H.P.Lovable Watercolors

As I mentioned in the previous post I worked some watercolors up for the H.P.Lovable designs. I really like how most of them came out. I think some might actually be worth putting on a t-shirt if I can find a decent service. I'll be sure to post about it if I do but for now, here are the finals so far.

Apologies for the baby-ized English, I'll probably change this on the final versions, except for the Cthulhu quote (that one I like).

 

Cthulhu

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dweaming."

 

Mi-go

"Remember, that dawk world of fungoid gawdens an' windowwess cities isn't weawy terwible."

 

 

Deep One

"In that laiw of the Deep Ones we shaow dwell amidst wondewr an' glowry fowevewr."

 

 

Old One

"Radiates, vegetabews, monstwostities, staw-spawn-whateverw they had been, they werwe men!"

 

 

Ghoul

"Can you fancy a squatting of namewess dog-wike things in a chawchyawd teaching a smawl chiwd how to feed wike themsewves?"

 

H.P.Lovable

Saw some incredibly crazy cute drawings some time ago and thought, hey why not take some Mythos creatures and cute them up a bit. To be honest I didn't come up with the name, that was my lovely wife. I think once the series is done I'll throw the designs on some t-shirts if the designs are good enough.

The first one  was just a quick once over of the big guy (Cthulhu), a mi-go, and some tests for a Deep One. I always like drawing deep ones and didn't love any of the designs I came up with on the first pass. Per this I decided to fool around and refine it a bit.

I finally came up with one that is fairly close to the final design on the bottom left corner, but it looked a little too...I don't know, derpy I guess.



 I pushed the Cthulhu design a little bit and finalized the deep one. The mi-go seemed solid so I left it as is and tried for an old one and a ghoul. I don't love the ghoul but that's sort of a tough one to crack. I'm not sure why but I felt like the shapes are too irregular. The old one looked ok though.

Another group of refining the design. Cthulhu looks good here as does the deep one. The Ghoul is closer but not completely done but I did include a couple of penguins. If you have read the Mountains of Madness you'll know why :).



This last group was just meant to play with the designs using a more sketchy and heavy brush line. I really love throwing lots of black ink on a page and this was more just to have some fun than anything. I'll post my watercolor results next.

"Care To Compete" Logo Design Process

Hey all, it's been a while since my last post. Fear not, I am still drawing everyday, but I have not posted here as most of my projects are in flux at the moment. Also, there are a few I am keeping a bit close to the vest until completion.
In the meantime I would like to show you a little graphic design project I took on recently for a new golf charity business, Care To Compete. When I started, I was given this proposal to go off of:

This was an interesting design but I thought it could use a bit of work. My client gave me some latitude to play around as long as I maintained the essential parts. These being: two C's, a T as a golf t, and the earth. As you might imagine I had quite a lot of fun pushing vertexes around in illustrator. I wanted to provide a few options for review, some which maintained the original shape and others which I thought kept the essentials but pushed towards a softer and more elegant solution.

 My clients liked one of the new designs. This was the third from the bottom on the right, but requested a few revisions. These were fairly simple and I provided them with a some options to go with for the final review and changes.The results of the revisions are below.

The notes came back for the final alterations. The requests were: the shading on the globe on 9, the colors on 7, and the shading around the globe on 5 to be applied to the rest of the design. The results were 4 final design options with some minor differences for the client to choose from, shown below: 

They decided to go with #1 from the group, which to be honest was my favorite as well. 

This was a great project and it was tons of fun to do a little straight graphic design.  Sometimes I get so into working on illustration and formatting that I forget how enjoyable it is to jump in and do simple logo designing. I love working with clients to find a design we can both be happy with and the challenges that come with the process. In my next post I'll throw some illustrations up so you can see some of the drawing work I've done lately. Till then I hope you liked looking into the process for this one, see you next time!

Deep One Female

Hello again gentle viewer.  I have another in-progress piece for you to have a look at. I know it must seem as though I have painted quite a few of these horrid fish-men this year, but please note I come from a very fishy town in Massachusetts. Doing these abominable batrachian monsters often helps me get a feeling for the hometown I rarely get around Seattle. Hmm, I re-read that sentence and on retrospect that could seem like a negative. Trust me I have only love for my birthplace, but anyone from that lovely New England town should be able to admit it's got some fairly fishy overtones. Thanks to a longstanding longing for my town's beaches and a persistent request for art from a certain good chum of mine for use in his card game, I present the next in the fishmen paintings: 

She's not done but I figure I should be finished with her by the end of the week. Let me know if you have any suggestions for the background!

Humming Bird UI test

Hello again! 

I have had a humming bird game rattling around in my head coming on a few months now. You might recognize the idea from an earlier post: http://sketcheveryday.blogspot.com/2013/04/humming-bird-vector-character-concepts.html . I am still quite interested in developing it further so my task last week was to make a fairly simple and stripped down version of the game view-port. I started by drawing a page or so of flowers to obtain some reference and work out the mood. Rather than keep drawing for weeks on end I went ahead and just got down to some quick layout/design work done. This was the result:

First I used illustrator to sketch out a few vector flowers and some assets.  Once I had vector flowers as close as I wanted I imported them into PS to add some tones, I think it gave them a bit more of a soft, and happier feeling.   

When the tones were where I wanted them I brought in the other assets: a time clock, score toast/label, and life/energy bar.

Once everything was laid out I thought it needed a little something to give it a bit more depth so I threw in a bit of shadow. Overall I'm fairly pleased with where it is at the moment but that just means I now have to design menu screens, items, power-ups and a few level backgrounds.  For now, I like where it's going. See you next time!

Sketch Dump Day! Now with more goats!

Ok, so it's been a few weeks since my last post. Fear not, I am still getting at least a few sketches out each day and even a concept piece now and then.  After my last post here (Goats and Gardens) I found a hitherto unknown love for drawing goats, more specifically their exceptionally odd face structure. I am not sure why I like the lines on these animals faces as much as I do, but this has resulted in a sketch log for the past 1.5 weeks of almost exclusively goats. Today's post is a cross section of that log.

I've taken the pages, pared down the ones I was least pleased with, and condensed the remaining into three pages.  I think it gives a good overview of the week for me; a long somewhat obsessive struggle to understand how the strange animal's faces work.  What I need to do is go to the zoo and look at some living goats, maybe get a bit of life drawing in.  For now, let's just go with the sketches I have at the moment, shall we?

The crazy thing with these faces is I still have about 3 pages I haven't included. I often find when drawing something like this I should give myself an arbitrary limit, lest it eat up all my sketch time for the week. It's very hard from time to time not to return to familiar lines once you've drawn a face 20 or 30 times. If you don't stop and move onto the next project or sketch, you could easily fill a sketch book within a month. As for my current next project in the queue, this week I should have time enough to finish a painting for a friend as well as maybe post a few more sketches. Until then please enjoy the goats. As a side note, does anyone have any ideas for an icon set? I have become bored with my current graphic design self challenges and would like to to another icon set.  Hit me up with any fun or weird concepts that might make for a good group of icons. I'm thinking my next icons should be cutesy but we'll see what strikes my fancy.

Goats and Gardens

A good friend posted on his facebook feed about wanting to start a landscaping business using goats. I loved the idea and got a bug in my ear to make a little logo for it.  For some reason I have wanted to draw a goat for ages and this little project gave me a chance to practice. I'm not sure exactly why I've had this desire to sketch a goat for a while but it sure was fun doing a concept page to figure out which type of goat I liked the most.  In the end feel as though this turned out well, although now that I've finished this one I might do a few more later on for fun. For the time being however, this should work.