POKEMON: Gotta Catch 'em all! (Part 2)

No real long story this time around. This is just the finished digital ink & paint for the sketch I did in my post from last March. Here's the progression, from thumbnail to rough cleanup to digital inks to full digitial color. And I threw in a pokeball background just for fun.

Lil' Eagles

So, an old pal from high school, who is now the Principal of a K-2 elementary school, asked me to design a new logo/mascot for his school. The mascot for the schools in the district is an eagle, but he wanted to steer clear of anything edgy and graphic. He told me that up until now, they’ve been using the Philadelphia Eagles logo. Not exactly kid-friendly. So I wanted to give him something that represented his school but was still appealing to 5-8 year olds. After a bunch of REALLY bad sketches that kept missing the mark, I finally came up with a drawing of this little fella:

My Principal friend was 100% happy with this first pass (which almost never happens, so I was pretty thrilled), so I moved right on to cleaning him up:

Incorporating a few elements that he liked from other school logos that he’d seen, I created this framework and text. Then I colored him up and colored the framework in red and white, the school colors. Here's the final version, which will now be living on Red Bank Elementary School's website: http://www.wdeptford.k12.nj.us/Red_Bank/

UPDATE:  The logo has been used on many identifying school properties, including this giant welcome mat:

and this fun boardwalk-style prize wheel:

Who's Your Friend When Things Get Ruff? Part 2

Remember when I posted roughs for my redesign of the old Sid & Marty Krofft tv show character H.R. Pufnstuf? I said back then that I'd love to do a finished color version of him when I had the time. Well two years later, here we are! I've been playing around in digital ink & color over the past two weeks, so I came back to this design as an exercise. I think I may go even further with him and give him an actual background, maybe see a bit of Living Island. WHATTT?? Completely unheard of, I know. But I just love this design so much, I'd like to do something complete with him. Until then, here he is with digital inks:

And in full glorious digital color:

For those of you that didn't get to see the original thumbnail and roughs, click this LINK to go to that post.

Doctor Who: The 10th Doctor

This is the first of my Doctor Who series, and my first attempt at fully digital inks. It took me a good week of working a few hours per night well past midnight, watching many tutorials, and a whole lot of trial & error, but overall I'm very happy with it. This was done in Photoshop CS6, recreating each line one by one. In retrospect, probably not the fastest way to go. But honestly, this was just intended to be a Photoshop color sketch, as my previous postings have been. But the pencil-lined pinstripes on his suit were a messy disaster. So I erased them and made nice clean digital pinstripes. And then since I did those I thought, let's make those little details on his tie look nice and slick. And hey, since I have to fix his nose to make it look more Tennant-like, I might as well clean that up too while I'm at it, right? And so on, and here we are.

Next up is the 11th Doctor, who will be my first attempt at digital inks in Illustrator. Which I imagine will be immensely faster than Photoshop, and even slicker looking than this. Look at me, finally entering the digital age! Onwards & upwards, my friends. ALLONS-Y!

POKEMON: Gotta Catch 'em all! (Part 1)

There's no long story with this one. My 11-year old is a huge Pokemon fan. This little guy, Fennekin, is his favorite one, so I drew my version of him for his birthday. I'm extremely happy with how this came out, and I have to say, now I can see how kids become so obsessed with them. It's 3am, and I should have gone to bed hours ago, but I felt a nagging need to finish him up before I called it a night. Tomorrow might be a little rough, but I enjoyed this enough that it's worth it. Not only that, but I liked drawing him so much that now I want to draw MORE (all??) of them! But for now, here's my first attempt.
This is the original design (on the left), my rough sketch (on the right), and the finished design (below).
Hope you guys like it as much as I do!

Cruisin' For Crazy

I've been wanting to finalize my redesign of Crazy Boy since I posted the redesign of his nervous partner Tinklefish about...wow, two years ago! I finally had a reason to, so here he is in full-on crazy color!

So, what's the reason? I've recently signed a deal to have Breakfast Monkey toys made! And also Witchamazoo toys! Exciting, right?? So over the next few weeks, I'll be posting updated designs and turnarounds of my characters as I finish them up for toy production. 

WHILE YOU'RE WAITING, please take a few seconds to answer this short survey (only 5 questions) and tell us in the comments box how much you're looking forward to Breakfast Monkey toys! And please share this with everyone you know that's a BMonkey fan! I promise it isn't spam or a virus.