I’ve been hired to design characters for a simple racing game. The characters are various breakfast pastries (bagel, donut, croissant, etc.) to be animated in Flash. Each character is from a different ehtnicity or part of the world. Here’s my first few concept sketches, not sure if I am satisfied with them yet. Feel free to let me know what you think by clicking on “comments” below.

Apple Strudel (German):

Croissant (French)

Scone (British)

Jelly Donut (Southern Belle?)

A hand that will reach down and grab one of the characters:

I saw this link on Drawn! (The Illustration Blog) and had to post it. As some of you may know, Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, is an extrememly private man. Photos of him are practically nonexistent, he never grants interviews, and even the residents of his home town seem unsure of his real identity. So it is quite amazing that Len over at Jawbone Radio managed to get an interview with Watterson’s mother. You can listen to it here.

I’ve recently joined a small artist’s group. Every two weeks we sketch or illustrate a different theme, just for fun. The current topic is “Hansel and Gretel”. So for my warm-up this morning I did a quick sketch of the witch. I like drawing old people, their faces have so much character. And I normally draw fun, cheery, cartoony subjects, so it was interesting for me to try something a little darker.

Today’s warm up sketch is a little on the odd side, but was a lot of fun to draw. It was inspired by a thread over at The Drawing Board. Maybe I just needed to get that last bit of Halloween weirdness out of my system.

Later this week I’m going in to meet with some local art directors, and they’ve asked me to bring in my portfolio. I promote myself so much over the internet nowadays that my leather portfolio is starting to collect dust. It’s badly in need of an update. So this morning I started sorting through all the fun projects I’ve had the privilege to work on in the past year or so. My favorites are the ones where I got do design my own characters. Here’s a few samples.

A few artists at Pixar have banded together and started a blog, Spline Doctors. Besides working at Pixar, the six artists involved (Scott Clark, Andrew Gordon, Stephen Gregory, Angus MacLane, Billy Merritt, and Mike Venturini) also teach at the Academy of Art. You just know this blog is gonna be good!