Now that you have learned how to do snowmen, you can adapt the basic form to make Roly-Poly Characters. You will follow the same basic information to dress your characters as you dressed the Snowman in his vest! You can have lots of fun designing clothes for all your characters. Since this will be part of a challenge for designing a village with selections of three basic forms, a house, a general store and a church, let your imagination wander and think of how the characters in your village would dress! You could have a barbershop with the barber and red stripe pole, a Police Station with characters in uniforms or the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker!

Make it a certain season or Holiday, just have fun and see what we all will come up with!

You may download the selections for the houses here. Unzip to your selections folder in PSP. Download skintones gradient here. Unzip to your gradients folder in PSP 6. If you already downloaded the gradients from the Snow Family, you have this one already.

Make a new roly-poly character following the instructions for the snowman. But color it with the skintones or skintones2 gradient or a color of your choice. Create the body and add the arms. But leave the head until later.

Merge the body layers only. Now, just as you drew the vest using the lasso tool, draw your clothes you have chosen. Here I am making a choir girl. 

Here we will use the body as guidelines for size and perspective. We will be drawing our clothes over the body using layers!

Add new layer. Choose the lasso or shapes tool and working from the farthest to the nearest, we will start with the sleeves. I will leave the styles up to you, these directions are just a guide. I used the ellipse and made puff sleeves. Add textures, patterns or fills at this time. *On the other example I drew cap sleeves.* Edit, copy and paste as new layer. Image, mirror and place in appropriate spot on the shoulders/arm. Now you can add lacey sleeves, ribbon accents or any other embellishment you'd like.

I then added a new layer and used the shapes tool, star1, anti-alias checked and placed a star at the cuff part of the sleeve. Copied it and pasted as new layer, mirrored and placed on opposite cuff. I then went back to the first star layer and using the lasso tool, selected just the top part of the star and went to edit, cut. I repeated this for the star on the opposite side. This gave the sleeve a bit of an edging.

Add a new layer. Now using the lasso tool, draw the clothes you have chosen! I give two examples here. Merge all visible layers and add new layer and make the head. This way you can move it over the collar as you need. Make the face and hair and you have a new character!

To make the hair, I used the shapes tool, circle, stroked, line 1, anti-alias unchecked, and just kept making circles of different sizes. I used fonts to make the eyes and mouth and the airbrush to add color to the cheeks.

Tube your character after merging all visible layers, image, copy, paste as new image. Below you will find an example of how I used the general store selection.

There is a church as well as a house in the selections zip. Just load your selections and "build"  the outside of the building using layers! You now have the beginnings of your village! Have fun and let your imagination run:)

© 2000 Driftwood Cove Graphic Design.