I decided to join in on the Character Design Challenge over on Facebook. This month’s theme is “Gangster”. I thought it would be fun to imagine an old hit man who still wears out of fashion turn-of-the-century clothes. The costume was inspired by this photo: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/390405861423365659/
You can join the Character Design Challenge here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/CharacterDesignChallenge/
The latest VeggieTales DVD “Noah’s Ark” (Amazon link) recently hit store shelves. It’s the first DVD to feature the updated character designs which coincide with the brand new Netflix series “VeggieTales In The House“. It’s a fresh, energetic new take on the characters. (EDIT: Credit for the new designs goes mostly to the amazing Elena and Olivia Ceballos).
I was asked to help with designing some costumes (sometimes from scratch, other times polishing existing designs). I also did a lot of concepts for a new character, Shem, who was ultimately voiced by Wayne Brady. At the beginning of the “Noah” project we were still using the old, classic VeggieTales style but eventually the decision was made to try and match the updated look of the “refresh”. The final Shem design is pretty close to one of my concepts.
The evolution of this story also took some twists and turns. At first they wanted to go with a traditional biblical setting, then a few other things were tried before eventually settling on something more modern. Hence, the variety of costume designs below:
Here’s a trailer for Noah’s Ark:
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Like a lot of other artists I’ve decided to jump on the Gumroad bandwagon. It’s a bit of an experiment for me. I already have my own website store and people seem to be happy with it, but I’m very impressed with Gumroad’s slick-and-simple website. Just create a Gumroad account and have easy, “forever” access to any files you purchase from various Gumroad sellers. Also, Gumroad only takes a small sliver of commission which makes them an attractive place to sell.
As an experiment I’ve put together a PDF sketchbook called “Sketchercise!” (45 pages with over 120 drawings) and I’m offering it as a “name-your-price” purchase. For the time being you can have it for whatever you think is a fair price, no questions asked and no strings attached. Other artists such as Will Terrell advocate this model for selling some of their content so I thought I’d try it and see what happens.
You can also get the Pose Drawing Sparkbook (both versions) and my drawing webinar on my Gumroad page, at full price.
Recently I was hired by VeggieTales creator Phil Vischer to help develop some characters for a fun new project he is working on. I can’t say much about it yet, but he has given me permission to post just a few of the dozens of concept sketches I did for the characters he’s been developing. I can tell you one is an aardvark and one is a frog, and they like to sit around and drink coffee. That’s all I can reveal for now. Stay tuned!
Yesterday I took a break from my busy work load to just play around in my sketchbook. I decided to use Stephen Silver’s excellent Character Design Shuffle app (available for iOS and Android). Each time you use the app it picks from several random character traits (gender, occupation, type of animal, emotion, etc.) to build a character assignment for you to draw. I spun the virtual wheel and was given the following words:
Vulture
Female
Pharmacist
Pogo Jumping
So yes, this drawing was totally random…and totally fun!
My webinar “Bringing Your Drawings To Life” is now 1/2 off. The price has been slashed to just $10 for the full HD 90-minute download.
Using principles from the Pose Drawing Sparkbook I tried to cram it full of tips to help you put more life and personality into your drawings. More info here, or watch these clips:
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$20.00 USD Now only $10.00
If you like this you might also like some of the other items in my store.
