Children's Story - Blog Posts

The Puzzler Bunch- Cute Story Idea

I already posted the art for the characters here if you wanna see it. This one is an older draft that I've been meaning to post.

Enjoy!

I was sketching in my sketchbook, coming up with as many different character designs for children as I could. I'm working on refining this new drawing style I'm working in, you see.

I drew a trio of characters, a boy and 2 girls.

The boy was tall and skinny. I gave him curly hair, a rectangular-shaped head and slightly angular features (I used shape language a lot for my character art) One of the girls was also on the tall side. She had an oval-shaped head, long straight hair and round eyes. She looked very kind. The last girl was shorter than her friends. I already had in mind that she would be a bold and smart character (both in intelligence and cheekiness) She has a triangular-shaped head, narrowed eyes and a little smirk as if she knows something you don't know. I gave her neat braids (the simple, stylized kind) that end as a little afro puff atop her head.

I really liked this trio of characters and came up with a little backstory for them. I named them Harold (who goes by Harry), Marissa and Alice.

They're a group of friends that live in the same neighbourhood and attend the same primary school. Another thing they share in common is that they have a love for puzzle-solving.

Each of them has a type of puzzle they are best at. Harold likes word puzzles, Marissa likes mechanical puzzles and Alice likes logic puzzles, especially math puzzles.

Fellow students at school call them the Puzzler Bunch. They're known around the schoolyard for their 'unnatural' (for ten-year-olds) cleverness when it comes to figuring out complex puzzles.

------

If I were to write a story with these characters, it would revolve around them finding increasingly complex puzzles left around the schoolyard and places they frequent in their neighbourhood after the overly dramatic Anaiah (a year-mate of theirs) demands that they help her find who stole her jewel-encrusted compact.

They left a cryptogram puzzle in its place, so obviously Anaiah runs to her sweet 'Harry-bear' so he can solve it and find her stolen compact! Oh and his sidekicks can help too, she supposes (she doesn't know nor does she care about who can solve what type of puzzle)

They decide to take up the challenge and they're led around the schoolyard and their neighbourhood as each puzzle leads them to the next, getting increasingly more difficult as they get closer to solving the mystery of the missing compact.

The questions are who's leaving these puzzles, why are they leaving these puzzles and did they really have to involve 'Madly in love with Harry' Anaiah?

-----

I'll have an answer to all those questions once I do some more planning. I've also realised that I've made a lot of work for myself. I barely know anything about solving puzzles and now I've gotta create 10 puzzles for this story!

Review: Paddington (2014)

Rating: 9.5 of 10

Paddington is a famous talking bear of beloved children's illustrated literature in the UK since 1958. (He even has a line of stuffed toys, merchandises, animated series, and even stamps and a statue.) Paddington's original illustrations are instantly recognizable, but as we all know, nothing is exempt from 21st century CGI treatment! So Paddington is now a hyperrealistic bipedal talking bear with a red hat and no pants (which may sound a bit terrifying), but this CGI Paddington is actually very cute, none the least because of his antiquated British manners and Ben Whishaw's mild soothing voice.

Paddington the bear comes from the forest of "Darkest Peru" and arrived at Paddington Station in London, looking for a family. He has been taught manners and how to greet people politely by his Uncle Pastuzo and Aunt Lucy and he hoped he could find family soon, but sadly London has become cynical. Children, or bears, cannot simply arrive at a train station and hoped to be adopted anymore, until Brown family approached him and offered him to give him a night's stay at their house. They agreed to help him finding an explorer who visited the bears years before in Peru, so Mr. Henry, Mrs. Mary, Judy and Jonathan learned to live with him momentarily.

Paddington learns as much as The Browns learns from him, and while the movie is also filled with regular "fish out of water" gags, Paddington's real story is about giving kindness and finding a family and the movie is really great at telling that. Paddington is not even afraid to bring out its sadness factor, which I appreciate because it made things much more poignant. I love children's stories that do not hold back (within reason, of course) because hey, bad things happen and the thing that matters is how we deal with them. TL;DR Throughout the movie Paddington is sweet and reminds us the wonder of a more friendly, civilized world even though he is a literal bear from the wilderness. That paradox is what made him special, and we ended up loving him as much as The Brown Family do.

*Here's a trailer. There's a bodily humor which might gross out some people, although I found it impossibly cute! I must remind you though that it's only a small part of the film and the rest of the film is really lovely.