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.

Once I inked the cartoon character and began to place the required verbiage into the design, I felt that the illustration looked too busy. I pulled the character out from the background and brought her forward to make her more of a focal point for the design. However, I still wanted a background, so then I had the idea that it would be neat to show a person stranded on an island, and a Ridley-Lowell boat chugging in to rescue them. This visual tied in nicely with the Let Us Help You idea. After that, I set about to make the cartoon illustration vibrant and colorful. The entire process from start to finish took about one evening, and you can see the final result above.

I really like this type of cartoon work. I’ve spent a lot of time working on improving my line weights to give a character weight and substance, and think it really came through nicely with this piece. All of the final color illustration work was done in Adobe Illustrator so I would have a clean vector art for their printing purposes.