FROM THE ARCHIVE: Blue's Clues - My audition sketches!

BLUE'S CLUES! Drawn on some left over "artsy" paper I had in my studio (feels like a parchment paper of some kind in my hand) and a purple col-erase pencil! 

These are 2003 audition pieces for Nick, though I didn't get it. I did these right after Steve left the show (Steve Burns, who was a fan favorite and left to go off to college in real life) and they just introduced a new actor to play his younger brother Joe. 

This license was a LOT of work, especially when you had to produce the full color art! Nick gave me a thick How-To booklet and CDs with the fabric patterns to lay in after you built everything in Adobe. 

In hindsight, I'm glad I didn't get it at the time as my Adobe skills weren't at the level this work required. Also, you needed to submit the final art with everything organized and labelled as they wanted it to be. It would have taken me longer to do and they needed someone with a bit more speed. 

It was still fun to draw though! I love the simplicity of it!

 

BLUE'S CLUES!

Here's some pieces from my original Blue's Clues audition for Nick I did years ago. These were done after the first guy who starred with Blue left the show and they had his replacement come on to take over. I think his name was Joe, but I can't remember now. The show did take a hit ratings wise with the new guy since everyone loved the original more. At any rate these sketches were pencilled out in purple colored pencil on cheap art pad paper and then approved by Nick after one round of changes I had to do for them. They then get scanned into the computer and started in Adobe Illustrator where everything is built and then it gets pasted into Adobe Photoshop where the individual textures are then dropped into the characters.

It's hard work but if you know the software it can be done rather quickly. I built up great speed working in Adobe Illustrator when I was deep into work for Strawberry Shortcake. The main reason that a lot of work has gone digital is that you lose the individual characteristics of an artist when he inks or creates a piece by hand. Corporations who have brands like Disney, Nick, and the WB need all the art to look like one person did it, when in reality 30 artists may have worked on it. The computer end of it all keeps the consistency which is very important in maintaining the style of a licensed property.

Working on the Blue's Clues stuff, I still have my "How To" book, which teaches the artist how to label their layers and generally how to create the characters in the computer. It makes it easier to change things when every artist labels his files and has all his layers set up like everyone else.