Category — Cartooning

Click on the above image to enlarge my 2012 Fangirl of the Month Calendar artwork produced for panelsonpages.com. As I mentioned in my previous post, I was asked to create an image for Ms. September in the style of Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi.

Just a quick update tonight with a cartoon drawing I recently did of a Hula Dancer mascot for Ridley-Lowell, a technical training school of business located in New York and Connecticut. They have a program called Let Us Help You, and wanted to abbreviate it to LUHU. They thought that the abbreviation had a slightly island or Hawaiian sound to it, and was close to the term hula, so it was decided that a hula dancer would make an excellent mascot.

Thus my cartoon sketching commenced. After scanning through some reference images, I found a pose I liked and set out to craft the character. The pencil drawing quickly came together, with my original idea being that I would place her on a beach surface with some palm trees to create a sense of environment. Click on the image to the right to see the enlarged pencil sketch.

Since a number of people have asked me what my drawing process is like, I thought I might make a short post on what goes into making a digital drawing. In the example below you will see the first stage of my art which is crafting a rough gesture sketch. I almost always start this sketch on paper, and it is usually quite small.

The point of this is not to think about details or even shading, but to capture a quick sense of movement that will carry over into the final image. This is the gesture sketch for a tee shirt artwork I was asked to illustrate called “Renegade Runners.” The image they had in mind was not your typical runner, but someone muscular in line with Rambo and wearing a camo headband.

The Fantasy Greeting Card series I completed contained a total of 5 images. Shown here are the original cartoon drawings for the remaining 3 cards as well as the finished products in their full-color glory. Amongst these three cards are my least favorite, and most favorite in the series. Again, digital coloring was done in Photoshop.

Here is another in the series of fantasy themed greeting cards that I made years ago. When I first approached this project I knew there were some more traditional images that I wanted to hit on. The fireside Christmas Eve family gathering is a well known, if not somewhat overused, holiday image. I wanted to take that and give it a twist by inhabiting the scene with fantasy characters. But what types of characters should I use? There were a number of options, and some (like a family of Orcs) were easy to shoot down… but it still took a little while to decide.

Continuing with my “archives” posts, here is another image from a number of years ago. I met a gentleman who was trying to start his own greeting card company. His idea; to create a line of fantasy themed greeting cards for non-christian holiday worshipers. He was a practicing Pagan and wanted to create cards with more of a seasonal “Yule” theme. Since I have always enjoyed fantasy art I was excited to take up this challenge.