POWERPUFF GIRLS - Adobe Illustrator vs Clip Paint Studio Pro

 

Here's my art I did of Bubbles using the sketch provided in the PPG style guide. I did it first in Adobe as that's where I'm most familiar, and its what they required you to do it in. Back in the early 2000s, there were no other programs available outside of Adobe, except for maybe Corel Draw. 

Instead of following the How-To exactly I deviated from it in spots as it was geared to doing a final color version. Doing the kind of work I've done I knew I would need to have a separate line art version as well. So I focused on doing that as a colored version is fairly quick and easy to create. 

First thing I noted as I was doing this is that this instructional How-To was made for designers who may not be artists who can actually draw. They originally gave you a CD with the pre-made files for the ellipses for the head, arms, mouths, and Bubble's ponytail (as you can see on one of the sheets below). It felt a bit like Colorforms and how you could mix and match parts to make a quick Powerpuff Girl. I'm assuming all the vector art in the style guide was all layered anyway so if you had to switch out an arm or mouth expression, you could do it fairly easy. 

I followed the steps and started working under the template (as they suggested) and not above it. That was a change for me as I always work over my roughs. But I tried it their way. I played with the opacity of the rough sketch to get it where I wanted it (around 30%).  

I made the two ellipses as they suggested for the head, though I wondered why they worked this way. 

The next thing that was weird was that they told you to keep the two ellipses exactly at their specs and to adjust and resize the pencil rough sketch to fit the ellipses. I then realized why they wanted it done that way because when you did the rest of the body, the thicknesses of the stroke lines would all match up to what they should be as per the guide. Basically, once you had that done you could enlarge the figure up and use some math to keep the stroke line thicknesses consistent when you did future stuff.

I laughed to myself as I was doing this as my first Powerpuff Girls work, in fact, my audition pieces were all done by hand with my green templates and French curves! Even artist Phil Moy, who did the Powerpuff Girls comic book for DC Comics at the time, did the original art all by hand as well. Mostly so he had the original art to sell later on. Great minds think alike! Mostly, I'd like to think there was a higher level of skill we applied to it.

I inked Bubbles in Adobe Illustrator with the pen tool and saved it as both an .ai file and as a .eps file, and the I opened it in Adobe Photoshop to color it. Yes, I could have colored it in Illustrator if I had to but I prefer using Photoshop to drop some quick color in. I love a simple color palette and the PPG characters certainly had that!

Once I was finished, I wondered if you could do it in the newer software that wasn't around originally. I decided to take the same rough sketch of Bubbles and do it all over again in Clip Paint Studio Pro as a lot of artists use that now.

I created a new Bubbles using the figure rulers and figure tools (mostly the Continuous Curve with Cubic Bezier). Yes, I could have probably done it using the Bezier tool as well. Once it was finished, I then colored it in Clip Paint as well to keep it all together. One layer for the line art and one for the color.

Overall, I think they are really close. The only slight difference you can see is on her ponytail. It's a bit sharper in Illustrator and was easier to do (possibly because I know the program so well), so I would toss the edge to Adobe Illustrator in that respect.

I had toyed with the idea of trying it a third time using Krita. I started to play with the ellipses and stopped as there is a lot of Krita that I don't know how to use yet. How many of these programs can you know and keep in your head??? Seriously!

Hope you like my effort on these! I posted my scanned How-To pages here for you to try if you want! 

 

POWERPUFF GIRLS - A peek inside the original style guide

I have binders and binders of model sheets and style guides that I need for my work. My total number of binders for Scooby-Doo is around 6 or 7 of them. I started with just one and it slowly grew over the early years. I would make a separate binder for the movie-related projects I did like Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders and Chill Out, Scooby-Doo!

These pages below are a peek of the original Powerpuff Girls style guide that I have and the style guide itself is what they give to companies to use when creating new consumer products. It's mostly for designers who may not have art skills to actually draw the stuff and they can use the artwork provided in the guide to do their work. There is a CD disc that comes with this and contains all the art including characters, icon, logos, design elements, etc.

This is from 2000 (or so) and they physically mailed me beautifully printed copies to use as reference. I took the sheets and slipped them in plastic sleeves to protect them and put then put them in a binder. Normally, I will keep licenses separate, or in this case, combine them into one big binder so that all the Cartoon Network stuff is together as I worked on many. Nowadays, they do digital downloads, but back in the day, they would mail you printouts and/or give you a copy of the CD with everything on it. I don't have the disc for the Powerpuff Girls though.

When I first was contacted about doing the Powerpuff Girls (in early 2000) I didn't know what it was. At the time I didn't have Cartoon Network on my cable service so they kindly sent me all this and a VHS videotape with a lot of episodes on them to watch so I could get the feel of it. The first two pages of my guide also has show information and an episode guide. Warner Bros always gave you plenty to make sure you were in the loop.

You will normally also get the model sheets, construction sheets, turnarounds, etc as well. Sometimes not. There are times when I've just received the final style guide as that is what they want you to match in terms of look and color. Things can change or evolve if you just worked with just the animation model sheets, and a style guide basically locks everything down.  

The next two pages show the step-by-step tutorial for drawing them in Adobe Illustrator. More on this tomorrow.

This page is the turnaround for Blossom and some action poses that designers can use for products.

The most important information that I needed, and why they sent me this, was to use the exact colors when doing the final artwork. Every license has a specific palette of colors, and Warner Brothers (Cartoon Network) has always had the best print accurate colors. I'm looking at you, Disney...

There was more to this guide and the next pages were of the bad guys and their color schemes, but I wanted to just give you a peek!

What's next? I will post the How-To here and my results from doing the provided sketch of Bubbles using their step-by-step!  

 

POWERPUFF GIRLS - Drawing Bubbles in Clip Paint Pro

 

 

Engaged in a creative endeavor this afternoon after finding the Powerpuff Girls "How-To" in my archive! 

I think it was part of the style guide from 2000 to help designers if they needed to do new art or make an adjustment to a piece of style guide art for some project. They wanted you to do it in Adobe Illustrator (which I did the other day) and they provided a step-by-step for how to do it, but I also wanted to see if you can do it in Clip Paint Pro. You can. 

I worked on top of the sketch they provided and used it as a guide. 

More on it tomorrow...

The Franklin Mint Renaissance 2001 'Distinguished Artist' award

I was going through my archives (while working on updating my resume trying to nail down months and years) and I found The Franklin Mint Renaissance 2001 'Distinguished Artist" award in a filing cabinet.

It's a solid 3-inch round medallion, 1/4-inch thick, and weighs about 2 pounds in my hand. I got a nice letter that still sits with it. I was in the Renaissance art show at the Mint right before things really started shutting down. I have no idea what art I did was in the show. 

I did conceptual product design art for them for a wide variety of collectible products. I had done all my work traditionally, as there were only a few who were doing stuff digitally. I think there were only two guys who did everything completely digitally in there at that time. Everyone else was mostly using traditional art mediums. 

I was there from June 1997 to September 1999. I started as a freelancer, then several months later was invited into the in-house art department where I had a cubicle. They let me go (with a bunch of other creatives in late '99), and I was then doing freelance for them in 2000 to 2001. What happened then is what just happened just recently with Disney getting rid of the in-house conceptual design department for Marvel Studios. They gutted the department and are just bringing people back on a contract basis per-film. 

Things were slowly changing there at the Mint in the fall 1999, you could feel a shift in the air there.

Luckily, there was a bright spot! 

I had, literally, just done my Scooby-Doo audition around that time... and it changed everything...  

Talk about perfect timing! It was an absolute game-changer for me! The last three months of 1999 were the start of non-stop Scooby-Doo projects for me that led straight through into Summer of 2001!

I still have fond memories of The Franklin Mint! 

I would also get some freelance work a couple years later when one of the Mint's art directors had started working for The Bradford Exchange!

Some new photos of the award are below and I added it to my awards list on my LinkedIn profile.

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.

 

Working with Contractors and Handymen...

Met this guy named Bob the Builder. You might have heard of him. He was popular. He told me his catchphrase was "Can we fix it?" and all of a sudden his construction vehicles all yelled "Yes, we can!" together. Wasn't expecting that! Seemed like a nice guy. He even offered me tea. We talked, and it went well, but we didn't wind up working together.

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Six years later, an emergency job appears and I meet a Hispanic handyman named Manny Garcia. He is known as Handy Manny. You might have heard of him as well. The word on the street was that he was popular, too. They called him "The Best Repairman in the County!" 

 

He carries a toolbox, and believe or not, his tools are alive! He talks to them as well! No kidding! I thought that guy Bob was weird, my tools don't talk to me, but I went with it. Manny and I talked and he said he needed some help. I pitched some samples of what I could do for him and he liked them! We worked together for a short time and I did a LOT of stuff for him. He thanked me and paid me promptly too! 

 

Haven't heard from him in a long time. It might be time for a comeback!

 

Below is a small selection of art that I did for Handy Manny!

 

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For you process junkies out there:

 
Bob the Builder audition art was done and inked on paper by hand in early 2001.

Handy Manny art was ALL done digitally in Adobe Illustrator with the pen tool in October 2007. Took a bit to get into a good workflow, but I soon became a Jedi Master with the pen tool. Some of my BEST work I've ever done with a super strict tight deadline!  

FROM THE SKETCHBOOKS: Titanic sketches

From one from my sketchbooks circa 1997/98. Almost 30 years since I did this portrait drawing of Leo from Titanic. I was blown away by the film at the time and just started sketching one day for fun/practice. Once it started to come together, I just stayed with it till I was done. This type of work got better, and shortly after, it would get me regular freelance work at The Franklin Mint, and in mid/late 1998, I was invited into the art department where I had a little cubicle. My own little open office amongst the creative folk. Good memories! 

I used to use a bunch of soft pencil leads (HB, 2B, 3B, 4B) at that time but I've changed my process a LOT since then. I use mostly HB and harder (lighter) pencil leads due to working in licensing art. Keeping it clean and easy to erase is key.

I still have this drawing, although I did cut it out of the sketchbook it was in. Sketchbooks can build up fast and take up space, so I scanned the drawings I liked and then cut and saved the physical pages I really wanted to keep. This made the cut. I still like it. It really pops off the page holding the original in my hands.

It also set my preference as to why I don't like to draw in bound sketchbooks anymore. You do something better than average and it sets the bar higher where I felt I was competing with this when I did every other sketch. Since 2000, all my sketches have all been done on separate pieces of paper and I just kept the ones I liked in a box. I can go through a LOT of paper trying to work something out, and since I work mostly on cheap copy paper, the waste basket next to my drawing table is usually always filled.

Below is another Titanic sketch I did that I cut out of a sketchbook. Drawn around the same time and all done in pencil. It's another one I hooked into and stayed with till I thought it was done.

 

FROM THE ARCHIVE: My SESAME STREET Storybook Audition

Here are some samples from my archive that I originally did for Sesame Workshop featuring some of the characters from Sesame Street! Done back in or around 2014. 

I did other samples for them, but these were unique in that they were done to show them I could do storybook art as well. I had already done many storybooks by this time but they wanted to see how well I would interpret the art direction they gave me with their characters and not someone else's characters. I agreed with this and it was not an issue. It was also not a paid audition test, but the upside had way more positives than negatives. 

Two reasons why they wanted me to do this: 

1) To reassure them I knew how to draw and layout art for a storybook while working within the given size specs and be able to leave enough room for the manuscript text (very important!).

2) To draw the characters in original poses without relying on style guide art as a crutch. 

There is a different skill and language to doing storybooks and it depends on what age demo they are being produced for as well.

They wanted three samples total, and they just wanted to see rough versions for them. They gave me art direction for two of them and the third I could do whatever I wanted for fun. When I submitted them back to them I put the art direction on the sample as well. That way as my samples made the rounds internally it was all there and self-contained on the main two. I marked the areas for where the manuscript text would go, but it's fairly easy to see without it. It's an art to build and frame areas where the story text will go on any given page and that's part of the fun of designing a storybook. There's so many ways to do it! 

On my samples, I added some gray tone to make them pop a bit more off the page and give some separation. Normally, if you were doing an actual book, you wouldn't have time for it, but you always have to go a bit further on the audition pieces to impress the powers that be. 

My third piece was done for fun and it featured the Twiddlebugs that lived in the windowsill garden outside Ernie's window. I used to love when they would appear on the show when I was a kid as they collected odds and ends to make their home and car. I also thought they were unique, and they weren't in the original reference they gave me, so I thought it would show some extra effort on my part. 

In the end, I was approved and added to the list of artists that were available to work on Sesame Street material. I never did get any actual work though as they had two other artists who had been doing the work for quite some time and they always got first dibs on any new projects. If they turned something down or couldn't fit it in, I would then possibly get it. That was fine as you never know when the call or email will come.

I inquired again a couple years ago to see if the people I knew were still there and if there was anything new going on. They were still there and I was told I was still on the list but that they weren't producing much (if any) new art due to budget cuts (among other funding issues). Turns out they were mostly repurposing the vast archive of style guides and older work for any new projects they did. They were also reprinting older classic material for a new audience. One that has never been out of print since 1971 is the classic Little Golden Book The Monster at the End of This Book starring Grover!

Hope you enjoyed this fun post as I find some more from my vast archives! 

 

 

REPOST: Drawing Shaggy video!

Fun video I made of myself drawing Shaggy from many years ago. Still entertaining as it's done by hand... on paper no less! Only 15 minutes for you short attention people! I worked fast in real time just for you!

Click the link! https://vimeo.com/11248154