I knew right away that I wanted to try and emulate the soft, round look of Calico Critters (Sylvanian Families for those outside the US). There are already Peanuts influences even in these early sketches, and that would continue into the final piece.

I like to make notes around my sketches or characters that I draw that really end up "speaking" to me. For Ghost, his notes say: "He doesn't need a lot of candy. He is small," "Polite," and, "All he had on hand was a pillowcase (he will still use it as a pillowcase)."

Just by the drawing alone, I was already getting a feel for Ghost. He's on the smaller side, he's quiet and thoughtful, but he's also creative. He seems happy just to be included and is going to have a good time no matter what trick-or-treating brings.

I also knew that I would have to make a crew of little animals for him to spend Halloween with, and the first character that came to mind was a rabbit.

It's here that I have to confess something. That note may say "Bunnicula reference," but I have not read Bunnicula before. If I did, it was likely over 1,000 years ago, back when I myself was little. I have vague memories of it, but outside of how the rabbit looks, I can't say I remember much else. I might have been too scared of it as a kid.

Regardless, the way I drew this character also quickly began to inform his personality. He's definitely precocious and gets into trouble (that second note says "high energy"), and while he may act like a main character type, he isn't. He falls in line behind Ghost and prefers to follow his lead. Although the two have wildly different personality types, they bounce off of each other well, like siblings.

For the other animals, it took me some time to think of what creatures you might see around your neighborhood. A fox or deer was a fun idea, but I felt that it wouldn't resonate with kids who maybe hadn't ever seen a creature as "wild" as that. A skunk and a raccoon, then, became the next obvious choices.

(I knew I wanted to have four characters in a row, a nice even number!)

I don't know if the proper industry term is "inking" or "lineart" or some other, secret term, but in my deviantART days, the stage of taking a sketch and refining it to look "clean" was always called "lineart," and I've used that term since 2009.

I actually enjoy doing lineart quite a bit! There's something very calming about tracing over your rough idea and making it easier to read, giving it shape and life with a couple of strokes of a pen. Even small variations in weight and width can make a big difference.

Something I developed a habit for while working on my portfolio; when I draw animal characters, I tend to draw them with pie-cut eyes, which were popular in rubber hose cartoons in the 1930s. Mickey Mouse will still sometimes be drawn with this style of eyes, and more modern cartoons will use it for a "vintage" look.

When I color eyes, I leave half of the iris black and the other colored in, but in the case of these guys, that looked way too harsh, especially when the flat colors were added in.

Although I don't normally use straight black when doing lineart, I felt it helped them look more "cartoony," and also helped them stand out from the dark nighttime background.

And just like that, our critters are coming to life! When picking out their color palettes, I ended up directly referencing a screenshot from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and translating the colors from that into being CMYK-friendly (the standard for printing your images while still having them look nice! I rarely remember to do this). The skunk was actually the hardest to color and went through several different grays, which I only did after consulting some outside sources (aka my dad).

In reviewing the piece at this stage, my dad also made an important remark; with them all in a line, it looks like a gradient. I never intended this, but it helps with the flow and how the image is read, and more easily differentiates each character while being limited to a muted color palette.

At this point, I came up with a somewhat ambitious idea, and it came from studying more screenshots from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. The backgrounds in the film are very distinct; watercolor and colored pencil skies, dark opaque backgrounds, specs of light highlighted in bright yellow or white. 

If I wanted to emulate the Peanuts style, why not just hand paint my own background?

This was the product of an afternoon with my beloved gouache set and a pad of watercolor paper. I'm happy with it, especially the sky, but in this format it looked...rough. I would need to do a lot of editing to make it look how I really wanted it to. 

Still, although this painting isn't my best, I achieved exactly what I wanted: it looked handmade. The inconsistency in the brushstrokes, the way the water thins the layers of blue and purple and black and meshes them together. It's an effect that can be achieved digitally, but in this case, I knew it was going to resonate more if there was a hand-painted element to it.

Much better! Now all the torn paper and too-thin paint layers are gone, and it makes the painting a bit more solid. A friend of mine advised me to add a frame around the window too, which helped it become part of the house and stick out a little less. It was tempting to make it a perfect square, but that would ruin the human error part of the painting, which was the entire point of doing the background this way.

At this point, I had to decide on the mood of the background, so I changed the values until it was darker (but not scary!). This would also impact how the critters would be rendered (or shaded and highlighted), and while it was an important decision, I made these edits with little more than gut feeling on what looked right and what didn't. This far in, I knew exactly how I wanted the finished piece to look in my head. If I felt something wasn't working, now was the time to pivot before I committed.

Is this vision coming together? 

For the next stage (we're nearing the end now!), I wanted to go a bit easy on myself. Shading isn't my favorite step, and I wanted to keep the process streamlined for my own sake. Another Drawfee go-to: rim lighting!

But, of course, even when a method is easier to execute, I still find a way to overcomplicate it. To keep in line with the "cartoony" look, I didn't want to smudge or blend the shadows, but they still felt a bit too harsh. This is a small detail, but take a closer look at the method of shading I used:

Highlights have always been tricky for me, and those as well went through two phases during the rendering process. The difficult part was going over the lineart with the highlights, almost coloring the lines in the process. On some of the lighter areas (like the skunk's stripes), I would risk losing a lot of information very quickly if it was too light, or not have any effect happen at all if it was too dark.

Ultimately, this double-layer approach ended up being the best option. It helps to sell the idea that the moon or a streetlamp is illuminating them, and it tells the viewer that it must be pretty late into the night. It was important to me that the scene still felt "safe," though. I didn't want to give the impression that something scary was around the corner. Nighttime is inherently a little creepy, but it can also feel like an entirely different world, espeically when you're a kid.

Other than adding noise or texture, a lot of their artwork and comics also use something called "chromatic aberration." This can happen in photos or videos when a camera lens doesn't focus properly, especially on something high contrast. Used purposefully, it can create a fun, "retro" vibe, as if viewing the image on a CRT television.

Exactly what I was going for.

It's another very small detail, but it made a huge difference in how the final piece turned out. It proves that every step is important, no matter how miniscule it might seem!

And here's the finished piece in all its glory! I hope this was as fun to read as it was for me to write. I will definitely be sharing more BTS like this in the future. I hope it serves as a learning experience, because it definitely did for me!