Adelia thumbnails...

I work at Nickelodeon - and while we do all (or most) of the regular cartoons in our building, the nick jr stuff is mostly taken care of elsewhere. And the headquarters for Nick Jr (programming like Blues Clues, Dora the Explorer and Olivia) is in New York, so we almost never see the people who work on them.

Why that matters is that all the big executives for Nick Jr are in New York, and if you want to pitch something to them, you have to go to them. What's quite nice is that the Vice President and the production manager came to our little studio in Burbank a couple of weeks ago and sat in a meeting room for an entire day taking our pitches....

It was great meeting them, and I showed them this character that I've been working on for the last couple of years named Adelia (you'll see her all over my blog and/or website - www.isaacmarzioli.com). They loved the character but probably won't use her because of how I designed her. I intentionally drew her without a mouth because she started off as an adelie penguin and that pointy nose was originally a simplified beak...somewhere in the design process, the character became more stylized. The beak became an upturned nose. My thought was always to have her as a character that has a narrator, and while she isn't a mute, she doesn't have to say anything to get her story told.

This is the original picture of Adelia


Concept art for the original Adelia Design

One thing you have to be able to do when you pitch a character or a show or whatever is be willing to adapt. While it's your job as a designer or illustrator (or, more broadly, a creator) to come up with the original concept - it's their job to hone it and refine it into something that can be watchable and hopefully successful. I'm trying to redesign Adelia with a mouth to get the VP's attention that maybe this character is still a viable option for them, but at the same time I'm hoping to show that I am willing to revise and that I can work with critique.

I expect nothing to come of this, of course, but it can't hurt to try. If things don't end up working out then I can always go back to my original design of Adelia.

I'm still trying a couple of different ways to incorporate a mouth with the character. Do I make the mouth a full part of her head shape? Or should it be more stylized and appear on the one side of her face (which I like more because it's smaller and cuter and stays out of the way of the rest of the head design). Anyhow - I'm still working at it...