Toy Design

A few months ago I was hired by Patch Products to illustrate two educational puzzles for preschoolers. One was a farm theme, the other a zoo theme. Each puzzle needed to incorporate several shapes into the artwork (indicated with thick black outlines). The original concept was to have the border of the puzzle take a shape that would match the theme....

JellyTelly.com is a fun website project from Phil Vischer, creator of VeggieTales. He's partnered with Focus on the Family to create online daily episodes combining animation, puppetry, and live action to present Biblical concepts to kids in fun and entertaining ways. Sort of like a Christian Sesame Street. It's really fun stuff! Much of the site's content is populated by puppet...

Here's another concept I worked up for DecoPac, a local company that manufactures licensed toys for specialty birthday cakes. They told me they were working on a cake design for Disney's "The Princess and the Frog" and asked me to work up a couple of rough concept sketches to help them sell it to the folks at Disney. They wanted one...

One of my regular clients is a toy company called DecoPac. Among other things they create many of the fancy birthday cakes you see in the grocery store bakeries. They often develop fun themes using licensed characters to tie in with movie and TV franchises. On occasion they will hire me to develop toy concepts for some of the cakes....

Here's one more project I did for DecoPac. It's part of a series of jungle animal cake toys that were ultimately never produced. The lion's tail was meant to act like a lever which, when pushed, would cause his mouth to open and emit a "roar" noise from a tiny speaker. I was asked to make the elephant sit on the cake...