Woodcrest Elementary School Sharks

So, my old pal Principal Jon Cohen, who hired me a few years wback to create the school mascot & new logo for Red Bank Elementary School, is Principal at a new school, Woodcrest Elementary. And so he asked me again to design a new logo and mascot for his new school. This time the mascot is a shark. As I found out when I started sketching him out, it's super hard to create a friendly little kid version of the planet's most feared predator. Here are a few of my initial roughs that didn't quite make the cut:

It took a while until he was finally starting to look fun and kid-like. 

Then I also thought every good nautical cartoon character has a decent sailor hat, right?

So, in the final pencil sketches, I tried a few out on him.

The sailor hat was the winner! So I cleaned him up (no nostrils!):

Then added some color:

And then I designed a new Woodcrest logo, using elements requested by the client, like the squeezed text shape with the bite taken out of it and the bubble background. And here's the final version. Last I heard, everyone loves him, including the President of PTA! WHEW!

#meettheartist

This was my contribution to a social media project hashtagged #meettheartist. Granted, most of the artists that I saw participating were a lot younger or even art students. But I was inspired by a lot of the art that I came across and I'd been wanting to do a decent self-portrait for a while now. I was never really happy with the one that I did back in 2011. I think my work has gotten a lot more solid since then. I'll probably be saying the same thing about this one 6 years from now. 😆

So, here it is:

And here is the original line art, done with a flair pen cleaned up in photoshop: