Hello everyone, and I’m back with a new round of the Drawing Children’s Book Characters In My Style series. This time, I will not be tackling the supporting cast of any particular book series. Instead, I will be tackling a different kind of children’s book character, the ideological opposites to the protagonists we know and love: villains! A hero is only as good as its villain, and there’s no shortage of antagonists from the annals of children’s literature to illustrate. With October in full swing, and such films and television series as the Goosebumps television series reboot for Hulu and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes on the way, now felt like the perfect time to bring on the evil.
Before I continue with this round, I have a couple announcements to make. I know that I haven’t been on the blog in a very long time, and I have plenty of reasons for that. I have been shifting my focus to my personal projects, which you check out on my website, Naimoli Universe. There’s also the first chapter of my online book Operation Awesome, which I am currently sending to agents and was influenced by Diary of a Wimpy Kid. You can also check out my comic strip Sammy Specific, which I am releasing new strips of every Friday.
Additionally, I am happy to announce that I am officially a freelance illustrator at Worldreader, a global nonprofit organization working with partners to get children to read at least 25 books a year with understanding! My first project, a children’s poem by Rebecca Fenton titled That Stinks, has been released on BookSmart, and I am currently working on another project with Worldreader, though I won’t disclose any details about it until its release. You can check out this post on the website’s News page for more information. You may have also noticed the many changes I made to the blog’s sidebar to reflect all these updates, including an Instagram widget and shortcuts to the Operation Awesome and Sammy Specific pages on the website. If you haven’t already checked it out, I hope to see you there!
Anyway, here are the usual rules before I begin:
- I’m only doing children’s book characters – meaning characters featured in books intended for audiences up to 12 years of age. Even if a character first appeared in another medium such as a comic strip or a game, I will still consider the character to be a children’s book character.
- I’ll usually do ten characters per round, though I might do more or less depending on what I’m feeling up to doing or how much time I have on my hands. If multiple characters are often associated together (i.e., Jack and Annie from Magic Tree House), I will consider them as one character for the round (featured in the same image).
- Since there are characters I will probably end up ignoring/not acknowledging, I’m open to requests to do these characters, as long as they are children’s book characters. I might also consider some young adult characters depending on the property.
- Some characters have styles that are specifically distinct from mine, so some characters will look more differently in my versions than others. Depending on how distinct the style of a certain character is from mine, I may ignore that character on purpose, unless requests entice me to challenge myself.
- Although I am creating a new interpretation of these characters, I will try to maintain the essence of their original designs, if there are certain features about them that in my style wouldn’t look the same. For example, I generally don’t give my characters dots for eyes, but if I am drawing a character with this trait, I will simply make the irises bigger.
- As usual, if you wish to share my work, you may do so for as long as you credit me. If you wish to use my work in any way, feel free to either comment or send a contact form on the Contact page on Naimoli Universe.
And so let Villains Edition begin!
Lord Voldemort, Harry Potter
What better way to begin this dastardly round than with the archenemy of the best-selling children’s book character of all time? I have to admit, I’ve been thinking of drawing Lord Voldemort on and off since I drew the Boy Who Lived himself way back in Round One. It was exciting to finally do it, so I had a rough idea of the pose for a long time. I knew that I had to depict He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in a pose that evoked his status as the Hitlerian dark wizard that he was. I primarily used his Funko Pop as a reference, but also images from the films. Incorporating Nagini was not initially on the cards, but once I saw him depicted with her so frequently, I knew she had to be included, and in a pose that was just as menacing. Let’s see if his depiction in the upcoming and questionable Harry Potter television series for the horribly renamed Max is as good as Ralph Fiennes’ iconic portrayal. And I think I said his name at least once. Great.
Slappy The Dummy, Goosebumps
I’d say the next villain for this round was a no-brainer: the dummy who refuses to be called a dummy himself! As the first Goosebumps character in this series, I found it really refreshing to begin exploring R.L. Stine’s iconic books (with enough villains in that series to carry its own round, honestly). I immediately knew that Slappy’s pose had to look as though he was making his cackling evil laugh as he prepares to come up with his latest plan to menace the next unlucky child. I made sure to make him appear short and small, while also making him look like a true ventriloquist dummy without deviating too far from my art style. I still would have preferred Goosebumps 3 instead of the upcoming Hulu reboot of the iconic 90’s television series, especially since the tone appears to be more mature than even the first film. But at least Rob Letterman is coming back, so that’s neat.
Count Olaf, A Series of Unfortunate Events
What’s this? The deceptive, money-hungry master of disguise is up next? Another character from a series I haven’t explored yet, I could’ve technically done the Baudelaires first, but Count Olaf is arguably more iconic. For this former member of the V.F.D., it was a no-brainer to depict him a pose that suggests him coming up with another sinister plan to snatch the Baudelaire family fortune. I thought the hands were perfect, as well as his creepy grin. I wasn’t initially going to incorporate the crows, but I liked some artwork with them on him and decided to add them, much like I did with Lord Voldemort He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and Nagini. The Netflix series was great but imagine a spinoff adaptation of some of the companion books, like All the Wrong Questions. Just saying…
The Grand High Witch, The Witches
Look out Voldemort He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, because you got some competition with a fellow child-hating witch! Much like my other drawings of Roald Dahl’s characters, I primarily used Quentin Blake’s illustrations as the main reference for the Grand High Witch, but also Anjelica Huston’s version of the character for more minor details (and avoiding Anne Hathaway’s version entirely due to Huston’s being more book accurate). Like I did with the Animorphs, I thought it’d be cool if I also depicted Eva Ernst’s true face as a GIF, horrifying as it is. It’s a shame that the 2020 remake was underwhelming at best and offensive at worst to people with ectrodactyly and other limb differences (especially as a remake to a great film that Dahl nonetheless hated), though at least the ending was better. Did it have to be removed from the horribly renamed Max for a tax write-off though? Even if it wasn’t that good, art is meant to be viewed, not erased to appease Wall Street investors. Now that’s villainous!
Coriolanus Snow, The Hunger Games
I volunteer as tribute to draw the dictator of Panem! For Coriolanus Snow, I decided to put him in a less dynamic pose, one that is much more fitting for an autocrat. A tyrant that is so sure of himself yet is ignorant to the fact that he will someday lose everything at the hands of a certain Girl on Fire. I primarily used his Funko Pop as a reference, but also images from the films (the latter helped with the collar). I’m not sure how many people were expecting Suzanne Collins to write a spinoff novel to The Hunger Games (and get an adaptation to said spinoff only three years after its release!), but the fact that she isn’t oversaturating the franchise, with a ten-year difference between Mockingjay and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and an eight-year difference between Mockingjay Part 2 and November’s upcoming film adaptation, is very respectable in my book.
The White Witch, The Chronicles of Narnia
Another child-hating witch? The competition is fierce! This was actually the hardest drawing to make in this round, being a composite of Leo and Diane Dillon’s illustration of Jadis (which inspired the pose), Deborah Maze’s illustration of the White Witch on the cover of the Edmund and the White Witch picture book adaptation, and the films to a lesser extent. I was originally going to take more influence from the films (especially for that admittedly cool take on the crown), but later decided against it and went a bit more book accurate. It’s great to finally get an update on Netflix’s Chronicles of Narnia adaptation (after five years!) with Barbie director Greta Gerwig of all people overseeing the project. But considering how shockingly successful Barbie was both critically and financially, the adaptation might be in better hands than we think.
Visser Three, Animorphs
Speaking of the Animorphs, we have a certain Yeerk that’s looking for a certain group of Andalite bandits. As you might imagine, drawing Esplin 9466 was very similar to drawing Ax, just much larger and way more menacing. Perhaps obviously, I used Visser Three’s appearance on the cover of VISSER as my main reference, but also his appearance in the graphic novels as well like I did with the Animorphs. I technically could’ve depicted his morph into the Unnamed Creature with Eight Heads and Eight Legs that appears in The Invasion as a GIF, but that would’ve been insane even without taking into account the wildly different portrayals of the creature between the books and the graphic novels. I’m excited to finally see Chris Grine’s take on Ax in December’s graphic novel adaptation of The Message, but still waiting for another (hopefully more optimistic) update on the Animorphs film.
Gellert Grindelwald, Harry Potter
And so we conclude this round with wizarding history’s second greatest dark wizard himself, Gellert Grindelwald! Grindelwald’s character design has an…interesting history to say the least, and I debated between drawing his appearance in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald and his appearance in Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore, but I settled on the latter due to Mads Mikkelsen’s portrayal of the character being better received (outside of Johnny Depp’s core fanbase, anyway). I don’t usually depict eye colors in my art style, but I knew I had to make an exception for his heterochromia. Later, I got a request to also design his appearance in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald anyway, so I turned the drawing into a GIF with both designs. I was surprised at how much harder and more detailed Depp’s design was, though the references were easier to work with, such as his Funko Pop, other merchandise and images from the film. While it’s a shame that plans for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 4 and 5 have been superseded in favor of the Harry Potter television series for the horribly renamed Max (which I refuse to stop saying is horrible), including possibly never seeing the legendary duel between Grindelwald and Dumbledore in 1945, given all the controversies surrounding those films, it’s probably for the best…
Whew, that was close! How I survived drawing these dastardly fiends is anyone’s guess. As I’ve said before, there’s no shortage of villains in children’s books to illustrate, and if there are any other villains that I didn’t draw that you want me to draw, I won’t mind requests to draw them. As for the next round? Well, since this was a break from the supporting character rounds, I’d say that this series can take any direction at this point. There’s still plenty of characters in general I haven’t drawn yet that I made a list of a long time ago, so it depends on that and whatever requests I receive. But for now, I will be adding these drawings to the Fanart page shortly.
Now if you excuse me, I need get out of here and get back to my website before any of these villains figure out where I went. You’re welcome to flee with me if you wish… 🦹
Naimoli Children's Books Blog 