Oatman Characters; How to Draw Them??

I'm working on Illustrations for Patchwork House. It's a stretch for my skills; I want to express the characters and moods of the friends I knew and the feelings of the good times as well as the hard times.

 One of my guides is Framed Ink, by Marcos Mateu-Mestre. Wow! What a wealth of ideas and instruction! Mateu-Mestre has a style perfectly suited to murder mysteries and action drama--a bit different from my style and what I want to convey, but useful never the less.

I think I want something gentler and maybe a little introspective, maybe more like Emily Carr's illusrations in Sister and I in Alaska.

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I LOVE her humorous depiction of herself and her sister!  I like  the expressions and postures of her figures--her focus is very much on her figures. Her backgrounds tend to be minimal, showing only what is necessary to get the feel of the place, and her colors muted.

However, I love color, and I do want some background. After all, the setting of Patchwork House, in an almost ghost town, is a character in itself.

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The clutter, the rusted tin and weathered wood of the buildings, the antiques scattered around, homes abandoned or reclaimed--there was a feeling of....of creating a humble new life from an abandoned past.
      
                                                                             (Thumbnail for "Workshop", showing Boone and Davey cutting fire agate--Believe me, I left out a LOT of clutter in this draft of the fire agate workshop!)

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