Progress on Daniel Tiger Character

So last month was very busy, I've been working a lot lately and when I haven't been working I've been resting or spending time with my family and friends. As a result I didn't get too much done on my two projects. I was off today so I decided to get back to work on them. I worked on the Daniel Tiger character today since I was still in the beginning stages of it, so it was easier to continue working on.

I got a lot of work done on his face. For the longest time I had trouble with getting the details of the face, especially the head the way I wanted it to look. In the show many of the characters have curved lines around their heads and I wanted to replicate that, but I didn't know how. I played around a bit in illustrator and I finally found a way that isn't so hard to do. I created a shape with the pen tool and added a ton of anchor points around it. When I got the number of points I wanted I did effect
Right now I'm still messing around the with face patterns and the fur texture I picked out. I'm not quite satisfied with it yet, but its off to a good start:

Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood Inspired Character

 Last weekend while hanging out with my boyfriend we started watching PBS because we were bored, a show called "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood" was on. I thought the show was really cute, but what really caught my eye was the design of the characters:

I really like the different textures and the other little details like the lines of their eyes and mouths. I got inspired to make my own little character that could fit into that world:

My idea is a little ferret that is into playing sports. I want to take him into illustrator and color him in the same way. This project should be interesting. I'm already seeing a lot of things I'll have to do like finding or creating fur like textures and using the mesh tool and gradients a lot. I've done a character similar to that style before in flash, but I'm going to use illustrator since it should be better for this project.

I'll post updates on him as I work on it!