Research and Development

 Hello all,

We are a week out from the beginning of Inktober and by extension, the first chapter of my short story: Magda Lynn and the Knight. With that in mind, I thought I would share some of the things I've been doing to prepare:

Below are some of the pictures I've been looking at as I design my characters and compositions. 

As I plan the illustrations for this story, I'm trying to be mindful of what people of the time would have been wearing and what kind of tools they would have been using. However, this story is not set in a particular time and place in our history, so I'm not committing to one particular time period or place. Rather, I would like to present a place that could have existed some time in history. 

That being said, there will undoubtably be some things that clash in the eyes of the those more knowledgeable about such times in history. To those people, I welcome any advice or feedback. My plans to write about these characters started a couple of months ago, but the real planning didn't start in earnest until early September. This basically means that I had a month to learn everything there is to know about my setting in order to make the story as plausible as possible. I hope you can see the folly in thinking this was likely to happen.

Thus, this project will be a learning experience for me and one I am greatly looking forward to. Hopefully everything I learn here will be put to good use in a later project.

Below are some sketches of characters and possible scenes for the story. I've also been looking at interesting designs for borders and embellishments, so I've included one of my studies here too.

I've been drawing Magda for a while, so I have more sketches of her than anything else in the story, but just this week I decided on a design for the Knight (far left is a rough version of this). Right now, I'm working on the compositions and overall design.

Here are a few books I've been looking at.

Honestly, sometimes I just get lost in bookmarking cool stuff in these books. There are so many great illustrations, and they all give me so many ideas, it's hard to narrow down what to use. It's fun to imagine all the ways I could use the information, but I know a lot of it probably won't make the final story this month. Still, it will hopefully prove useful in the future.

That's all for this update. Come back next week for the beginning of the story!

Thanks for reading.

-Sarah