Exploring Sugar: Characters

So for the survey I named the chosen styles as follows and I asked children of 7 to 10 yrs old and asked them to arrange them from what they liked most to what they didn't like and the answers were as follows:

Just Apple - Bob - Hero - Boy

Bob - Boy - Hero - Just Apple

Just Apple - Bob - Hero - Boy

Bob - Hero - Just Apple - Boy

Hero - Bob - Just Apple - Boy

Bob - Boy - Just Apple - Hero

Bob - Hero - Boy - Just Apple

Just Apple - Boy - Bob - Hero

Bob - Just Apple - Hero - Boy

Hero - Bob - Boy - Just Apple

Boy - Hero - Bob - Just Apple

So based on this I decided to choose the "Bob" one as it seem like most like this style.

I designed other characters for watermelon, prunes, grapes, banana and mango. I made some female characters so that it will also attracts girls and I tried to put some kind of personality in the characters based on the shape of the fruits.

So here's the characters that I did. I chose a kind of "modern" style of painting based on the modern cartoons like Owl House, Spider Verse and Klaus, and I tried to make it look 3D for aesthetic purposes. Also I had to change the design of the apple because of how the other characters turned out when I was designing them.

I'm also going to use exactly these illustration to put on the top right corner front of the recipe cards when they will introduce themselves. I might use the same illustration but in a different arrangement for the packaging also or maybe I'll include a few minor changes.

And here are my sketches for characterizing the sugar and the honey. For the sugar it was really straight foward, I chose to make it as a bag of sugar to relate to refine sugar and I'll explain more on the final Illustration.

However for the honey it was pretty hard I did a few sketches to finally ending up making something totally different. I first tried to make it as a guy but then realized that my kit was missing some female characters so I decided to change it but I was not very satisfied with how it was looking mostly because it didn't really fit the others and was looking more human with honeycomb patterns.

But then I realized that honey is very often shown in the hive of the honey bee in most cartoons, and this could become my character as it had a weird shape like the other fruits. So here's the character that I ended up making, I made her hair a little bit like if there was honey falling on her head and her clothes are winter clothes because people, especially as a child I know you usually consume honey raw when you're sick and having a cold.

And here the sugar. I made him sort of like a delinquent because sugar is bad for health. But I also made him cute because sugar is sweet. As for his clothes I just made the plastic bag as his clothes and made it look like rags on him because sugar doesn't contain any nutritional values so in some way I associated it with poverty.