Melanie is based off of Nina Persson of The Cardigans. I thought Ms. Nina looked a lot like what I visioned Melanie to look like so I just used her as an example.
Mel when she was thirteen (she was supposed to look older for her age, as Ville said in chapter 5)
Mel in 2004 and onward
Valerie
For chapter three I think I googled "Sandy blond hair" lol! I was wanting each character to appear at least once in a chapter cover. I stumbled across this picture, a teenage girl with sandy hair. It inspired me to write the scene where she carves the message into the monkey bars. The scene came to me immediately like it was meant to be.
For when Valerie was an adult I was just typing in the name of random actresses that I thought had that "natural beauty" to them. I thought of Kate Beckinsale thinking it wasn't going to work out because I had only seen her with dark brown hair. But then I stumbled across pictures of her with blond in her hair! I always imagined Valerie as being beautiful, too, so it worked out well.
^This was the one that made me write in that Valerie had modeled bikinis and underwear.
Here's the first background I had, depicting the four main characters.
Yoshimori
I love Taichi's dancing and so I based Yoshimori off of him.
Reed
(Note the cowboy hat)Reed was actually based off a person I knew at one time, but I felt like I couldn't very well track him down on myspace or whatever and steal a real picture of him, so I googled "guy in cowboy hat". XD
Gabriel
I couldn't really find any pictures that looked like how I pictured Gabriel, but this guy was close. Isn't he handsome?Well, I hope you all liked the pictures! Thanks again for the comments! I really appreciate it and I love hearing from you guys!
Love, The Hardest WayBy the way, Happy Independence Day!