Yikes, this guy was difficult to complete! Do I always say that? As usual, about half-way through the process I contemplated just scrapping the project and starting on something new. Once again, I’m glad I stuck to the drawing.
This one is a little different since I actually started with a “real” pencil sketch. Now that you all see how my hand-drawn characters look, I think you can understand why I ultimately turned to the digital medium. It’s my dirty little secret–I can’t actually “draw,” at least not in the traditional way. Trying to translate the very slick-looking images that are floating in my head just never seems to work when I’m using a regular old pen and paper. It’s not exactly a bad drawing (with a little color and what-not, it could be down-right cute) but that’s just not the look I wanted for this piece.
Anyway, with a bit of tinkering on Illustrator, I got a slightly uglier version of the above sketch. Seriously–it looked like a strange brown alien baby had landed on my computer. It was very disconcerting. Last night I was so frustrated that my poor husband had to “talk me down” from the computer so I could actually get some sleep. Yet another example of why working on something late into the night is probably not a good idea for me.
Apologies for the lack of screen shot here… Frankly, at the time I didn’t think it would be worth it since I thought I’d be pressing “DELETE” and ditching the whole project.
But all is not lost! After spending most of the morning at a job interview (I think it went well! Wish me luck!) I came back home feeling very refreshed and confident. I looked at some more pictures of real-life beavers, plus got some inspiration from some of my favorite artists (I really love John W. Golden and Sick on Sin). Part of me used to be reluctant to look at how other artists have rendered a subject, but I figure that it’s pretty much impossible for me to copy these guys because, hey, they rock so hard. Plus I’m sort of physically unable to do anything other than my own style, so plagiarism is sort of impossible.
Anyway, here’s how I finally cute-ified the beaver, which is not necessarily the warmest and fuzziest creature in the forest…
Now to work on a nice background for this fella…
Filed under: Adobe Illustrator, characters, process | Tagged: beaver, woodland critter
