Sick Days

Nothing much to post today. Perfect Wife is battling a nasty cold, and I feel one coming on (hard to  resist  kissing PW, even when she's sick!). Even Rocco the Wonder Dog is feeling under the weather.

In lieu of anything new to post, here's another little piece  from a freelance job I did a few years ago. The client had a concept for a kids property that they needed images for to show potential investors. The concept was a  dinosaur/enviromental/adventure series that is  too  complex to explain here. As far as I know, this series never went beyond these sketches, a recurring theme in my recent posts.

These drawings are random sketches of various characters from the project. I actually like the way they look, and am sorry the series didn't go forward.

These characters may still be copyright the person who hired me, so you can look, but don't use.

If anyone likes these, I have plenty more I can show you.

Making Faces!

In illustrating our children's book, "Oscar's Naughty Chicken", I am faced with many crowd scenes to draw.

As a kid, I always hated when cartoonists would make the backround characters generic nobodies. Since they weren't major characters, why take the time to make them look interesting? Great cartoonists like Al Capp, Bill Elder & Warren Kremer (Yes, Warren Kremer!) always avoided this trap.

I like all the characters in my book to look interesting, even if they are only appearing on one page. Unfortunately, sometimes I slip into formula drawing, and everyone ends up looking the same. 

To remedy this, I like filling up  pages with random character designs, like the ones you see above. These are all off the top of my head, sketched quickly with a ballpoint pen on copy paper. After a few dozen pages of these, I have a wide range of character types to choose  from. Some are poor, some are derivative, but some are fun and with a little tweaking, they'll find their way into the book. I'm not saying the above doodles are examples of great cartooning, but exercises  like this get my "wheels turning".

And yes, the next step is to figure  out their body types and personalities.