Let the Good Times Roll

So Matty and Seth had a great time with this Brit kid yesterday.
Check it out here.

windowpaintsplosion

The Cheat, get down! It's supposed to be a picture of the window!

Having a secret cat is a tricky business. You've got to be sly about carrying in cat food and litter, gotta know when maintenance men are coming into your apartment to fix something (ha! as if they'd fix anything on their own) and, if your apartment windows are at ground level, you've gotta disguise the cat sitting there. Because, obviously, cats want to sit in windows. And watch things. And make strange little guttural noises at birds.

So this paintjob was a clever way to hide the bright white cat that would otherwise be seen by every passing car in the guest parking lot, which is right outside. This pic was taken at night, so the top is actually just the clear glass, not black, and the bottom leftmost circle of the right pane is also clear... just the size of a kitty face.

Hilarious, actually.

Apparently, all the cheese at Tops is funny.

Crikey.

So this is the sign for the next trade show, with a "crocodile hunter" theme. I was given a pink post-it note with the text, and was told the theme... I was thinking about possibly a cartoony version of Steve Irwin, but thought that'd be a little tacky, seeing as he's um... kinda... dead :P I found out that Jackie from marketing would be dressing up in the famous khaki outfit for the show, so I got the go-ahead to make a cartoony version of her instead.

This is my idea sheet with sketches of how things could look:

Then I went ahead drawing out Jackie in croc-hunter garb:

Photoshop geekiness follows:
For this type of cartoon (like the TMNT Steve-o) I've pretty much got my method down now - I start with a pencil sketch, ink it over and scan it (1st version pictured), then clean it up in Photoshop and get rid of errant lines (2nd version). I add coloring beneath the linework, making separate layers for each article of clothing, skin and hair (3rd version). I then use adjustment layers (set to hue/saturation) for the shadows and highlights on each layer, drawing within the layer mask to control where the shadow/highlight will go. I like this adjustment layer method, because it leaves room for tweaking later on... after it inevitably looks different on the first printed proof.

The rest of the final sign/poster was done with Illustrator, popping a traced "jungle" photo in the background, then a couple of starbursts and a radial gradient for a vignette type effect.

I basically stole the style of the "crikey" text from TMNT Steve-o, but hey... maybe that's justification for drawing it at work in the first place? Works for me.

Neon + on + on + on

So my company goes to trade shows with big themes for their booth, and the next show they're having a "Vegas Wedding" theme. Don't ask me how a Vegas wedding and sterilization products fit together, because I don't know either... I just make the artwork.

So anyway, I thought it'd be cool to try to mimic the signs of Vegas wedding chapels, with their neon and multitudes of lightbulbs. I'm pretty proud of the neon effects, especially on the "world famous" words. Do broken lightbulbs and the dimmed-out "d" in "wedding" add a bit of cheesy realism? I like to think so.

Needless to say, this will end up being changed in some way, shape or form by the marketing peeps... but I like this version, so I'm posting it before I have to change it.

UPDATE: Needless to say, they wanted changes. They asked for the word "medical" to be in lower case, so I adjusted the sizing and redid all the lightbulbs.