character design – when art is fine

20230213

Last week I spent a couple of hours learning about Affinity Designer, trying and playing with it. I actively watched ~1h of an Udemy course on Design Thinking. I actively engaged with other people’s art for a couple of hours, I did one larger illustration, which included a little bit of experimentation, I experimented with drawing typography, and I did a couple of dozen illustration and character sketches, of which I cleaned up the following ten. …

And still, when I got up this morning, I thought, “I didn’t do anything last week. I have to push harder this week. I’m not doing anything worthwhile. I’m not learning.”

20230116

You can’t go wrong with drawing Zombies.
You can’t go wrong with drawing Pirates.
You can’t go wrong with drawing Snails. Right?
If you think about it, Snails are actually well-fitting animals for both Zombies and Pirates. Slow, Omnivores, plundering your mum’s garden… .

20230113

After I wrote the fight scene, I decided to do character drawings based on it.

I’m also pretty set on using that sketchbook background for my drawings at the moment, but I’m still experimenting with the look of the drawings. For these, I used Kyle’s Tech Micron 0.5-Brush, but I don’t think that’s the one I’ll stick with.

This also concludes the second week of “back to drawing.” I’m still figuring out how much I can work and at what kind of schedule day to day.

20230110

w39 2021

Recently a very nice lady approached me via social media and asked whether or not she could commission me for artwork. She had come across my Instagram and followed the link to my Spreadshirt-shop, but didn’t find a motif that she felt was appropriate for her 3year old grandson. We got into talking about her grandson, how he likes dogs and scared-loves big heavy construction machinery. Then we struck a deal and she commissioned me to do this motif.
I just added it to the spreadshirt-shop this morning. If you’re looking for a shirt gift for your grandchild, maybe this one works for you as well. And if it doesn’t, feel free to reach out.

w35 2021 – Gisune the Tiefling

On Monday I challenged myself with another random drawing exercise.
I created a list of various attributes, gave each item a number, then went online to rolladie.net to randomly select two items out of the list, and ended up with the following two attributes: Brawl Stars | Tiefling
Brawl Stars refers to the hit mobile game “Brawl Stars” from Supercell, Tiefling refers to a race from Dungeons & Dragons.

I decided to draw a Tiefling character that stylistically, complexity-wise might fit into the game Brawl Stars.
I went to donjon.bin.sh to create a set of random Tiefling character descriptions, picked one from which I took the name and some other features, and then got drawing.

On Monday evening I saw someone post title card sketches on Instagram, which then led me to do this drawing on Tuesday.

Dino Trocknungen – construction

Lets’s close the first month of freelance with a set of illustrations I did for Dino Trocknungen GmbH and in collaboration with Kassel based design agency Lockruf.
Dino Trocknungen was going to brand a set of construction waste containers and wanted to utilize their mascot for this purpose. They were acquiring a new truck as well, which was potentially gonna get a print on the door(s). So they were looking for poses/actions of their mascot which would suit the theme but also needed to fit onto the containers.
With this info and some temporary design layouts from Andreas Bollerhey (of lockruf) I had a lot of fun just sketching proposals.
The client selected his favorite sketches, Andreas gave me some additional info on how he’d like the files to be set up so he could make adjustments for the final layouts, and off I went to create the illustrations.

design layouts with illo adjustments by Andreas Bollerhey of lockruf.com

Beer brewer mascot

I had the opportunity to design a mascot for a private beer brewer and illustrate one small vignette that can be used on a label, sticker, card, etc..
Initially, the goal was to cartoonify the client into the mascot, and I briefly explored some options based on some of the cartoons/comics the client grew up with. The last option I threw in because in our conversation I had learned that there’s a family crest that features a bull and an axe.
He liked the bull and so that’s the option we went with for the final illustration.