One that got away: Care Bears

Back in 2003, I did an audition for the Care Bears. I didn't wind up getting it and not sure why it didn't go past this initial sketch at this point. It was for a book project and you can see the open gap in the center that would go into the fold of the book spine. You can't have anything important get lost in spine of the book so you really have to design a complicated layout well. Each bear was to be doing something in the shot and the art direction would tell you what else was to be drawn.

Overall, I still like it. It was all to be done as vector art (like my work for Strawberry Shortcake) and I think I got this audition either before or during the early stages of my work on Strawberry as other potential future work either down the line or in-between. As I mentioned in a previous post, you try out for stuff and some things you get and some things you don't. I was probably relieved that I didn't as doing it all as vector art would be really time consuming! My Strawberry Shortcake art was extremely complicated vector art though I'm proud of all that stuff and how it turned out.

For you process junkies, the art was drawn on cheap copy paper and then I lightboxed it onto a clean sheet of copy paper by inking it all with a Micron pen to finalize the art. With licensed work, it had to all be there and "on model" first time out as license holders usually do not want to have to go back and forth with revisions and lose any time. If you can nail it the first time with minimal instructions, it's all good! American Greetings owned both properties at that time and if you got in with them they would just keep feeding you work, which is always nice!