Portfolio: The Pirate’s Treasure
The story I’m in the middle of working on right now is The Pirate’s Treasure.
All of the stories that I have the hardest time producing portfolio pieces for are the ones that I still haven’t nailed down the character design. This is true of “The Pirate’s Treasure”.
I have 2 main characters in this story: The pirate and the farmer. An agent or editor who looked at this story for me commented that the farmer needed more character development especially since I refer to him as the farmer throughout the story. He doesn’t even have a name. He is a cardboard cutout.
My calendar says I am on Day 6 of the Pirate’s Treasure. I have hardly anything to show for my efforts. (I think I might have even slept through my work day on Day 3). It was hard work to get me to even sit down with it. A day or so ago, I pulled off a Character Design book off my shelves that I haven’t read yet and started working with it. It starts with the most basics of Character Design: who are your characters.
I wrote more than I drew that day. Then when I had landed on a few character traits that I liked, I asked what if.
What if the pirate was really tall? He might not fit in his berth:
What if he has two hollow legs and is always hungry?
Then I thought about exploring that last idea and I went off seeing how many food items I could use in the landscape of islands that he could see. Then I thought, what if he drew a map of all these landmarks?
Then I wondered what if the pirate isn’t literate? He wouldn’t have words and letters to explain what he was learning. What if he captured it all in a drawing?
Ok. not all pictures, but I thought of the idea of no words after I started. I could spend some more time here working on a graphic image that will communicate better.
A previous version of this story, I had the farm transformed at the end of the story. I did a quick sketch to remind me of what a cool idea that is.
The pirates is the Ying to the farmer’s yang and they have a lot in common and several traits that are not in common. A venn diagram was begging to be made:
