Character designing has begun

Excited to begin the art for my graphic novel, I dove into some character sketches for my main protagonist, a biracial 12-year-old girl. Once I had sketched a few, I showed the co-author to get some feedback.
His thoughts were along the lines of "be more edgy" which I then had to decipher the exact meaning of what "edgy" looks like. We went through some other graphic novels and researched the look of characters and discussed it further.
"Like this style?" I'd ask. "No, that's horrible," he'd say. Okaaay. "How about like this?" I'd ask. "No, not quite like that."
Back and forth it went until I pulled out an old sketch that I'd done and asked, "Like this?"​

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BINGO! Yup! That's the visual that he needed to describe what his idea of "edgy" is. Now that I had something to visualize, I was able to make some changes to our main character. She went from the first drawing to the second drawing. 

Before

After

Basically, smaller eyes, a little more angle to the face and a little more corners incorporated into the design. I'm pretty happy with her, and Keith likes her too.
Actually, I love her. So, when I feel an emotional reaction to a drawing, I think it's a good sign.
And with both of us now happy with our main protagonist, I started doing environment thumbnail sketches. I basically drew this out during my Digital Painting college class and explained the process of placing my horizon line in varying places and then plotting the character in the space first. By focusing on shapes first, I can think purely in design rather than get caught up with the details.

My main goal is to make a book layout, but for my students, I explored the various ratios of the bounding box for TV, Phone/Table viewing and Feature animation.

I only really fleshed out the top row and would have done all of them but for the interest of not boring my students, I went ahead with the top image.

I enlarged the thumbnail and then made sure it fit the ratio of a full page spread by adding space at the top and bottom of the image. Then I constructed the sketch a bit more to get some forms in and cleaned up the sketch a little, still trying to keep it rough.

 Lastly, I did a quick tonal value study over the comp. The one on the left I did very quickly in class and the one on the right I spent a bit more time with, using the lasso tool in PS to make some nice pointy hard shapes for the rocky mountains in the back and making sure I locked my layers on each element to keep the value gradation within my forms.

Well, that's all for now. Next up will be designing the secondary characters in the story along with fully developing the above illustration. Til next time!