Besides preparing the shoot of the next episode of my web series I am working full steam on the illustrations for my fairy tale book called Below the Floor.

As I mentioned in a previous post the main character of this tale is a small fella called Leto. It took quite some time to figure out what he will look like and below you can see the first illustrations I did when I was creating him.

Basically, I did some research and quick sketches of features I wanted to see in Leto, as I wanted his character to be reflected in his physiognomy.

Leto is still a very young Wan Tau (that´s the name of his fairy tribe) and a bit inexperienced, but he is a very brave little one: He is one of the guys who swarm and gather food for their tribe, mainly vegetables left by the humans. Going on expeditions into the human world is the most dangerous task a Wan Tau can do, but this is nothing compared to the challenges that await him as the story unfolds.

But now back to the designs:

After these initial ideas and tests I came up with this first portrait which was quite close, but still not where I wanted to get to.

There are some things which I kept in the final design, though.

I´ll post some further design steps in the next blog posts so stay tuned to see how Leto evolved. 🙂