Shining princess design

For this story I wanted to look into traditional Japanese culture and use that for the base of the story. You can find some of the images I looked at on Pinterest. I started by looking at Japanese patterns.

-Pattern Source book: Japanese style, 250 patterns for projects and designs, 2005, Shigeki Nakamura, Originally published din Japan by MdN corporation Tokyo Japan

I also came across these image from a female stock image book, that I thought related to this story and would use as inspirations when thinking about finalising my images.

 I then did some drawings of Japanese in traditional dress and some more recent.

I then looked at oriental dolls as in the story she is referred to being beautiful and doll like so looking at dolls seemed like a good thing to do to help my character designs.
Oriental dolls

These kind of dolls have very dainty features like I want the character in this story, I am aware that I wanted to make my characters strong women but at the same time I would rather have more cultural links within the story as I have found it really interesting looking at the cultures and how they are represented. Especially as this character isn't human she is form the moon so making her look like a doll will help show that she isn't human. I then looked at more modern dolls, BJD's or Ball point dolls, they have more manga exaggerated features, big heads and eyes with tiny noses and hands.

After looking over all my material I found I did some character designs and some small pattern samples.

I want my character to be doll like and have chosen to do a mix of two of my designs as I want the character to have traditional hair style. I tried to exaggerate the eyes and made some of her features smaller like her eye brows and lips.
Last page layouts

More defined idea of what the character will look in on the page.

After this I then drew the pages out and knowing what I had learned for the other pages I had already finished in my book, I decided that I wanted to use empty black space to emphasis the image and bright she shines, I also thought to do this to try and represent how Japanese wood prints use white space in there images, but mine will be with black as I want her features to be white like a doll and the pattern to stand out. Though unlike Japanese woodcuts I want to experiment with spot colour as I found it interesting and harder to work with because I am used to just going full colour, but I really liked how my Atlanta pages turned out and how I had to consider design more as I had a limited pallet. So for this story I will further limit myself and see how this affects my work and image making.

page 6

Other pages

page 5

page 1

page 2

Bamboo cut for the first page.