Free Finger Puppet Business Cards

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A couple of weeks ago I announced my new finger-puppet business cards. I designed them to serve several functions:

  • To demonstrate my abilities as a character desginer;
  • To stand out and be a good conversation starter at networking events;
  • To display not just my contact info but list past clients and quotes/endorsements from satisfied art directors.

So far the cards have been a big hit. I’ve received a lot of positive feedback. It’s fun to watch grown professionals turn silly for a moment as they put their fingers through the little holes and move the character’s “legs”. Several people have asked to have one of each. So I’ve decided to offer them for free through my blog.

If you’d like to own a set, just send your name and address to me at blog@cedricstudio.com and I’ll drop all three in the mail to you. No charge. My treat as a small thank-you for reading this blog. (Be sure to write “business cards” in the subject line of your email).

Another way to get the cards is to sign up for my mailing list. It’s a quick and easy way to keep up on my latest projects. Every month or two I send out a short promotional email showcasing my latest work, and I also mail out a postcard about once a year (I should do it more often but, well, I don’t). When you fill out the form just write “business cards” in the comments line and I’ll mail ’em to ya.

The cards are totally free with no strings attached. But if at some point you happen to need a freelance character designer/illustrator, I hope the cards will serve as a reminder that I’m out there and available.

“3-2-1 Penguins!” Character Designs (part 2)

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Continuing yesterday’s post…I also designed a future version of Zidgel, the ship’s captain. He’s big on vanity and low on brains. As an old man, er…penguin, at first he appears to have retained his youth and vigor. Then, through a series of gags we find that he is actually wearing a truss, false teeth, and a toupe. It was a lot of fun to design both versions.

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Finally, there’s Kevin. In this episode the malfunctioning time machine has a reverse effect on him. Instead of growing older, Kevin actually regresses to a young penguin and eventually an egg:

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There was one last misc. alien character I designed for a brief “talking heads” scene on the ship’s monitor. Here’s the turnarounds and an expressions chart:

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“3-2-1 Penguins!” Character Designs (part 1)

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On Saturday NBC aired another episode of 3-2-1 Penguins! for which I did some character designs. The plot centered around a malfunctioning time machine that sends the penguins’ space ship into the future where they meet their future selves. (The lesson for kids was about respecting the advice of our elders.)

The original penguins were designed several years ago when the series premiered on DVD. I don’t know who came up with the original designs, but I’ve always admired them. The characters have great personality, contrast, and appeal. It was a real treat to take three of the four characters and create an elderly version of each one. Here’s the first two:

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I was also asked to design a generic alien character, a veeery old war-weary soldier. The director suggested he have three eyes and one of them be covered with an eye patch. The character only has a couple of scenes (no dialogue), and while he is held up as someone for the kids to revere he’s also played as a comic character. I wanted the design that was both respectable and a little silly:

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I did a lot of art for this episode, so more will be posted tomorrow.

Fleas and Ticks

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Recently I was hired by a publisher of Christian music curriuclum (Praise Hmyn Inc.) to do a spot illustration for a children’s song, “The Tick and the Flea”. My instructions were to depict a tick and a flea having a picnic on top of a Shitzu’s head.

Here’s the final illustration, sketched, inked, and colored in Photoshop. The client asked that we clearly see the dog’s face, so I couldn’t zoom in too closely. It was a real head-scratcher (pun intended). The only solution was to make the bugs about 1,000 times their actual size. Even then they were small, so I kept the designs very simple (i.e. four legs instead of six or eight) in order to read clearly.

Fleas and ticks are brown. I wanted them to stand out more so I used cartoony colors, which also gave me freedom not to be too literal with the designs.

The fur was fun to color. I used a hard Photoshop brush set at either 10% o 30% opacity (depending on the color) and then just built up my strokes. It’s always best to just suggest hair with a few strokes of highlight and shadow. If you try to paint ever individual hair you’ll go mad.

This is my favorite kind of illustration project: Simple, colorful, and lots of fun to draw!

“3-2-1 Penguins!” Character Designs

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On Saturday NBC aired another episode of 3-2-1 Penguins! which I did some character design work for. This was a funny episode (directed by Tom Bancroft) with a lesson about the importance of inner beauty and character as opposed to vanity.

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One of the characters I was asked to design was a cheezy George Hamilton-type alien with his own line of hair and beauty products.

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Another character was a beauty products saleswoman alien who’d had too much plastic surgery.

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Here’s some concepts of one of the characters covered in Avacado Hair Cream (he’s normally brown).

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And finally, a gag “photo” I illustrated of the mom of one of the caracters. I basically just added hair and glasses to one of the main characters.

3-2-1 Penguins! airs Saturday mornings on NBC. Check your local listings.

Keeping A Morgue Or “Swipe File”

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As a freelance illustrator I often use reference photos for my work. Not to copy or trace but to study in order to help me understand the subject matter as I draw. My friend and fellow illustrator Tom Richmond recently wrote a good post on the proper role of reference photos when creating a piece of art. He compares it to a writer using a thesaurus, and warns against relying too heavily on reference imagery so that it becomes a crutch.

When I was in art school the internet was brand new and there was no such thing as Google, much less Google Image Search. Back then we were taught to scrounge old magazines from friends, relatives, and recycling centers so that we could pour through them and rip out photos of anything and everything we thought we might be asked to draw someday. We were taught to organize them into what was called a “swipe file” or a “morgue”. Over a period of several years I eventually filled two-and-a-half filing cabinets with photos.

Google has made much of my “morgue” irrelevant, but not all of it.Read More