Strawberry Shortcake: Pencil to Final Inks!

Strawberry Shortcake character art I did during the 2009 New Look time period. From pencil art on cheap paper, sent in for approvals, then final inks done on good art paper (via my light table). Not digital, done all by hand at the time. I made small tweaks as I went to refine the line quality. Still have the original art. Enjoy!

 

It's not so much the art as the stories that are behind them...

My audition piece for Strawberry Shortcake back in 2004 when they rebooted her with a new look. All done in Adobe Illustrator. My first real work in that software, and it was a bear.

I did this piece TWICE. One night, when I was adding the final touches to it... my computer died. I was horror struck and wasn't able to scrape the hard drive hoping it was still there. I took the drive to a couple local places but to no avail. I had to get a new computer system all set up and then I had to go back and redo the whole thing all over again from scratch!

Soon after — as we didn't have USB flash drives yet — I would buy spindles of CDs and EVERY night I would burn a new CD with that day's work on it. By the end of the month, I had a stack of CD's sitting by the computer. Once you have a horror story of losing data, you then do all you can to not have it happen again! I've been abiding to the "back up rule of three" since that time!

In hindsight, it was probably better that it happened when it did as it increased my skills and speed in Illustrator, and it was much easier doing it the second time. I'm still happy with it.

You may look at it and think it's a nice piece of art. I look at it and just think back to that dark, brooding night as I was laying in bed and looking up at the ceiling wondering what I was going to do...

It's not so much the art as the stories that are behind them...

 

It's Strawberry Fields...For A Little While...

Oooooohhh! A blog post with a good title that works for it. I had the Beatles song going through my head as I was uploading up the pic. This past Thursday I found out that I was approved again (or re-approved?) to draw Strawberry Shortcake. I had to do a new audition for it since they changed the look for her in 2008 and they aged her a smidge more than the version I originally drew back in 2004-05. I guess to compete with the newer version of Dora the Explorer as they both now look like they could almost exist in the same universe. I like the newer face and head shape designs and she's just as colorful as she ever was. I did several pieces for an audition and there were little tweaks here and there, with only two major complete redraws. It takes a bit to get the female body language down and the ultimate feel of it again, but once you figure out how to do it, it's not hard. I've done so much male dominated work the past few years that you do lose something when you go back to a feminine one.

I'll post some of my sketches, and the changes that were made, since some like to see the process of how this all gets done.