Happy Adelia

This is one of the first new cleaned up versions of Adelia - with her new look (it's really just a revision of where her eyes and nose sit on her face).

IF: Launch - Angry Birds: Adelia the Adelie Penguin edition...

I drew this over the weekend for Illustration Friday's Launch...and I liked it enough to finish it up.  I cleaned it up in Illustrator and colored it in Photoshop.

I've been addicted to Angry Birds since Thanksgiving - I'm currently trying to get 3 stars on all the levels (I have one left!)...and then I'll move on to Angry Birds Rio (my wife is already half way through).

When I thought of Launch I immediately thought of the slingshot launching birds at little green pigs.  I didn't want to just draw the game, but have one of my characters get in on the action.  I created Adelia back in 2006 and I recently brought her back (which just means I started drawing her again)...so little Adelia the Adelie Penguin is getting in on the pig popping action.  I like to think that Adelia would be one of the little blue birds that work best on breaking the ice blocks.

Adelia's back!

I'm happy to announce the relaunching of Adelia! 

Adelia was one of the first character designs I did after college (back when I was only drawing to fulfill the requirements of the homework assignment).  This is what she originally looked like:

This was from 2006 - and at the time I was doing a series of realistic watercolor penguin illustrations.  I titled it Pinguino because I wanted a cuter word for Penguin (this is Italian), and her name came from accidently titling the Adelie penguin with an 'a' instead of an 'e' at the end...it sounded like the perfect name for a little girl penguin.  And the more I drew her, the more cartoony she became - and the toes (which look a little creepy on a penguin) changed to basic webbed feet and her nose became more upturned.

I'm currently going through my old images and seeing which ones I can salvage.  It turns out that most of them are off model from the way I want her to look now - so I'm using a lot of them as templates for pose, but nothing more.

Also, last month I was doing a bit of research for a project I was working on for Nick Jr, and found a small rule about drawing a child's head.  To make a character look younger or sweeter or cuter, just drop their eyes below the middle point of the head.  All of my previous Adelia illustrations had her eyes sitting on the middle line and sometimes above!  So I had to rectify that, and quickly!

IF: Launching a penguin

I heard so much about this game called Angry Birds last year.  Conan was talking about it on the Tonight Show (during the 15 minutes he ran that show), Adam Carolla's boy wanted to actually be an angry bird for halloween.  Some time around Thanksgiving of 2010 I decided to download it onto my phone and I've been addicted ever since.

Now what does any of that have to do with Illustration Friday's theme this week of 'Launch?'  Well,  I immediately thought of a bird being launched out of a slingshot.

But I wanted to draw my character Adelia.

Adelia is a penguin character I drew several years ago when I was trying to break into children's books...I ended up giving up on the idea in favor of other projects...but I dusted her off this week and decided to update her a bit and give her another go - but this time as a licensed character.  It's tough to get something like that off the ground, but I think she has a lot of potential.

Adelia Cleanup (illustrator lines)

Stylized version of those same two characters...

I did a version that was very cutesy (in the previous post) and this version was trying for that same thing with a simple design and Japanese Kawaii aesthetic.  This drawing I did in Adobe Illustrator and uploaded to the microstock illustration sites.

To potentially make them more attractive to microstock buyers, I added the thought balloons so they could add their own caption or use them for whatever message they wanted.   They were accepted on Shutterstock a couple of days ago and have already sold 4 times, and are still queuing up on the other sites...so we'll see!

New project...

I'm working on a new project that's due tomorrow - these are the two main characters:

Microstock report for May 2011

So this was another month where we didn't pay any attention to our microstock sites - but still made a few dollars:

Shutterstock accounted for 50% of the total stock sales revenue.  That one seems to be pretty steady while all of the other sites are slowing down...still selling, but slowing down.

I'd like to spend some time creating new illustrations, so hopefully I'll be able to get to that this week (while I have some vacation time)....but I have some other projects to work on (we always seem to have something), so we'll see if anything gets posted.