“3-2-1 Penguins!” Character Designs

March 3, 2008 by Cedric

On Saturday NBC aired another episode of 3-2-1 Penguins! which I did some character design work for. This was a funny episode (directed by Tom Bancroft) with a lesson about the importance of inner beauty and character as opposed to vanity.

One of the characters I was asked to design was a cheezy George Hamilton-type alien with his own line of hair and beauty products.

Another character was a beauty products saleswoman alien who’d had too much plastic surgery.

Here’s some concepts of one of the characters covered in Avacado Hair Cream (he’s normally brown).

And finally, a gag “photo” I illustrated of the mom of one of the caracters. I basically just added hair and glasses to one of the main characters.

3-2-1 Penguins! airs Saturday mornings on NBC. Check your local listings.

Kikkoman Character Design

February 21, 2008 by Cedric

Recently I was hired by the good folks at Ketchum Communications to create a character for Kikkoman soy sauce. They were printing a brochure and wanted to include a fun cartoon mascot. They asked me to take a bottle of Kikkoman and add a face, an apron, and a chef’s hat.

It was the standard “take our product and add a face” method of character design. It’s a common approach to creating a mascot (i.e. the M&M’s guys, the Chips Ahoy cookie, the Kmart Blue Light guy, etc.) Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

At first glance this kind of assignment doesn’t give a character designer much to work with. The juicier jobs involve designing a character related to the product (i.e. Keebler Elves, Energizer Bunny, Serta Mattress Sheep, etc.), not the product itself. There is a lot more freedom to experiment visually. When the character is the product you are much more limited. An M&M has to look like an M&M, a light bulb has to look like a light bulb. If a character designer isn’t careful, such product-with-a-face characters risk appearing dull and unoriginal. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way.Read More

My Schoolism.com Character Design Assignments

February 11, 2008 by Cedric

A few months ago I took a character design class online through Schoolism.com. The instructor was Stephen Silver, one of the top character designers working in animation today. Stephen’s video lectures were very inspirational and full of meaty content. I probably learned more from Stephen than I did from some of my professors when I was in art school. If you have any interest in character design and can afford to take the class, do so!

I posted my weekly assignments here on the blog and tried to share my thoughts without giving away too much of the actual content of the lectures. The blog posts were quite popular and were even featured on Drawn!, a popular art blog.

For those of you who may have missed it, I’ve now compiled all of my Schoolism.com blog posts onto one page. Here’s the list:

“3-2-1 Penguins!” Character and Concept Art

February 4, 2008 by Cedric

On Saturday morning NBC aired another brand-new episode of 3-2-1 Penguins! for which I had done some concept work. This epsiode was directed by Rob Corley over at FunnyPages Productions (check out their blog).

The character art needed for this episode was pretty light and straight-forward. The only new characters were a race of tiny ear-people who spoke in Munchkin-like jibberish. My instructions were to take a human ear and add cartoon arms and legs. Like I said, pretty straight-forward.

The only other concept art they needed from me were some party hats for the Penguins to wear in a birthday scene, and a sketch of the twins and Grandmum after being splattered by an exploding cake. One of the running gags of the show is that you never see Grandmum’s face. It is either out-of-frame, or strategically covered by a well-placed prop. So I left her headless in the sketch, knowing it wouldn’t matter. (Although they did send me a turn-around model of Grandmum for reference, and yes she does actually have a face. I’ve seen it!)

3-2-1 Penguins! is a science-fiction comedy from the creators of VeggieTales. It airs Saturday mornings on NBC.

Shameless Self-Promotion: Download My New Portfolio

January 29, 2008 by Cedric

To any art directors/art buyers out there:

As a freelancer I’m always looking for new clients and fresh projects. So this blog is as good a place as any to announce that a new, updated PDF version of my character design and illustration portfolio is available online. You can download it for free here or on my website. Feel free to print it out and keep it on file for your records.

I’ve also posted an updated version of my resume here.

Finally, you can join my mailing list here. I send out a promotional email 3-4 times a year, and a “snail mail” postcard once or twice a year.

To the rest of you, thanks for indulging me. Regular blog posts will resume tomorrow. (If you like animation, you’ll enjoy tomorrow’s post.)

“3-2-1 Penguins!” Character Designs

January 7, 2008 by Cedric

On Saturday morning NBC aired another episode of “3-2-1 Penguins!” which I was fortunate enough to work on. For much of the series my job was to design various aliens which the Penguins would encounter as they hopped from planet to planet. If the script called for a prop or gag that would change a character’s appearance, it was also my job to do a concept sketch and/or turnaround drawings so that the modelers and animators could replicate it correctly.

This particular episode (“Practical Hoax”) didn’t require any new characters. However, the script called for several “photographs” of various characters and it was my job to illustrate the “photos”. I’ll show you those tomorrow. In the mean time, here’s a few of the concept sketches I did for this episode: