Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Mr. Zits

Well TV's Kyle, This Zits For you!
A couple of years back I pitched a cartoon storyboard to Frederator called Blackjack & Zits, which was considered funny enough but it was also considered an idea that had been done before. I mean it's basically about a big dumb dog who likes to destroy things and a messed up cat with a broken back and an ill-fitting glass eye.
Approaching the design of the character I started with a series of sketches that culminated with this....
As you can see, the characters were originally called Blackjack & Scratch.
The Scratch name kind of implies that the cat character was always close to meeting his demise. However, I went with the Zits name because it seemed to roll off the tongue better.
As you can see with the sketch above, the character was crudely designed on purpose.
To help get that effect, I drew this sketch with a ballpoint black pen.
The whole idea was to make this character look like a mack truck hit him a couple of hundred times.
Unfortunately, when I went to do a cleaned up drawing of the character, I did a blue ruff and came up with this....

It's not a bad drawing, but it's my habit to want to take the ruffness out of a sketch and slicken up the line. I eventually ditched the idea of doing any clean ups of the character and created all model and storyboard sketches with an Ebony pencil.

Heavies


Well here's a couple of sketches of some heavy set characters. These drawings were done fairly fast and loose with a polychromos blue pencil. You might see some of my influences in the drawings although I didn't intentionally try to ape a particular style. A lot of times when developing a character, I may focus on body shape and body attitude over the basic head features, but in this case, I focused more on the facial expressions in both sets.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Another sketch...


Some of you have been asking me to add more drawings to the blog. So here's a new one of a short angry guy. Actually, it's not that new...it's been sitting by my scanner for weeks.
I'm finally getting around to scanning this stuff and putting it up on the blog.
Look for more over the next couple of days.
This drawing is inspired by the funny little guy from Pink Panther cartoons and Phil from Hercules. Like I said, it's inspired... so in short... it's been Mitchellized.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

I'm Back....

Just in time for Flu season.....
Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, new and improved for 2008.

You'll be noticing some major changes to the blog over the next couple of days, including a brand new look.