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!
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.
It was still fun to draw though! I love the simplicity of it!
Batman pencil sketch on cheap copy paper with an HB pencil lead! Based on the animated version of him from The Batman done in 2004-2008!
It's AMAZING how much the Powerpuff Girls construction sheets matched the FUN and CHARM of the original show!
Below are some of the standard model sheets for the original show! These are the "locked in" model sheets that are used to help the artists maintain consistency. These are part of the "Main Models" section of the model sheets and are usually in their own section labelled as "Group Poses" as they feature more than one character.
All of these pages and more are usually given to anyone, including me, who may be working on the license in some fashion.
A lot of these final model sheets also make their way to the official style guide where they may be redone to make final print-ready files that will be used for consumer products like t-shirts, posters, cups, toy packaging, books, etc, etc!
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 (as it's simple flat colors) but I prefer using Photoshop to drop some quick color in as this exercise was more to see if you could do a line art version and have it be on spec. It's from my working cross-platform on many projects. 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. Clip Studio has come a long way from its Manga Studio origins and more artists have shifted to it over the years. I wondered if the quality and technical ease would be the same and so I loaded the sketch template into Clip Paint to give it a shot.
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!
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.
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!
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...
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.
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.
