Tricky Dick

Now that I have Netflix I watch a lot of documentaries.  It seems like, in most of them, they will mention something horrible that Richard Nixon did. In one documentary they showed a clip of him on stage with his wife, after winning the election and he was moving his head back and forth waving at the crowd while fluttering his long eyelashes. It was totally weird, like some kind of super villain trying to pretend to be kind and innocent. Needless to say, I was mesmerized by the fluttering of his long eyelashes. I always thought he looked and acted like a real life cartoon but in that moment he reminded me of a celebrity caricature in one of those old Warner Brothers cartoons.

Webmaster T logo

This is another Logo I did for the folks at ProInternet Television.  It's for their sister site WebmasterT.com . The color scheme for the final version was changed to red and grey for the website. I think I'm more partial to the pale green and orange though.

These are the concept sketches. The original suggestion was to put the main character, Webmaster T in a Loony Tunes style circle and have him throwing the yo-yo foward so that it is coming at the camera. I tried out several different versions of this but also threw in some of  my own ideas, and they ended up picking one of mine. This is one of those designs that could have gone in a number of different directions. I'm sure I had like eight more ideas in me, but these were the best.

ProInternet TV Logo

 This is a logo that I designed for the website/company ProInternet Television. It's now live on their website and it's also featured quite a bit in this video. This was a fun one to design. Below are some initial concept sketches. The client wanted something featuring a sort of retro TV design. They ended up liking the first one the best but they had also mentioned liking the combination of the TV and Computer in number 5. So I came up with the idea of adding a keyboard to the design and they were pleased.

New Years Resolution

Usually I don't make any New Year's resolutions, unless it's something kind of vague like, make more money with my art. And that's usually something I would be doing no matter what. This year, however,  I've decided to make a real resolution; I'm going to finish all the projects that I've had on the back burner for a while.  I'm going to start one at a time and finish them to completion within the first few months of this year. Then I'm going to start on the projects that I've been meaning to do for a long time and hopefully have those done or going on before 2012 is over. 

The first thing I'm going to do is finish inking and lettering Rudolph The Hideous Abomination.  I started working on and posting this comic like two years ago. Then I got pretty busy with freelance work so I wasn't able to work on it quite as much.  After a while, I got so sick of working my day job that I decided I couldn't do any art projects that weren't going to bring me money.  I was really hoping I could start making a living with my art real soon. So I started focusing on doing stock illustrations and designing T-shirts when I wasn't doing freelance work. So, I just didn't have the time to work on Rudolph anymore. 

2011 was a good year for freelance work but not so good the stock illustrations.  Around July my sales dropped drastically even though I had uploaded a number of new illustrations. So my money making plans didn't really work out. Because of this, I decided I could no longer put so much stock (no pun  intended) into doing stock illustration.  So, I decided to exploit every source I  could. This year I've started selling products on Zazzle.com, designed souvenir T-shirts to sell locally, entered contests and started a new webcomic, The Daily Doodle.  There's a lot of other things I'd like to start in the coming year, some of which I've had on my mind for a while but I just can't do anything new otherwise I'll feel guilty about the things I haven't finished.  So, I've decided not to be too concerned on whether or not these projects will be lucrative and finally put an end to that nagging guilt!

Surpanda

Several months back, I designed this mascot for Surpass Hosting.

 

I kept his color scheme pretty basic, keeping him black and white like a real panda and adding a blue tie to go with the site design.  The dark grey one on the right is the first iteration but I wasn't quite happy with it so I did one that was plain black with some lighter contour lines.  I prefer the black one better but I showed both versions to the client just to give them a choice.  They ultimately chose the dark grey one because they felt it matched better with the website.

These are some initial sketches that I did, just coming up with different designs.  They preferred the cuter more classic look of the ones on top.  So from there I did some more sketches working out the body shape and other details.

After we got the look of the bear down, I did some more sketches giving him various accessories. In the end we kept it pretty simple, just giving him a blue bow tie.