Back in the beginning of 2011, I was asked to help out a bit with the pilot for a new Care Bears television series. The director, Jeff Gordon (no relation to the race care driver, but he can manipulate a mean pencil) was developing it at a studio called Moonscoop for broadcast on The Hub channel. Yep, those of you with The Hub know that it has already begun to air just this past June.
One of the things Jeff asked me to do was to design a squirrel family – a mama, papa and baby squirrel. I got the ball rolling with some developmental designs for all three and took them as far as I could go before I moved on to begin working on another project for Moonscoop. The squirrel family made it into the show, and even appear in the opening titles of The Care Bears.
I thought I would show you some of my drawings of the baby squirrel. As you can see, the young toothy one went through a transformation over the four images here. I’m sure he changed even more from this to the final because the show is done in CG (computer generated).
In case you are curious of how the squirrels turned out, you can see them in the opening title sequence of the show. Covered in turquoise fur, they only get seen from behind during the song, but make their presence known in some of the episodes. Perhaps another time I can show some other characters I drew during the development of the pilot.