Polar Bear Brainstorm Sketches

Some of you know that I've had a picture book idea on my mind for a couple years, based off of a shorter story in the Old Norse corpus. I've been working through the original story and am thinking about how thoroughly I want to rewrite it for my own purposes, and in the meantime I thought it would be nice to experiment with different styles a bit. I did some previous sketches... oh, maybe two years ago, which I'll link to below, and I haven't really come any further in terms of figuring out what the whole thing will look like, but I thought this would be a good chance to get back to it. Heavy on the eraser tool here, and I think I can get a nice effect out of it, kinda like a cartoony version of the woodcut illustrations they have in some of the old Heimskringla translations, but I think I may need to keep experimenting. Hoping that at some point I'll hit "critical mass" and just get through the whole thing real quick--but meantime I have lots of groundwork to do still. I've never had to do consistent, repeated illustrations of the same character before.... oh, wait, except for my Grim Bunny illustrations: callego.deviantart.com/gallery…  Anyway, point being that I think I just need to keep working through character designs for a while until something clicks... or I may need to be a bit more aggressive about measuring out character dimensions...

On tumblr here: idrawvikings.tumblr.com/post/8…

Earlier bear sketches: callego.deviantart.com/art/Bea…