I had a blast last week at the Creative Freelancer Conference in San Diego. My head is still spinning from all the great tips, tricks, and inspiring info that was served up. Can’t wait to post about it here. I’ve been swamped with all the emails and client work that piled up while I was gone, but I hope to have something posted in the next day or two. Stay tuned!
Superior Scribblers
Recently I was nominated by Bob Ostrom for a “Superior Scribbler” award. As far as I can tell its not a real, tangible award. Just a fun way to acknowledge other artists whose work you enjoy.
If you are nominated, one of the rules is that you nominate five other artists. Here are my picks (in no particular order). Two of them work together at their own studio so I’ve combined them into one link. Click on the images to check out their work.
Pray For The Hodge Family
I wanted to pass on some sad and tragic news for those of you who are fans of VeggieTales. Longtime Veggie writer/director Tim Hodge has recently been hit with two crushing blows. This past weekend Tim’s 17-year old son was in a serious car accident and is currently in a coma. If that weren’t bad enough, I’m told that this same weekend Tim also lost his father to a battle with cancer.
In addition to his work on VeggieTales Tim was the executive producer for 3-2-1 Penguins!, a TV series for which I did some character design work. He is a terrific guy and I thoroughly enjoyed working with and for him. I can’t imagine the intense grief he and his family must be under right now. Please pray for them in this dark hour.
I’ll post an update if I hear more.
[EDIT: Here’s a news story about the accident.]
[EDIT: To get the latest updates on Tim’s son, sign up to follow their CaringBridge journal here.]
NCS Chapter Picnic
For the last several years I’ve enjoyed being a member of the National Cartoonists Society. Our chapter (the North Central Chapter) covers several midwestern states but we manage to get together three or four times a year and I always have a great time. I spend so much time alone in my freelancing cave that I relish any opportunity to hang out with other cartoonists. This is a really fun bunch.
Tonight Tom and Anna Richmond hosted a chapter picnic at their lovely home right here in the Twin Cities. They are first-class hosts and Anna is a fantastic cook. We spent a relaxing evening enjoying burgers, wine, cheese, desserts, and even caramel-marshmallow s’mores around a fire pit in the back yard. Thank you Tom and Anna for your wonderful hospitality! The evening went by way too fast.
Sorry for the lack of photos, I was too busy enjoying myself to snap one or two quick shots with my iPhone. Not sure why the group photo turned out so blurry, my iPhone usually does a much better job.
The next NCS event will be our annual chapter meeting in October. This year it will be in Souix Falls, SD. Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to attend—I’ll be running with my wife in a 5K “marathon” that weekend. That made this picnic even more enjoyable for me.
Incidentally, if you haven’t checked out Tom Richmond’s illustration blog you are really missing out. Give it a looksee.
Sketchbook Update: Bible Guy
This afternoon I was designing a Bible character for a client project. This sketch was too exaggerated to meet the style the client needed, but I liked how it turned out so I decided to do a full render in Photoshop.
Sketchbook Update (part 1)
It’s been a while so I thought I’d post some noodles and doodles from my sketchbook. I don’t have a scanner with me at the moment so I thought I’d try snapping pics of the sketches with my spanky new iPhone 3GS. The results aren’t as good as a scanner would have done but after adjusting the levels in Photoshop they didn’t turn out all that bad.
More sketches coming tomorrow.
All artwork copyright © Cedric Hohnstadt. All rights reserved.
