New Client: VeggieTales

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I’m excited to announce I’ve recently completed some props and costume designs for an upcoming VeggieTales animation project. I can’t show any artwork yet but I have their permission to announce them as a client.

I’ve worked with Big Idea in the past as a character designer for the “3-2-1 Penguins!” TV series and I’ve done some VeggieTales work indirectly for Scholastic, but this is the first time I’ve created concept work directly for the VeggieTales animation series. They’d approached me twice in the past but both times I was too busy to take on anything new. I’m glad it finally worked out. They’re terrific people and I hope I can work with them again in the future.

New! Download My Comp Art PDF Portfolio

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I regularly get hired by ad agencies to create “comp art”—rough sketches (sometimes color, sometimes not) designed to help them pitch their ideas to their clients. My artwork has been presented to clients such as Walmart, Target, Best Buy, 3M, and Chef Boyardee. Examples are of course posted on my website. Now you can also download selected samples of my comp art as a PDF. If you need something to print out and bring to a meeting, or if you want something simple to email to a colleague, this should fill the bill. One more way I’m trying to make life just a little easier for my potential clients.

Toy Story 3: Woody Figurine

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One of my regular clients is a toy company called DecoPac. Among other things they design many of the fancy birthday cakes you see in grocery store bakeries. They also create various toys and novelties to put on top of the cakes, often tying in with licensed characters and brands.

Last year they commissioned me to develop some concepts for a “Toy Story” cake to correspond with the upcoming push to promote Toy Story 3. I was asked to come up with some cake designs highlighting Woody and Buzz, and also to brainstorm a few ideas for small “Woody” toys or mini-figurines that could be placed on top of the cake for extra appeal. I don’t yet have permission from the client to show you the various concept sketches I developed for the cake itself. I can show you some of the rough ideas I came up with for the Woody toy:

Woody and Toy Story are copyright © Disney.
Woody and Toy Story are copyright © Disney.

Here’s how the final three-inch figurine turned out:

Woody and Toy Story are copyright © Disney.

And here’s a cake design DecoPac ultimately developed for the bakeries to use:

A few days ago I was in my local Wal-Mart and saw this exact toy decorating one of the cakes in the bakery display cooler. Of course I had to buy it. My little girls had an extra-special treat for desert that night:

Character Design: Rhino

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Last year I did some concept development work for an animated motion picture currently being developed in Hollywood. I was brought on board to help design some animal characters. The catch was that I had to try to match the style of another artist who had already done quite a bit of their visual development.

I did some sketches of an ostrich and a near-sighted rhino. Ultimately it was decided that I wasn’t quite capturing the look they were after and so we shook hands and parted ways. Oh well, you can’t win them all. But they were great people to work with, they paid me for my work, and we parted on good terms.

I can’t say too much about the project because as far as I know it is still in development. But I did retain the rights to my unused sketches and can show them to you. I posted some ostrich samples a while back. Today I came across some of the rhino drawings in my files and thought I would post them as well:

Copyright © Cedric Hohnstadt. All rights reserved.

Act II Popcorn Header

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A few months ago I was hired by the terrific team at Minneapolis agency RPM Connect to illustrate an in-store display for Act II Popcorn, a brand owned by ConAgra Foods. RPM came to me with a fun concept (two kids bouncing around on a sea of popcorn) and a rough layout for the signage, then asked me to work up a sketch:

ConAgra gave us a thumbs-up to move forward. Due to printing limitations it was decided that we could only use five colors: Black, Red, Blue, Gold, and White. I could use any percentage of the colors I needed but we decided not to risk mixing the colors. In other words, I could use 30% red to get pink but I couldn’t add black to the red to get maroon. It was a bit of a challenge but in the end I think it worked out well.

I created the artwork in Illustrator. I made sure to place the kids and the floating popcorn bits on different layers so that the designer could have a little flexibility when fitting them into the different layouts. I didn’t bother illustrating all of the popcorn on the right-hand side of the artwork since I knew it would be covered up by the blue-and-gold “swoop” shape.

Here’s the final artwork I submitted:

And here’s the final header RPM designed for use in stores:

Look for this display in your local grocery store, and then grab yourself some yummy popcorn!

From The Archives: Aliens!

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I was digging through some old artwork and found some alien concept sketches I did way back in 2006. These were some “villain” designs from an educational project for kids that was to take place in outer space. As far as I know things never went much further than this before the project came to a stand still, for reasons I’m not privy too. (I did get paid for my work.) The client has asked that I not reveal any specific info about what they had in the works, so here you go….some silly aliens from the studio archives.

Any time I look back at old sketches like these I notice things I’d like to improve or do differently to make the designs stronger. That just means that with each passing year my skills are improving and I’m developing a keener eye. At least, that’s what I like to think.