Character Design | 5 | Ideas

Talking to my dads friend who's an author/ actor/ anything that's not a steady job! he was telling me about what children like to read about (remember this is for a book, not a television show) and one thing that stood out to me was this little bit of information... 'children like to read about someone older than themselves, so, say if your 11 years old, the books you read would have a lead character who is around 14 - 15 years old' 

I started off thinking about teenagers as this would be a good age for a lead character. We were all teenagers once (i still am) so i started thinking what i could work with from being one my self.

I picked up on the fact that at around 13 - 15 years old, you didn't want to know your parents, you didn't want to be seen with them and you thought that they were against you. You want to start to be independent. you also want to go against what your parents say and do (looking at cartoons on the television, parents are portrayed as stupid n' dumb, and act as the comedy within the cartoon. a good example of this is 'fairly odd parents'), and this lead me to think about hair styles...

When my hair get too long everyone goes on about getting it cut, literally every day, until a do.

But for a teenager trying to be different and rebel against their parents, they'll go in moods n' say "YOU DON'T KNOW ME!!! I HATE YOU!!" and run upstairs.

So i was thinking how this could become a lead character, why is this person want his hair long? the whole worlds against him, wanting to get it cut etc maybe its super hair? maybe he's in a group?...
...but wheres the 'heart and optimism'??

 I could have gone further with the idea, but other things started to have more potential...