Lotzi is faded...

I drew this for Illustration Friday - this week the theme is 'faded'.  I was toying with the idea of a ghost...and then possibly dreams...but then my wife said that faded would be someone who drank too much...

That made more sense, so I went with it.  This is a character we're developing named Lotzi.  Let's say he's getting faded on too much rootbeer...

 He's a lightweight like me.  Two beers (rootbeer, remember?) and it's time to make best friends with the sidewalk in an alley somewhere.

One thing they've been doing in animation these days is steering the artists to use a cintiq to draw.  The best part is how easy it is to edit your drawings...one downside (and this is why I've been doing more drawings this way than by passing them through Illustrator like I usually do) is that drawing on the screen doesn't have the same feel as drawing on a piece of paper.  It's just a matter of getting used to (as sometimes there's a little bit of a delay...), so I just continue to work at it.

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...