual, gravitated towards 20s/30s design - in this case the boyish, shapeless cuts of the dresses. Putting Beauty in a shapeless, dropped-waist shift means she still looks cute but her age is ambiguous. I also gave her beauty of the soft-20s-prettiness variety which again makes her look ambiguously youthful I hope. Her hair is in loose pigtails rather than being down or formally dressed.

I also think it makes sense to dress Beauty in practical, slightly boyish clothes (I imagine this is some sort of riding outfit) rather than the beautiful gowns she is normally shown in, and to put her hair in a careless, scruffy style, because it throws any prettiness I've managed to depict in her face into sharp relief.

The lines might be very 20s but I again tried to inject a certain amount of vagueness about time and geographical setting by the patterns I chose. I gave Beauty a white palette since she's the traditional fairy tale innocent. It also makes her black hair look more striking.

I'm well into using colour as a signifier... in this case I like how she and the Beast are at opposite ends of the greyscale so they're related in colour as well as contrasting. Her white is punctuated with earthy colours, green and brown (probably not clear in the scan), because she's your humble, friend-to-all-living-creatures type. Beast has bright red and blue in his clothes because he is removed from down-to-earth living as a prince and a Beast. The palace is dominated by my favourite colour, green, which can be used to create an unworldly, unnatural atmosphere as I've attempted in the dining-hall illustration. Alphonso Cuaron uses green an awful lot to create various atmospheres. Look at his 'A Little Princess' - it's the greenest film you'll ever see.

If I was working on the actual picture book, some sort of colour/lighting map is one of the first plans I'd make.

Designing the Beast

So, the process of coming up with a character design for the Beast.

I love sketching in the V&A in South Ken, and it occurred to me when I was there the Natural History Museum next door might be a good place to get inspiration for a beast. The sketches in the top left

corner are some that I did there (when I wasn't jabbing small children with a sharpened pencil for getting in the way. Not really. I just wanted to. Bloomin cheek they've got, running round enjoying a child-friendly museum).

Ahem. As you can see, the animals I sketched don't have an awful lot in common with the gorilla/bear hybrid I ended up doing, but I find it often works this way - an important part of the process is trying an eliminating blind alleys. It's something I have to discipline myself to go through, this process, rather than just diving in and coming up against problems that should

have been eliminated at an early stage, when its too late to do much about it. In this case I'm glad I worked through civet- and dog- based ideas early on (see the early sketches in the top right hand corner).

After that I hit on something pretty close to the final design pretty quickly. I think this is because I was utilising a lot of the work I've done over years in drawing another character - Iorek Byrnison from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (relevant bit's about halfway through post). To me, the word Beast conjures a very mammalian creature, and if you want your Beast to be at all appealing, fur helps. But I didn't want the Beast to look too friendly, and I think this is why I started thinking along the same lines as Iorek Byrnison: reducing the proportional size of the head and eyes to make the character a little inaccesable and hard to read; more imposing.

The other consideration with Beauty And The Beast is while the Beast is just that, you have to try and make him not appear so animal that it seems weird that human Beauty falls in love with him.

Can I just take this opportunity, by the way, to point out what an odd fairy tale Beauty And The Beast is? Whereas tales like Cinderella and so on seem to have a fairly clear morality and absolutely archetypal plots, Beauty And The Beast seems to me to be something more rich and complex.

Anyway; bears and apes/monkeys struck me as the animals with the most obvious human-like physicality. I'd already thought about Iorek-style-beariness for the Beast's body and I liked the idea of contrasting that imposing bulk with quite a delicate, clever almost-human face based on a monkey's.

I think the final design looks a little like some depictions of the Chinese Monkey King. He's somewhere between a bear, a silverback gorilla, a monkey and a sloth. Putting trousers and boots on him pulls him a little more towards the human end of the scale.

So that's about it. All in all a design I'm pretty pleased with.