Being inspired for art style was not too hard for this project; as soon as I saw the art of Jon Klassen – I instantly knew I wanted to go for that kind of art style. His work was simple but yet the characters had a certain complexity and elegance to them in the way they were drawn and coloured in. This simplicity often carried a comedic element to the story as well; with their often blank expressions somehow conveying a wide variety of emotions.
Here is a mood board that I developed around the work of Jon Klassen, I will refer to this for inspiration for both story and character design:
Once I designed my character (see character designs) and decided what my story was going to be about (Ollie Owl accidentally taking drugs and going on a trip), I decided to do some research in that area. Looking at accurate recreations of trips, I decided that it was too boring and that I wanted to exaggerate the look of the trip, so I decided to look at 60s hippie culture style art to get inspired. Here is a mood board that I developed from that research.
For the part where the trip goes bad, I wanted to use some optical illusions to convey that – the hard it was for the reader to look at it, the better. Here is a mood board that I developed from that research.
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