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Book Extract

Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke

“CHAPTER 1: BAD NEWS

All was still in the valley of the dragons. Mist had drifted in from the sea nearby and was clinging to the mountains. Birds twittered uncertainly in the foggy damp, and clouds hid the sun.

A rat came scuttling down the slope, fell head-over-heels, tumbled down the moss-covered rocks and picked herself up again.

‘Didn’t I say so?’ she muttered crossly to herself. ‘Didn’t I tell them?’

Snuffling, she raised her pointy nose, listened, and made for a group of crooked fir trees at the foot of the highest mountain.

‘I knew before winter,’ murmured the rat. ‘Oh yes, I knew before winter, I could smell it coming, but they wouldn’t believe me, no, not them! They feel safe here. Safe! Huh! I ask you!’

It was so dark under the fir trees that you could scarcely see the gaping crevice in the mountainside that swallowed up the mist.

‘They don’t know anything,’ the rat continued peevishly, ‘that’s their problem. They know absolutely nothing about the world. Not the least little thing.’

She glanced warily around again, and then disappeared into the crevice in the rock. There was a large cave behind it. The rat scurried in, but she didn’t get far. Someone grabbed her tail and lifted her up in the air.

‘Hi, Rat! What are you doing here?’

The rat snapped at the furry fingers that were holding her tight, but all she caught was a mouthful of brownie hairs, which she furiously spat out.

‘Sorrel!’ she hissed. ‘Let go of me this instant, you brainless mushroom-muncher! I don’t have time for your silly brownie tricks.’

‘You don’t have time?’ Sorrel placed Rat on the flat of her furry paw. She was still a young brownie, no bigger than a human child, with a spotted sulphur-yellow coat and bright, catlike eyes. ‘How come, Rat? What’s the big hurry? Need a dragon to protect you from hungry cats, or what?’

‘This has nothing to do with cats!’ hissed Rat angrily. She didn’t care for brownies herself, although all the dragons loved them and their furry faces. When the dragons couldn’t sleep they would listen to the strange little songs the brownies sang, and when they felt sad, no one could cheer them up as well as those sharp-tongued brownie layabouts.

‘I’ve got bad news, if you want to know. Extremely bad news,’ grumbled Rat. ‘But I’m not telling anyone except Firedrake. Certainly not you!’

‘Bad news? Oh, festering fungus! What sort of bad news?’ Sorrel scratched her stomach.

‘Put - me - down!’ snarled Rat.

‘If you say so.’ Sorrel sighed and let Rat hop down to the stony floor of the cave. ‘But he’s still asleep.’

‘Then I’m waking him up!’ spat the rat, making her way further into the cave, where a fire burned blue, keeping the darkness and damp away from the heart of the mountain. Beside its flames the dragon lay asleep, curled up with his head on his paws. His long tail with its spiny crest was coiled around the warmth of the fire. The flames brought a glow to his scales and cast his shadow on the cave wall. Rat scurried up to the dragon, climbed on his paw and tugged his ear.

‘Firedrake!’ she shouted. ‘Firedrake, wake up. They’re coming!’

Sleepily, the dragon raised his head and opened his eyes.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it Rat?’ he murmured in a rather hoarse voice. ‘Has the sun set already, then?’

‘No, but you must get up all the same! You have to wake the others!’ Rat jumped off Firedrake’s paw and scuttled up and down in front of him. ‘I warned you, I really did - I warned the whole bunch of you, but you wouldn’t listen, oh no!’

‘What’s she talking about?’ The dragon cast an enquiring glance at Sorrel, who was now sitting by the fire, nibbling a root.

‘No idea,’ said Sorrel, munching. ‘She just keeps nattering on. Well, there’s not much room for sense in a little head like hers.’

‘Oh, really!’ Rat gasped indignantly. ‘Honestly, I ask you, I-’

‘Take no notice, Rat!’ Firedrake rose, stretched his long neck and shook himself. ‘She’s in a bad temper because the mist makes her fur damp.’

‘Pull the other one!’ Rat cast Sorrel a venomous glance. ‘Brownies are always bad-tempered. I’ve been up since sunrise, running my paws off to warn you. And what thanks do I get?’ Her grey coat was bristling with anger. ‘I have to listen to her silly fur-brained fancies!’

‘Warn us of what?’ Sorrel threw the nibbled remnants of her root at the wall of the cave. ‘Oh, putrid puffball! Stop winding us all up like this or I’ll tie a knot in your tail!’

‘Quiet, Sorrel!’ Firedrake brought his claw down angrily on the fire. Blue sparks flew into the brownie girl’s fur, where they went out like tiny shooting stars.

‘All right, all right!’ she muttered. ‘But the way that rat carried on is enough to drive anyone crazy.’

‘Oh, really? Then just you listen to me!’ Rat drew herself up to her full height, planted her paws and bared her teeth. ‘Humans are coming!’ she squeaked, so shrilly that her voice echoed all around the cave. ‘Human beings are coming! You know what that means, you leaf-burrowing, mushroom-munching, shaggy-haired brownie? Humans are coming - coming here!’

Suddenly all was deathly quiet.

Sorrel and Firedrake looked at each other as if they had been turned to stone. But Rat was still trembling with rage. Her whiskers were all a-quiver, and her tail twitched back and forth on the cave floor.

Firedrake was the first to move.

‘Humans?’ he asked, bending his neck and holding his paw out to Rat. Looking offended, she scrambled on to it. Firedrake raised her to his eye level. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

‘Perfectly sure,’ replied the rat.

Firedrake bowed his head. ‘It was bound to happen some day,’ he said quietly. ‘They’re all over the place these days. I think there are more and more of them all the time.’

Sorrel was still looking stunned. Suddenly she jumped up and spat into the fire. ‘But that’s impossible!’ she cried. ‘There’s nothing here they’d want, nothing at all!’

‘That’s what you think!’ The rat bent over so far that she almost fell off Firedrake’s paw. ‘Don’t talk such nonsense. You’ve mingled with humans, right? There’s nothing they don’t fancy, nothing they don’t want. Forgotten that already, have you?’

‘Okay, okay! muttered Sorrel. ‘You’re right. They’re greedy. They want everything for themselves.’

‘They do indeed.’ The rat nodded. ‘And I tell you, they’re coming here.’

The dragon-fire flared up, and then the flames burned low until the darkness, like some black animal, swallowed them. Only one thing could extinguish Firedrake’s fiery breath so fast, and that was sorrow. But the dragon blew gently on the rocky ground, and flames flickered up once more.

‘This is bad news indeed, Rat,’ said Firedrake. He let Rat jump up on to his shoulder, and then went slowly towards the mouth of the cave. ‘Come on, Sorrel,’ he said. ‘We must wake the others.’

‘And won’t they just be pleased!’ growled Sorrel, smoothing down her ruffled fur and following Firedrake into the mist.”

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Learning Report

For this assignment, I was tasked with designing a character from an already existing text. The text I chose was from an extract from the children’s book Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke and the character I have chosen is a member of a fictional species known as a “brownie”, a short, humanoid, cat-like creature. The name of the character is “Sorrel”.

I chose this extract as, as someone who doesn’t read many books, this book in particular stood out in my childhood as a memorable extract with interesting characters to develop. There are illustrations of my chosen character in the book but none of them show any detail as they are all wide angle shots of the environment.

After reading the extract I safely came to the conclusion that Sorrel is short, cat-like in appearance and relatively large-bellied, as the book describes her as being lazy and having a particular fondness of mushrooms. Whilst this was useful information, initially I don’t feel like I created much variation in my initial quick drawings so progress came to a bit of a standstill. After realising what other ways I could draw her body, progress quickly sped back up again. It took longer than I’d hoped, but eventually I did come to a body shape that I was satisfied with, and that was true to the text.

I had a difficult start when trying to design Sorrel’s face. “Cat-like appearance” was pretty much all I had to go on so I started with drawing a cat face using references of cat photos from the internet. From here, I drew more cartoonish faces and they started to look a lot more like what I was going for. It didn’t take very long at all to end up with a very young, cartoonish face with large eyes.

Using my skills I developed by doing life drawings, I spotted my boyfriend in a sort of lazy slouching position that fit Sorrel’s personality particularly well, so I decided to draw him so as to get to grips with not only the posture, but with the emotion he conveyed, so that I might be able to transfer those skills to drawing my character.

After drawing this I decided that it would be helpful for me to draw my design of Sorrel with various different emotions. Not only was this a lot of fun and great practice, but I felt like I understood the character a lot more afterwards. Only after this did I feel comfortable and confident enough with my design of Sorrel that I drew the final turnaround of her. Overall I am very pleased with how my character turned out. I feel like I conveyed her attitude very well with my design and I paid attention to the text and stayed true to it. I only wish I managed my time a lot better, as I would have liked to have made a clay model of Sorrel, but I am nonetheless satisfied with the work I have done.

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Final Character Design - Sorrel Turnaround

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This week I dedicated to showing my design of Sorrel expressing different emotions. This is not only to get used to drawing the character many times (so that the final turnaround is of high quality) but also so that I can get a feel for how I’ll be able to express emotion on this character specifically, and what are going to be the most common expressions this character is going to make.

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Whilst doing some drawing with my boyfriend, I noticed he was slouching in a position I would imagine Sorrel, the character I am developing, would likely sit in. I decided I would draw him in the position he was sitting in so I could get a feel for it.

After that, I experimented with what kind of face Sorrel will have. She is described as having a cat-like appearance, but that’s the only real extent of the description of her facial features, leaving a lot to the imagination. I started with a drawing of a more realistic cat face and then did more cartoonish ones. It didn’t take me very long to come to a design that I really liked.

I feel like the round face and large eyes emphasize the youth of the character, and also gives me freedom to be more expressive with it.

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Last time I worked on my character for my final submission, I don’t feel like I drew enough variation - most of the drawings were much of the same thing with slight changes, so this time I draw more extreme variations. Sure enough, I felt like this helped a lot to determine Sorrel’s final body shape. In the book, it describes her as being no taller than a human child (hence my asterisk by the particularly short drawing) and also being especially lazy and eating a lot, so I thought the drawings with larger bellies were more accurate to the story.

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This week, I focused on fast life drawings. The first two images are from an exercise where we were tasked to draw each other in various poses with strict time restrictions. The more poses we drew, the more time we were allowed, hence the more detail went into each drawing. This was to help us get to grips with how to draw emotions coming across with such little detail, and how characters can be shown to emote even from afar.

Afterwards we went to the canteen and picked people to draw. This proved much more difficult as the people didn’t stay still forever, so having an indeterminate time limit really helped me to draw these poses much faster. The central-bottom sketch on the last image is my favourite, as I had a lot of time to get some of the details in as the man sat there for a long time, and I feel like I conveyed the emotions well.

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I decided to make a start on my main assignment for this module this week, which was to chose a character from a written piece and make a design for them based on the text. The character I have chosen is “Sorrel” from the book Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke. It’s one of the few books I read from my childhood, and because it was from so long ago I decided to read the first few chapters again to refresh my memory of this character.

Sorrel is a member of a mythical species known as a “brownie” - a furry, bipedal creature with features similar to those of a cat. I decided on this character rather than a human or a dragon as I feel the design is complex enough to challenge the skills I’ve developed thus far, without being so complex as to overwhelm myself.

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Similar to last week, I was tasked with making a model of a character. Unlike last week, however, I could make a model of whatever character I wanted to - original or otherwise.

Given my struggles with last week, I decided on a character with a similar body structure to the rhino so as to get in more practice and finally get to grips with the material. The character I chose was Turtwig from the Pokémon series.

I took all of the feedback from last week and applied it here. The main concern from last time was to avoid making the model look blocky and rectangular - so I spent a lot more time carving out the shapes in the styrofoam. I also gave the model a thicker coat of clay where I wanted more details, like in the face, for example, so that the markings could be much deeper and more visible.

The feet didn’t turn out quite how I wanted them to, they came out slightly different from one another in shape and size. The head is also slightly too heavy for the body - as you can see in the pictures, I had to use my hand to get the model to stand on its four legs. Otherwise, it would’ve tipped over an rested on its chin.

Other than this though, I am very happy with the progress I made since last week. This is a much higher quality model.

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This week’s assignment was to make a 3D clay model of a cartoon animal. I chose to make a rhino.

The first order of business was to get a turnaround for the character. I started with drawing the rhino from its front. Once that was done, I drew straight lines over key points of the drawing (top of the rhino, top of the horn, top of the ears, centre of the eyes, bottom of the feet and so on) which allowed me to draw the rhino from its side and from behind all to scale. This was important, as it was the main reference I had to make the character 3D.

As the rhino is a relatively bulky character in contrast to characters like felines, I didn’t feel any need any wires for the skeleton of its limbs or tail, and felt quite satisfied that I could use just the styrofoam as the skeleton for the model. Working with the styrofoam proved a big challenge, however, as cutting the pieces to the sizes I wanted did not go so well. I even ended up cutting my hand. As a result of these struggles, it took a very long time to even get a crude base of the rhino.

After coating the skeleton with clay, I was actually personally satisfied with the result. The final rhino model looked very cute and I was personally impressed with myself, especially having never tried something like this before. However, upon review, my finished model didn’t hit the brief. The rhino’s head was too large and too square, and didn’t fit the correct proportions that I’d drawn out. Despite my own fondness for the model, this feedback made perfect sense. It’s clear I still have a lot to learn in the field of clay modeling.

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This week’s task was to design either “The Thiefmaker” or “Locke Lamora” from The Lies of Locke Lamora. Given that the extract I had been given didn’t feature much of the Locke character, I felt I had more to go on with the Thiefmaker.

This character sheet I will admit is not as high quality as last week’s. This was because I was discussing ideas with my peers while designing the character, and drew on my existing drawings to help further my explanations to them. I didn’t have a clear idea of how the character looked and acted just from reading the text, so I decided to draw a few basic stereotypes to try and find at least a good base to go off of.

I was then given the opportunity to listen to the same extract played by an actor. As an amateur actor myself, this was a huge help, as I was able to visualise the body language very clearly and sketch accordingly. After this and a few discussions with my peers, I came up with a body style that I felt fit the character of the Thiefmaker quite well (with my favourite design being at the bottom, second from the right).

I had then elected to draw the environment of the underground area that was described in the extract. It was described as the wooden rib cage of a dragon, which stuck at in my mind as a poignant detail.

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The next piece of text to be designing characters for is Titus Groan, where I’ve been tasked with coming up with some designs for the characters Rottcodd and Mr Flay.

After last week’s mishap, I am really starting to understand and get the hang of this method of character design. Many quick, crude drawings and making plenty of mistakes along the way, and then highlighting the ideas and mistakes that capture the essence of the character described in the text.

I’ve put little asterisks next to the designs where there was something I liked. For Rottcodd, I expanded on the design of the especially long coat, the hunching over, and the hands in his coat pockets. At least to me, he seems more old, dreary, and a bit miserable like described in the text. I quickly drew a few faces and asterisked the on I felt fit his character best.

For Mr Flay, I played around with his posture a little bit and felt like a slouching posture fit his character also - but in a more inquisitive, threatening and sinister way. One design I really liked is the asterisked design in the centre, third from the right. I meant to draw his arms as if they were folded (like in the text) but from a distance it looks like he’s sinisterly wringing his hands which fit his character rather well. I felt like drawing his hand was useful to me, as when I was reading the text, I imagined him talking with his hands and gesticulating rather a lot, so I felt them important to his character. The hand I drew had fatter fingers than I intended, and were supposed to be skinny and knobbly.

I’m a lot more pleased with these character sheets than the sketch I did last week.

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I misunderstood my instructions for the first week’s brief. My initial thoughts were to write down any key features of the characters of Little Dorrit (specifically the Father of the Marshalsea) and then draw/design a rough sketch of the character based on the physical descriptions and character traits in the text. I’d only managed one drawing, but one with a lot of details. The aim of the task was to design lots and lots of extremely rough outlines of the character which would take a matter of seconds to draw rather than the 25 minute sketch I made. I’m overall not too upset with the drawing, but obviously it didn’t meet the brief. I’ll take this info on for next week.