The Real Catwoman

Special post today! Today (actually, April 8th) is my girlfriend Jen's b-day. She's a real trooper in that she's working hard on her animation projects on her birthday. I'm getting into caricatures so I thought I would start with my favorite person....Jen! The whole process is really fun for me; I start with reference sketches of the subject until I can draw the person easily without resorting to copying a photograph. Then I start to notice parts of the person I like and that have great design potential. Finally I choose a pose and push those features to make it a solid design. This isn't nearly finished yet, but I like the drawing and hope to polish it soon. Jen, I hope you like this! <3.

Robo-Scare-Crow

A robot scarecrow! In my mind he would probably run on corn ethanol because it's right there on the farm. Ideally, he should run on electric because most farmers are already hurting the environment with pesticides such as DDT. And I've been thinking about this too much, haha.

I've had this guy in mind for a while, I just had to get off my duff and flesh him out (notice the irony?). This is the first sketch, which I will then blow up about 150% to get a nicer, more detailed final drawing. Then I'll color it and submit it to either Threadless or Design By Humans. I'm leaning towards Design by Humans because they favor illustrations that take up the entire canvas that is the shirt. As always, input is desired! Ciao.

Heeeeere we go, the final drawings for a proposed children's book. The characters I did a couple weeks back are the cast. So, this is a game I played back in the day in P.E. Centipede was a game that improved on the premise of "Tag" by making the "it" person couple with another person when he tagged them. Then a chain would begin that wouldn't end until time was called.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with these five. I think the contrast will be more apparent when I add color, as the texture of the graphite became distracting (especially on the darker pieces). Body language and characters were the two most important things to me, so I really spent my time doing rough sketches and taking photographs. I didn't want the background kids to be no-faces, so I spent a little time developing each of them. Which is good in my case since a couple panels have the background guys taking the spotlight. I'm really happy with the depth and variety of images. You'll be seeing color soon!

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."