Something slightly different. For a bit of practice with Corel Painter, I did a painting from a photo of Katy Perry, I was quite pleased with the results. It doesn't really fit in with my regular stuff, so I thought why not post it here.

Some more character roughs. This time jungle animals.

I've been really incredibly busy over the last few months, so I'll start posting some of the new character rough and working sketches that I've been generating. Here are a couple to get the ball rolling.

A recent You Tube vid that I posted on how to make your own comic book style speech bubbles.

I guess it's been a long time since I last posted anything here. I did a job recently for a client who wanted a logo in the style of a comic book sound effect.

I tried a few different ways of doing it but none of the shapes I came up with really looked quite right. So then inspiration hit and I came up with this really quick way of doing it with Illustrator's filters that still retained an organic look

Check out the video here:

Here's my latest You Tube vid on drawing a Cute Elf girls type face. Enjoy.

This assignment was a bit different. The client was TeldelNort Communications LLC based in Mexico. They required an illustration for their prepaid telephone card, featuring some stereotypical characters from Mexican sitcoms, such as India Maria. Not the kind of thing I get asked to do everyday and something I know precisely nothing about. Anyway here are some images they supplied me with to get the general feel together with my rough, final artwork and final card graphics, which altered my original background (Unfortunately, not for the better, in my opinion, Though I do kind of like what the designer did with the speech bubble).

Blue sky thinking is one of those hideous marketing terms that means just come up with loads of ideas no matter how crap or stupid they are, but you can apply the concept to cartooning as a way of getting out of a rut and generating some new designs.

A fun exercise is to take a photo of a famous actor or pop star or just anyone who has an interesting face and just base a character on them. Here are some I did this week. Can you work out who these are based on? As Stan Lee used to say, a "no-prize" goes to the person with the first correct answer. BTW The clue's in the file name.

I created this "Big Bad Wolf" character 4 years ago for a client who decided not to use it in the end, but I always liked it so I decided to colour it up and put it on You Tube. The design will also be made available as a T Shirt from my cafepress shop. Go to http://www.zengrenade.com/ and click on the shop link or go direct to http://www.cafepress.com/zengrenade

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This cute little fella is my take on a new underwater RV

Here's a quick preview of one of the projects that I'm currently working on . It's an animation for up and coming rap artist Mike Alexander's MySpace page.

Let's kick this blog off with a couple of videos showing the "inking" and colouring of a character that was done for Paintball Genie. And no I don't really do it that fast.