I came across Elys Dolan's work during the Waterstone's 'Picture This' competitions last year that I was
going to enter, which involved creating character designs and a double page spread of Beauty and the Beast. I was instantly drawn to their work because of the wonderfully cute and eccentric characters and her very child friendly style.
Her work has subtle colours that give off a really lovely dream like feel and appear to be created digitally but also look somewhat traditional, as if rendered with colouring pencils. This has a slight naivety about it which works really well with children's book illustration.
Her characters all have huge eyes, which give allot of character and expression and makes the character look super cute, I feel some of the designs could fell more mature if it weren't for the over the top style. This super cute thing is really important when aiming at a young market but it also appeals to a wider audience particular a female audience who maybe more inclined to cute sugar-coated goodness.I want to appeal to this kind of market but also don't want to restrict my audience so I have to have a balance between super cute and 'AWESOME'..
Still, I really love this work and the character designs, as well as the soft rendering style. I think during my character design process my characters had gone a little mature in terms of detail and 'realism' so maybe drawing back on some of the detail and exaggerating the proportions will help make it more like and children's book illustration.
