Christmas Panda

Here's the clean-up and a quick color job of the Panda at Christmas.

I'm going to revise a little bit more and then color it for real in photoshop.

Squaremania Christmas Panda rough

If you have a facebook account, you'll have seen all sorts of people put up "christmas countdown clocks."  It seems rather unnecessary considering we all know when Christmas is, AND it's we still have two major holidays in the way (halloween counts, and columbus day...heh...actually i think we're not supposed to recognize that one anymore...so then there's thanksgiving).  But even as big as those holidays are (but not columbus day, that's a racist holiday or something...) Christmas looms even larger on the horizon.

Everybody say hello to Christmas...it'll be here before you know it...at least that's what the retailers would have us believe...

Christmas Stinks!

See, cause it's a skunk...

It seems a little old fashioned to stand on the corner ringing the bell...I remember seeing guys dressed as santa outside every supermarket or mall jingling and jangling.  But I can't recall seeing anyone in recent years...that also might be because it's a little old fashioned to step outside one's house and away from one's computer to buy Christmas presents.

 original color

I did a rough sketch and then cleaned it up (inked it) in Adobe Illustrator...and then decided to just throw some color on it.  It probably needs some revisions but I thought I'd put it up - the finished version (complete with photoshop color) will follow soon.

Christmas is coming!

How sad that we have to start thinking of Christmas already!  Gotta get a head start on the presents.  Gotta clear a space for the tree.  And so on.  But it does make for some cute squaremania pictures!

Here's one now (just a quick little illustration):

Christmas is coming, be afraid...

Frankie Stein sketches

I'm working on a new project - I've been neglecting the blog a bit, but only because I've been doing a lot of sketching lately, and not so much finished illustrations.

Here are a couple of illustrations involving little Frankie Stein.

I've pretty much got his character down, and need to work on the supporting cast of characters...and that should take a while as there are a lot of little characters...

Squaremania on more (mock up) products!

So the last couple days of my hiatus are over...and this is what I've been working on:

There are a bunch of things I created in Adobe Illustrator (such as tags, backpacks and pencils) and then cut, pasted, and cropped my illustrations into and onto them.  I also visited my niece and nephew last weekend and they were excited about pencil toppers (for some reason)...so I added a couple of those to my (mock up) merchandise.

Here's one more that's finished:

You can see more on my website - www.isaacmarzioli.com - I still need to work on getting a few more up and also on putting a variety of other types of merchandise up.

squaremania on products!

I figured that since it was back to school time I would work on this first:

I'm working on getting my characters licensed - I'm doing some mock ups to help potential clients and agents see how Squaremania looks on products.  I drew the pencil in Adobe Illustrator (i did a basic pencil outline  and then a series of color gradients...for the metal color at the bottom I created a small shape and flipped it so the gradient would create a pattern that went one direction and then the opposite direction) and then pasted in the characters and cropped them to the right size and look.  I also changed had to select each character individually and change it's opacity to multiply so it, in effect, erases the white boxes around them (that you would get from pasting a photoshop file into illustrator).

Those characters are isolated from this illustration that I mocked up on a backpack:

This one ends up looking a little more cartoony - but I didn't want to spend the time making the backpack looking realistic when you could get the point without spending all that extra time...