Superior Scribbler Award

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scribbler

Thanks to Bob Ostrom for nominating me for the Superior Scribbler Award. It’s always an honor to be recognized by another artist, and this particular award is a lot of fun.

Here are the rules to the award:

  1. Each Superior Scribbler must, in turn, pass the Award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy buds.
  2. Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.
  3. Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to this post, which explains The Award.
  4. Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List (!?) at the Scholastic-Scribe’s blog. That way, we’ll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives this prestigious honor!
  5. Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.

My nominees will be posted soon. Stay tuned!

Separated At Birth?

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Just a crazy random thought….is it just me, or do these two look uncannily alike?

woody-conan

[EDIT: The photos above were just featured as “Toon Twins” in today’s (8/18/09) daily newsletter from AnimationMagazin.net. It’s a free email, worth signing up.)

Mascot Contest Winner Announced

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mascot-contest2

“Mascot Contest 2” officially ended on Friday. A lot of people entered and most identified all the mascots correctly. Those who did were entered in the drawing. I put the entries on slips of paper and my two-year-old daughter picked one out of a baseball cap.

The winner of the mascot contest is David Oldham. Congrats David! You’ll receive a free copy of Eric Goldberg’s new book Character Animation Crash Course!

The correct list of products is:

  1. Mucinex
  2. Progressive Insurance
  3. 9Lives cat food
  4. Booberry cereal
  5. Geico insurance
  6. Michelin tires
  7. Verizon
  8. 7-Up
  9. Kool-Aid
  10. Mr. Clean
  11. Mrs. Butterworth
  12. Wendy’s

It was a lot of fun for me to watch the entries roll in! Thanks to everyone who participated. To those who didn’t win, better luck next time!

Mascot Contest 2

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mascot-contest2

(EDIT: Contest is now closed. Winner and correct answers here.)

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 it would be fun to have another mascot contest, similar to the one I ran last year. A good mascot will help customers instantly recall the name of the product he/she/it represents. Can you name all twelve products/brands represented by the mascots above? (Hint: Some mascots share the same name as their product). Most are fairly well-known, but I’ve thrown in a couple of dated ones to keep it from being too easy.

animationcrashcourse

If you can correctly identify all twelve products I’ll enter your name into a drawing for a free copy of the book Character Animation Crash Course! by famed Disney animator Eric Goldberg. This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to learn not how to give your animated characters a sense of true personality and life. The book comes with a free CD and is chock full of great info. I happen to own a spare copy, hence this contest.

Remember, to be entered in the drawing you must correctly name the products, not the mascots themselves. The contest deadline is midnight (central time) on Friday, June 12. I’ll announce the winner on Monday, June 15. Send your answers to blog@cedricstudio.com, along with your name, email address, and phone number. Please do NOT leave your answers as a posted comment. Such posts will be deleted.

This is not a scheme to add you to some sort of mailing list. This is just for fun. I promise I’ll only use the info to contact you if you win, and after the contest all the names and email addresses will be deleted from my computer.

Also, to view some of the mascots and characters I’ve designed for various clients don’t forget to visit the “Character Design” page on my website.

So….How many products can you name?

Funny Video: Freelancing in the Real World

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My friend and fellow illustrator Tom Richmond recently posted this YouTube video on his blog. It’s a hilarious illustration of the ways some clients will try to take advantage of freelancers. Fortunately I don’t run into this kind of thing much anymore. My clients for the most part have been great and treat me like a total professional, and I’ve been at it long enough that I can usually sniff out the bad ones before the project ever gets off the ground. But they are out there and every once in a while someone will try to pull something like this.

If you’re relatively new to freelancing, watching this video might be good therapy:

Incidentally, if you find yourself relating to this video a little too much you might benefit from reading my two-part article, “How To Bid Out A Project”. You might also want to visit the Buiness/Freelancing section of my Recommended Resources list on Amazon.com.

Lunch With Ray Comfort

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Cedric with Ray Comfort

My wife and I spent Memorial Day weekend in Los Angeles to visit clients and to attend the NCS Reubuens Awards Weekend. We started off the weekend meeting with one of my favorite clients, Ray Comfort (evangelist, author, and co-host of the TV series The Way of the Master with actor Kirk Cameron). We were given a tour of their offices and then Ray took us out to lunch along with some of his staff. They were a terrific bunch!

Ray is a ball of energy with a great sense of humor. He pulled out his wallet and showed us gag photo after gag photo, told us stories about the chickens he’s raising in his back yard (yes, Ray built a chicken coop in a California suburb), and showed us some nifty slight of hand magic. One thing I love about Ray is that he doesn’t let the dust settle. His mind is just brimming over with creative ideas.

For instance, I told him a humorous story about my first visit to LA and he very creatively used it as a springboard for a post on his blog about the Gospel. It’s a funny  story (well, funny now…although I didn’t think so at the time) so I thought I’d share the link.

I’ll also clue you in that Ray and I will (hopefully) be working together soon on a really neat project. I can’t say much more than that but if the pieces fall into place I’ll have some fun work to show in a few months.