Final design. After working on the side by side, I decided to combine earlier concepts with the initial illustration. This will facilitate the animation pipeline and still convey Thea's personality.
This is a side by side I created to play with sizing and detail. I decided if I ever redo this project I will select the Thea on the far right to be "look" of this story.
Simplified my initial illustration concept.
Value study to make sure values wouldn't compete when it came time to color.
I decided I didn't want my story to have the 80's as the main focus and the character had too many details for an animated series. I redesigned her dress to be a little more modern and simplified her hightop Chucks.
First crack at developing Thea's design. This fit the 80's theme but it lacked her personality so I went back into a redesign phase.
Early concept sketches of Thea.
This is the evolution of Thea's character turnaround design. Thea was hard to nail down. She needed to appear as if she lived in the late 70's early 80's without the time period looking like a cliched 70's/80's look. After researching costuming of period movies like Escape to Witch Mountain, Firestarter and ET, I began to design a simple jumper-style dress that would be easy to animate for an episodic program.
About Thea:
Thea Adelaide Shepherd is introverted and thoughtful, this diminutive girl is the hero of bedtime stories. Don't let her size fool you, she has a big imagination. Her family moves into an isolated house in the woods of Chesapeake Beach, MD - her parents hometown that has a LONG family history.
