I like designing characters. After all, that’s basically what fills my sketchbooks. I’ll start to doodle a face, then soon enough a whole page will be full of variations of that first drawing. You’ve already seen the results of that with my previous posts of bear sketches and Frankenstein head sketches.
Last year I started to sketch an old dude in a deep sea suit. It was just some random guy, but he kinda looked like he needed some young charges. So the sketch grew to include the chunky kid and the little blonde girl, and on the page next to it were a few octopus designs. The sketchbook continued to be filled with mental musings on other topics, but my mind would often go back to that underwater trio.
The initial sketch that got the ball rolling.
Recently I decided to do something about it. Already well into another sketchbook, I created more sketches of octopi looking for that one that would go well with the kids. It was kind of like drawing a balloon with personality. A few more kids and fish were added to the mix. It started to look like a cohesive idea.
A whole mess of octopi that were drawn to find the one that would best go with the kids.
After deciding on a few poses for a group portrait, I transferred the characters to Bristol board and inked them individually (I’m a brush and bottle kinda guy, with the occasional Rapidograph and Micron pen stuck in there). Scan ’em, color ’em in Photoshop, composite them together – and there you have the Aqua Kids!
The final drawing of all the Aqua Kids & the professor.
In 2005 I was one of the first two production artists hired on to work on a brand new pre-school show for The Disney Channel called Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. After three seasons of being on the air, those of you with toddlers know exactly what I’m talking about. For the rest of you, the show is an intentionally slow paced educational program starring Mickey Mouse and the gang that primarily helps teach basic math to the little tykes. While the show is animated on the computer, fellas like me did some preproduction art in a more traditional method. My work for the actual show can be seen in the Animation section of my website.
Working on this show was a blast. For years I had doodled Mickey and his posse. In fact, when in college, I would often subliminally hide Mickey in my still life oil paintings until the teacher caught on. So to eventually get to draw Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Pluto, Minnie & Daisy for a living was an unexpected blessing. Not only were those guys in the show, but I also regularly got to draw Chip & Dale, Pete, Ludwig Von Drake, Clarabelle, and one of my favorite Disney side characters – Willie the Giant (from Mickey & the Beanstalk and Mickey’s Christmas Carol).
Much like the work I did for the Disney Channel’s My Friends Tigger & Pooh, my production art consisted of drawings of the gang done in ink, then colored in Photoshop. Now and then I have cause to draw the characters for friends and fans. When I do, it usually involves a nice sketchy pencil line, and some watercolor. I thought I’d share a few drawings from the past couple of years that were done for that purpose:
Mickey and the gang from “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse”
This pencil and paint piece above was actually done for a charity auction that I organized. I had called upon many of my professional cartoonist friends to donate a piece of their art, so I felt it was only fair to also step in with a piece. This ultimately went to my pal Bill Morrison, editor and art director for Bongo Comics. (I also bought one of his pieces!)
Mickey, Donald & Goofy doing their best on a birthday cake.
This was just a birthday card I did for a friend named (if you couldn’t tell) Patty.
Mickey, Donald and Goofy who were a bit overzealous with putting out the candles on this card for the occasion of my Uncle Ken’s 70th birthday.
My Uncle Ken Frye passed away earlier this year from cancer, so this card is a fun reminder of good times with him. A big chunk of the family gathered for his 69th birthday in 2007 and treated it like it was his 70th. He surprised us all and made it well past 71 for which we were thankful. This one was inked and watercolored.
And this last piece was something I actually did for work – unofficially. I organized a crew lunch at a local chili joint in Burbank known as Chili John’s. They’ve been serving the best beef, chicken and veggie chili since the 1940s around their lunch counter. Fire-breathin’, toe-curlin’ Mickey (you won’t see THAT as an action figure anytime soon) appeared on the flyer that went out to the crew announcing the lunch.
From time to time a project comes along that is just plain fun to work on. Back in 2007, this was such a project. I was approached to create an illustration of actor Fred Willard (Best In Show, Everybody Loves Raymond, Anchorman, WALL-E) for the charity group Actors and Others for Animals. Fred was going to be their guest of honor at their annual banquet held in November that year. The piece I created was used on their “save the date” cards, their invitations, and on the cover of the banquet program.
This “Save the Date!” card for the Fred Willard event features text designed by the art director I worked with who also had moved the frog up a bit revealing his floating foot.
The request for this job came right from Mary Willard, Fred’s wife, who is very involved in this animal charity. I had gotten to know the Willards a bit, and the previous year drew their personal ad that they took out in the program book that was honoring Dick Van Dyke (we’ll save that piece for another post some day). This time, when the committee was tossing around ideas for the cover, they asked Mary if she thought the fella who did her ad could do the program cover for Fred’s banquet.
Most jobs I get asked to do, the client really knows what they want, so I draw one pencil rough, make any adjustments, then go to the final. This time the client left it kind of open-ended. They wanted Fred with some animals, though weren’t sure how that should be.
Thumbnails: Often I’ll do them for myself, but this time they had to be a little more detailed because the client was going to have to pick and choose from among them. As you can see, none of the thumbnails as drawn were taken to the final stage, though #5 became the template (#4 was my favorite). The client picked elements from several. One thing that became clear – they only wanted animals that are relatively common house pets (though the committee chairwoman really liked the squirrel, so that stayed). They didn’t like the outstreched arms pointing towards Fred, but rather wanted the animals applauding him.
Thumbnail sketches drawn to figure out the layout of the image.
Tight Pencil: Once they figured out what they wanted from the thumbnail stage, I worked on a tight pencil drawing and then showed it to them again. Usually a client wants to make changes at this stage, too, but apparently this one hit all the right buttons and they said “go for it!”
This is the tight pencil drawing of Fred Willard drawn on tracing paper. I lightbox this onto Bristol when I ink, so the thin paper assists with that process.
Final Piece: There were two stages to the final piece. The first was inking the drawing, which I do with a nice Winsor-Newton brush and a bottle of black FW acrylic ink. Rapidograph pens are used for some of the small stuff, but the brush is primary. The client needed the piece to be flexible for multi-purpose use, so Fred (with the squirrel) was one layer, and all the other animals were other layers.
…and here’s the final piece composited and colored in Photoshop.
The second stage was with the computer. All the drawings were scanned, then composited in Photoshop. Speed was of the essence for this piece, so I took all my traditional airbrushing knowledge into the computer and came out with this final illustration.
They loved the piece, and even used it the next year for the event honoring Broadway legend Carol Channing. The animals appeared on the cover and interior of the program.
The 2007 program book cover featuring Fred Willard, and the 2008 cover with Carol Channing.
To add icing to the cake, I was invited to attend both banquets, too. It was fun to sit there seeing these actors roasted by their famous friends and sitting shoulder to shoulder with them myself. Folks like Dick Van Patten, Ed Asner, Loretta Swit, Jo Anne Worley, Henry Gibson, Norm MacDonald, Martin Mull, Tippi Hedren, Ted Lange, Lily Tomlin, Florence Henderson, Catherine O’Hara, Jack Riley, Gary Owens, Peter Marshall, Gary Collins, Doris Roberts, David Lander and so on. It was as if I had fallen into the television set of my youth.
So, there you have it. Perhaps a lengthy explanation of everything, but hopefully a fun insight into what took place to make Fred Willard look like the Best in Show!
Bears. Certainly ever since the days of Teddy Roosevelt when he refused to shoot a captive bear cub while on a hunting trip, (stuffed toy bears have since been called “teddy bears”), bears have held a fascination for cartoonists. Clifford K. Berryman famously represented that Roosevelt incident in one of his cartoons. I have my own fascination with them as an art subject, even to the point of once developing a newspaper comic strip about a bear – but that’s for another article at another time.
Cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman’s 1902 cartoon that famously ribbed Teddy Roosevelt’s bear incident.
When fictionalized, bears are often big, fluffy, huggable, loveable, silly old bears. There’s a certain warmth and comfort that can be achieved with a bear. They look like gentle giants in real life, so when drawing them, many artists tend to give them a sympathetic and friendly look. Yogi Bear was constantly working it to get the pic-a-nic basket. The Jim Henson Co. creation Bear in the Big Blue House was a big, soft, friendly bear that the pre-school set really fell in love with. Even the kung fu wielding Kung Fu Panda was big, soft and loveable despite the fact that he could reign down some mighty painful kung fu awesomeness.
This past week I set about to do a series of bear character studies. I took about eighteen pages of my sketchbook to draw bears of various shapes, sizes, and styles. The goal was to explore multiple ways of creating a bear and still retain it’s friendly loveable beariness. I was pleased with the results, and plan to try it some more in the future. It was clear that there is an inexhaustible amount of ways to imagining this creature as an appealing cartoon character design.
As some of you know, I worked on the entire two season run of The Disney Channel’s pre-school show My Friends Tigger & Pooh that continues to air. I’ve even posted four pieces I did for that series on my website that you can see here:
The art I created for that show was certainly more in line stylistically with that of a comic book. I’d pencil and ink my pages by hand, then scan and color them in Photoshop. This method was suited for speed since I had to crank out about 17-20 drawings per week.
I like sketching the characters from time to time, and still get asked to do so by children (and sometimes their parents). However, I like the more classic look of a colored pencil line with a dash of watercolor paint, not that unlike the original Disney Pooh cartoons done back in the 1960s.
The following pieces are a few Pooh sketches I’ve done for friends and family that have never seen the light of day other than by whom they were intended. Tigger on top of Pooh is fresh off the drafting table this week! Enjoy.
…and just as a little bonus, here’s the rough pencil sketch drawn first before getting to the final version.
