Character Design

Sorry for the slowdown in blog posts this week. Things have been pretty crazy here. I'm putting in a lot of hours on an animation project, plus this week I also whipped together some storyboards for a major retailer, did some character design sketches for a major food company, and finished up designing a mascot character for a small business...

This past Saturday morning NBC aired another episode of 3-2-1 Penguins! which I had the pleasure of working on. There were only two characters who needed to be designed, Admiral Sowmaster and his assistant, Cash. Both were to be pig-like aliens. Here's an early rough concept. The Admiral is on the left. After turning in the first concept I received some very...

Last year I took a character design class online from Stephen Silver at Schoolism.com. One of the lessons dealt with memory sketching, which I've written about here. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhD_70XlG_o&feature=related] Here's a video of Stephen Silver doing a memory sketch and discussing it as he draws. Fun stuff. If you have an interest in character design I'd highly recommend taking Stephen's class. You'll learn...

As a character designer I'm fascinated with product mascots. A good mascot, when combined with a strong ad campaign, can be an enormous benefit when promoting a product or service. My favorite freelance projects are when clients hire me to design a mascot or character, either for advertising or animation. To help illustrate the power of a mascot I thought...

On Saturday NBC aired another episode of 3-2-1 Penguins! for which I did some character designs. The plot centered around a malfunctioning time machine that sends the penguins' space ship into the future where they meet their future selves. (The lesson for kids was about respecting the advice of our elders.) The original penguins were designed several years ago when...