Lily Malcom: Conveying Emotion: Breathing Life into Your Characters
Lily Malcom is Vice President and executive art director of Dial Books for Young Readers. She's art directed many great books and talented illustrators including Corinna Luyken, Judy Schachner, David Small, Zach O'Hora, Erin Stead, Jerry Pinkney, and Jon Agee. Lily shares a number of awesome tips to make your characters unique and bursting with... character. Here are a few: Main characters can convey emotion through their eyes, yes! But be sure that emotion spreads to their eyebrows, too. And what other accessories can be emotive? Think of Ladybug Girl's wings for a start. The size and placement of your characters on the page are hugely important. You can use that space that they take up on the page and the way it changes page to page to make a huge impact. A big change in size or placement of a character page to page results in a powerful page turn that shocks the reader. You can also speed up the action this way, or slow down the action with spots and vignettes. Visual n...