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...
