BLAST FROM THE PAST: Precious Girls Club Art

I was contacted and did a small interview a couple months ago with a fan who does content on YouTube and they wanted to know more about the work I did for Precious Girls Club around 2009. I thought it was an interesting prospect as I was prepping some art for my blog and had the above art ready to go. I was trying to find the exact year PGC was around and then found out about all the legal drama that surrounded it. I was never aware of it until last year!

I'm still quite happy with the final art and it was all done by hand! I don't know if I still have any of the originals around though.

I haven't heard anything about the interview I did or if it was posted anywhere, so I'm posting the question and answer here for it as it shows the "day in the life" of a working artist.

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What was it like working on Precious Girls Club? Have you worked with Precious Moments on other projects? What was the extent of your work on PGC, and what made it into any final releases?

This project is hard to talk about in that it was just another job that filled a hole in my schedule. I only did character art (no backgrounds or elements) and I don’t even know the names of the characters if they had any. They were some adult characters, but mostly preteen girls that I drew. I guess they were preteen as I didn’t get any info to begin with. I knew what Precious Moments was as a brand. I was brought on in an emergency to help finish a project and I had to match the look and feel of it. They showed you the stuff and asked if you can do it. I thought I could and I did it. The approvals were really easy and things can really move when they are in a hurry. This was the only Precious Moments related work I did.

I drew the character art on cheap copy paper, and when it was approved, I then inked the final art on vellum. I used vellum at the time as the ink glided over the paper and it gave it a smooth professional look where I didn’t have to do much cleanup after I scanned it into the computer. I inked a lot of Strawberry Shortcake on vellum (and on normal art paper as well).

I think the Precious Girls Club work came around shortly after I finished work on the 2009 Rebooted look for Strawberry Shortcake as this art was close to the ages of the PGC characters. I’m guessing though. The 2009 Reboot took the 2005 look I worked on and aged the characters up in an effort to keep the audience. A lot of brands were doing this at the time as they didn’t want the money spent on them to go somewhere else. They did the same with Dora the Explorer too. I was steeped in doing work on properties aimed at girls and it was soon after in 2009 that I spent the whole year drawing Power Rangers: Jungle Fury which spun me back to the male audience. You go where the work is and stay open to it.

 

PRECIOUS GIRLS CLUB line art! Or How I Spent My Weekend...

Here is how I spent this past weekend here in the studio. I got a call on late Friday afternoon to do some quick, single character line art illustrations for the Precious Moments licensing line. I had till Tuesday or Wednesday to get it done, but I banged it out and had it all done around Mid-Sunday afternoon. It was a fun and quick job for some great money. This was quite a nice change from being so immersed in the world of the Power Rangers: Jungle Fury art I've had been doing since Mid-February.

Now Precious Moments is mostly known for it's whimsical baby or young child illustrations and sculptures, which all have the tear drop eye look that is the signature to it's style. This project was for Precious Girls Club, which is a line where (I guess) they aged the kids up to about an 7-9 year old range. The bodies and clothing style has the Strawberry Shortcake feel to it, which as most people know I drew as well back in 2004 for the better part of the year.

Here is a small batch of the characters I did. I did ten of them in total. For a better look click to enlarge!