Fiennes Character Designs

One of the biggest challenges, after figuring out a mental picture of a character, is translating that onto paper. 

Helen always had thick, curly brown hair and an expressive face. Her dramatic eye rolls and stubborn questioning were accented by big, round eyes and well-shaped (but not thin) eyebrows. When I tweaked her face shape a bit, I turned to a website on hairstyles for different face shapes. For more complicated expressions/poses I use stock photos, but my basic picture of her has been pretty consistent for the past six years.

Perhaps because he's a quieter character, Reuben did not have many distinguishing features for a while. When I started writing the book, I thought of him as a tall, but otherwise unremarkable middle-aged white guy. A few extra pounds, some chemo-induced hair loss later on, but nothing memorable. 

When I tried drawing his face, though, I ended up modeling him after a younger Paul Sorvino. I realized that a round face and somewhat prominent nose helped make Reuben look more similar to Helen, but dissimilar enough that she could still share some of her mother's features.

Donna Bianci (the labor and delivery nurse who delivered Helen and later becomes an oncology nurse) was also a challenge. My mental picture of her is a pediatric nurse from Children's Hospital Boston in Waltham. But in terms of personality, she has elements from three different nurses I've worked with (all of them were named Donna). Since she reminds me of four very real people, I wanted to make her visual design from scratch. It's still in progress.

Katie and Chloe Green (two sisters who appear much later in the book), like Reuben, seemed to come alive in the drawing process. They were written as short, blonde, and petite, but their faces were unclear. Looking at my current sketches of both of them, I was most satisfied with how much they resembled each other, and with how their expressions came out. Sometimes that can be the hardest thing to nail in a picture.

Pictures below.

Helen's face reference.

Reuben and Helen showcase angst. 

Left: Anthony Head (I loved the expressive eyebrows in the photo from which this was drawn). Right: sketch of Sorvino (reference photo from Internet Movie Database).

Donna Bianci

Sketch of Helen's junior prom dress. The bodice (top part) is black and the skirt is white. It's based on a 1980s cocktail dress I saw on eBay and fell in love with (it wasn't in my size though).

Reference for face: an American Apparel ad I had saved on my computer (for a picture of a dress). Chloe Green is the older sister of Katie Green.

Shannon Lawrence: overprotective but loving mother of Chloe and Katie Green. Face reference from an online picture found when Googling "middle aged woman."

Katie Green, the younger and more carefree of the Green sisters. Used a stock photo for the face reference.