Before you begin any design, you need to know a bit about your character.

I started you out by suggesting a series of questions about who the doctor is. I sat down for about 30 minutes and thought these things through and here's what I came up with:

So, my period will be late 1800's in western US, Oaklahoma City (or thereabouts).

From this outline I can now start to explore some shapes and possible proportions.

Now I can begin to play around with the features and proportions. I'll focus on Jekyll first.

I want him to have a large head in proportion to his body, sort of like Mr. Monopoly and the Mayor of Townsville from the Powerpuff Girls series.

I saw a picture of Edgar Allen Poe once and remembered that he had a very odd shaped head and eyes. I found some reference on the Internet.

Here are some of the caricatures that I did of him.

I'm leaning towards a combination of 3 and 4 with the body of 5.

Here it is pasted together and overlapped in onionskin.

and here's the clean up with a variation in the jaw.

A few minor modifications here and there then cleaned up and in color.

Total time from initial roughs to final version here: 2 1/2 hours.

The next phase is coming up with some poses. For this, I have each of the students come up to the front of the class and assume a pose from the story and then everyone draws their character in that pose. The poses are very rough and only last for two minutes each. If we go through everyone twice, that's 28 poses.

Here are just a few poses from these sessions and then my modifications to one of the poses.

From these I can now select down to the 10 best poses and begin the modifications for the final model sheets.

Go to Mr. Hyde design process

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