Behind the Scenes:The Artwork of The Five Dollar Mail

 When I get artwork for FDM, most of the time, our artists are not readers and are not familiar with the characters. So I have to send them "character packets" that contain clothing notes, relevant passages from the book, a written description of the character, and a page of headshots from Google Images of people that have a general look of someone I might cast if, say, this were a tv show or movie. So I've included a few examples of the sorts of stuff I send to artists.

I do have sheets for each character, but I don't want to swamp this post with so many pictures it makes it hard to load. So I just snatched some out what was on this particular computer and went with it.

I specifically tell the artists not to make them look like any recognizable actor or model. The photos are to give a general idea of the type of look for each character.

 I don't imagine I have to tell you who these redheaded stunners are modeling for.











The problem with Lily is that in general, women are not really allowed to be plain-featured on TV. We know a girl on TV or in a move is plain featured because they take some beautiful girl and throw a pair of glasses on her, something that annoys the crap out of me.

Sometimes we have to go with what we can scrape together that might work well enough. It is what it is, I guess.

Here's a sheet of women's work clothing that we used for Lily.  I love that we have Ma Ingalls here on this sheet. I suspect that woman in the middle pic is boiling cane sugar down.     

Not really the sort of pics I wanted to use for Luis. Luis is a very specific sort of look and I really was coming up empty handed on it. Underweight Hispanic kid in his early to mid teens. Kind of hard to do a Google search on something like that.

Someone sent me one of these kids as a suggestion and I just went with it.   

I'm a whole lot happier with these guys. Fortunately, it's not hard to find pictures of pretty young men with blond hair. I'd be fine with any of these guys playing Jesse.






I had a similar problem with Wash as I did with Lily. All the guys I could find that might make an okay Wash were actually far too good looking. He's not unattractive, but it's certainly not the first thing someone would notice about him. His is the type of attraction that has to grow on a person a bit.

Anyways, I was looking for someone with a strong, open face, tousled hair, and a bit of a weathered look. Again, it is what it is. I thought all the artists that took a crack at him did a great job, despite my non-committal descriptions of him.


I think part of my problem is that I see these people so clearly in my head they are as familiar to me as my own face. All the artwork that's come back is different from that and from each other, and I love that. I love seeing different interpretations. But when I'm looking at actors or models to express my own interpretation, I have a hard time. 

Some of these have actually been updated and are no longer in use. Without looking into the laptop, I don't know off the top of my head. But all of these have been in use at one point or another. 



I do have more of these things. If you enjoyed this, let me know and I round up the others and throw them out there for you.