Illustration

27 Feb

Posted at 00:00h in Art & Business, Illustration
As a freelance illustrator I often use reference photos for my work. Not to copy or trace but to study in order to help me understand the subject matter as I draw. My friend and fellow illustrator Tom Richmond recently wrote a good post on the proper role of reference photos when creating a piece of art. He compares it to a writer using a thesaurus, and warns against relying too heavily on reference imagery so that it becomes a crutch. When I was in art school the internet was brand new and there was no such thing as Google, much less Google Image Search. Back then we were taught to scrounge old magazines from friends, relatives, and recycling centers so that we could pour through them and rip out photos of anything and everything we thought we might be asked to draw someday. We were taught to organize them into what was called a "swipe file" or a "morgue". Over a period of several years I eventually filled two-and-a-half filing cabinets with photos. Google has made much of my "morgue" irrelevant, but not all of it.

22 Feb

Posted at 00:00h in Illustration

(Sketch by Corbett Vanoni. All rights reserved.) I've been getting a lot of questions about inking via Ask Mr. Artist Guy and through posted comments. I'm slowly working on a post or series of posts about inking principles. As for the mechanics of digital inking, back in 2006 artist Corbett Vanoni posted a terrific tutorial about how to ink in...

21 Feb

Posted at 00:00h in Character Design, Illustration
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. mascots.jpg 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.

08 Feb

Posted at 00:00h in Illustration

If you've attended a comic book convention in the last few years, you may have noticed the "sketchbook craze" spreading through the art world. Comic book and animation artists will assemble dozens of personal sketches, have them made into booklets at Kinko's, and sell them at conventions and other events. I've been to Comic-Con twice in the last five years...

04 Feb

Posted at 00:00h in Character Design, Illustration

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....