I haven't done a character sheet in a while. I don't have an animation background, but I am interested in continuity and fluidity of design. That's why I devour animation model sheets (not literally, most of them are circa 1940s and are probably worth a mint) ,for their display of characters from all angles and expressions. These are the featured characters in my submission for Teatrio this year. I'm a little behind, but not doomed yet!

I sketched these guys one time and got too uptight about it, resulting in stiff drawings. So I went back, looked through animation books, observed my girlfriend Jen kicking ass at drawing characters at lightspeed for her animation class, and did some life drawing. Once I was relaxed and nailed how the characters were constructed, I gave the finals a shot again and they flowed. Nice how prep work accomplishes that.

P.S.- to my followers, I can not name these people if my life depended on it. Save me. Some people have the gift, but I've been procrastinating in that one area. So far they are Coach, Sporty Girl, and Larvae Boy. XD

Hey there! Here it is, one week later. I would have posted this sooner, but I was waiting for the image to go up on www.threadless.com So I took the best parts of both sketches and produced a sketch roughly 10 x 12. I'm really happy with how the colors turned out, that I was able to work with a limited amount of color (8 colors is the website's max for printing). Do me a favor and vote on it by clicking the link under the image. I'll let you know how it did!

Coming soon to Threadless! I was drawing randomly in my sketchbook one day and I had the idea for a guy coming straight out of Brother's Grimm who shambled through the winter forest, devouring everything with his beard. The mustache I drew originally resembled an insect's mandibles, so I ran with it. These are the two comp sketches I did for the shirt design, which I'll post later. I went with the bottom one because I prefer bodies contorting to the straight on pose of the first. However, the first sketch was a lot better executed (only failing at composition) so I took the elements I liked from that one for my final.

I went looking for inspiration in designer toy (vinyl toy) companies online. Places like StrangeCo, Kid Robot, and TokiDoki all use really bizarre imagery but make it work through cuteness (and some really clean design work). So thinking of how these places turn simple shapes into a character, I took simple shapes in my sketchbook and evolved them into....something, haha. For me, I got a few clunkers and a few fresh ideas. I want to do this more often, maybe under a theme (like Dinosaurs!).

A guy at Pixar's booth for last year's SCAD Career Day showed a couple students a Finding Nemo art book and pointed to the designs for the fish. "See? That's all they are, a shape."

This would also go on a T-Shirt. I really like this one more than the organist because characters (cat characters!) are the focus of the image. I found out that my two favorite things are texture and shape from this piece. I really revised the characters in the final sketch to get a nice silhouette. I notice a lot of my peers using textures pulled from online texture libraries and I didn't like how things kept reappearing. A friend and fellow illustrator makes her own textures; I like to paint mine. Both solutions are infinitely better than using an image bank for texture.

It's good to be back :) Here we have a multi-limbed organist with a Dickensian city as his instrument. Silly me, I did a lot of character development for the organist and you don't even see his face.

This is my entry for the Savannah Music Festival's T-Shirt contest. Actually, this is the illustration which was modified for their template and palette of shirts. So the end result would be a little different. I'm pleased with both. Generally the music festival gets a great number of artists submitting some very colorful, upbeat designs. My favorite last year was from Jeff Powers, an illustration major, who did an anthropomorphic tree playing a cello.

Tomorrow I'll probably post the development work that went into this one. And since I left myself some time before the deadline, I will probably get another one done.

Last week I went and revised the characters in my story. I know, stop working on characters and get to illustrations! This is the end of character work for a while, and it was helpful for me. I learned a lot about character design this summer from combing over websites, interviews, art of books, and a very thorough book on character design for animation.

One very practical idea I gleaned from my research is that characters should not be designed in a vacuum but in a group if that's where they'll appear. So I started with the girl (probably the cutest and most innocent element of the story) and then followed with the papa monster who appears to be the most grotesque and worn of the characters. I played with scale, detail, and color in relation to each character. Putting them all in a lineup at the end was the most fun for me (even if the little monster got his foot clipped by some accident).

Right before I started work on an illustration for the savannah music festival, I experimented with how I paint things in Photoshop. The two characters under the scale chart took about 1-2 hours in Photoshop. I like my color and rendering choices but there's still room for improvement. Hopefully after I get this illustration done for competition I can devote some more hours to practice and make some nice additions to my portfolio :)