Friday, April 15, 2011

Style Test


Fooling around with a sort of old-school style test. It reminds me of brochures I would have seen at the school nurse's office back in the day. "Robbie feels happy because he has high self esteem."

Personally, I think Robbie looks happy because he's walking through the park on a wicked nice day.

I inked it all scribbly with an ultra fine point Sharpie and then colored it in PhotoShop. I've got a book Idea that might lend itself to a style more like this than my usual art style. I might have to do some tests with actual images from said book.

Friday, April 01, 2011

Astounding Tales of Thrilling Adventure


The Professor is slashing prices all over the place.

So the concept that I had for this and the five pieces that I posted before it was to create brightly-colored, energetic illustrations that could be stills from the greatest Saturday morning action cartoon of all time. In reality, I don't know what that show is. It became mostly cool, somewhat quirky characters fighting an army of robots.

Visually my style is influenced by a lot of cartoons, especially shows from the late 90's early 2000's like Dexter's Lab, PowerPuff Girls and Samurai Jack. For this project I went full-on Samurai Jack mode and lost most of the line work. Those shows mean a lot to me because even though I didn't grow up with them, they started hitting the airwaves while I was in college and they helped point me in a new direction as a storyteller and cartoonist.

Another notable thing for me about this project is that, while I'm framing it in the context of this imaginary cartoon show, I didn't give any consideration to the story. That's pretty rare for me. Usually I can't do any personal work without the creating a story around it. Even when I'm doing random sketches of people's faces, my brain starts forming a back story for them as characters. Mostly this is fine with me. I see myself as a storyteller. Sometimes it can become burdensome, so I intentionally set out to avoid thinking about a story and just focus on crafting the images. Of course, most of these characters have shown up in my work before and I'm sure stories about them will creep in to my head eventually.

For now though, it was just a really fun project and I'm glad to have done it.