Narrative Illustration/ Development. Character designs for Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker

The two Aunts were the last characters I needed to design. I wanted to make them look as revolting and awful as possible. The aunts are fairly well described in the book but the description still leaves room for interpretation. Sponge is described as being ghastly and vain whilst Spiker is very thin and sharp (in both appearance and personality).

I began with Aunt Sponge and drew some brief sketches of my first ideas. At this point I wasn’t sure what would work for the character. In the book she finds herself to be beautiful which led to the idea of frilly clothing. The fact that the character is quite rounded led to the use of curly hair styles, to help reinforce that look.

A lot of my early sketches focused on Sponges face, the first few attempts were not working in my opinion. Compared to the style of James she looked nothing like a person. Instead she was looking more and more distorted, although I wanted this from the design I felt it went too far. 

After working on the face I then went on to draw some clothing designs. I wanted her clothing to like it was once nice but now looked torn and gaudy.  Even though the character thinks she looks beautiful I wanted her appearance to be the opposite. Some of the initial sketches already featured this and I thought it would be ironically funny. 

The final design for sponge works well in my opinion. I enjoy the look of rag tag clothing as it makes her look particularly unpleasant.

Once sponge was complete I moved onto aunt Spiker. She is meant to look the complete opposite of sponge but still unpleasant. Once again I started with some sketches to get my early ideas down. Spikes design was a lot easier to complete than sponges as I knew what I wanted. At first I drew her with a short Pony Tail hair style but in the end I changed this for spiky short hair. When drawing sponge I put a big puffy ribbon on her back, I thought this would work for spike as well. It helps to tie the two characters in together. Apart from that I gave her a thin dress and facial features which fit well with her original description.