Cartoon drawing of a blue devil/demon I drew up for Monster Monday.
Monster Monday: Blue Beast
Cartooning
Cartooning and illustration art posts featuring the digital vector art cartoons of vector artist, cartoonist & illustrator George Coghill.
Monster Monday
I recently started up a group sketchblog, Monster Monday. As the title suggests, the idea is to create artwork of a new monster every Monday.
Monster Monday was inspired by other group sketchblogs such as Illustration Friday and Sugar Frosted Goodness, which I have participated in in the past. As opposed to a weekly generated theme, I wanted to work on something that I naturally loved to draw, and also have an ongoing theme. I know I get caught up in the day-to-day work and having to work on a new weekly theme while challenging, also resulted in my not participating on those sites.
I wanted to create something that had a regular theme of something that I already liked to draw. Monsters. Monsters by their nature inspire creativity since they don’t exist. You can make whatever you want. For me, it was about making the weekly project fun and as pressure-free as possible.
Monster Monday: Cartoon “Igor”-style Character Sketch
Another cartoon drawing for the Monster Monday group sketchblog. Further experiments with painting in Photoshop using the Wacom Intuos3 graphics tablet.
Monster Monday: Cartoon Ogre
Cartoon ogre creature for Monster Monday group sketchblog. I’ll be posting some further info on Monster Monday in a future post, but for now it’s a new blog I started up with a weekly theme of monster art to rally myself and other participating artists to get a personal piece of artwork created at least once a week and share.
Commander In Beef
A recent Obama & McCain humorous cartoon illustration I created for Time Out NY for the “Commander In Beef” article regarding what New York City chefs would prepare for the 2008 presidential candidates. The illustration was created for the dining section, and is currently being featured on the front page of the Time Out NY website’s dining section. The featured artwork is a spot illustration companion piece to the full page illustration I created for the print article:
‘Hairy Canary’ T-Shirt Illustration
I just finished up a t-shirt illustration – ‘The Hairy Canary‘ – for mail-order/catalog company What On Earth for their pub t-shirts line.
The basic premise of the t-shirt designs are as follows: the artist is given a choice of bar/pub names to choose from, and from there a design is worked up to go with the name. I believe all the bars & pubs are actual places, but these aren’t officially sanctioned or anything.
From the list I was given, the name ‘Hairy Canary’ just jumped out at me and I knew it was a theme that would spark a cool illustration.
What The @#$%&!
Ever wonder if there’s a word for that cartoon symbol expletive using the ampersand, pound sign (or octothorpe), dollar sign, percent sign, ‘at’ sign and exclamation mark? You see it all the time in printed comic books and cartoon strips.
Seems there is. Over at Typography.com, there’s an entry which discusses this unique cartoon curse “word”, claiming it to be called a ‘grawlix‘.
High-Contrast Line Art Illustration Style: Self-Inspiration
Sometimes (and probably most of the time) merely seeing how an effect is achieved will offer no clues as to what it’s like to create that effect for yourself. Copying or mimicking the effect can help, but those moments where it works within your own artwork should be explored the moment they happen.
When these chance moments appear, when you have that ‘a ha!’ moment, be sure to dig deeper. I’ll share with you a recent ‘eureka’ moment I had while working on a t-shirt illustration project for a client.
Monk/Friar With Beer Keg – Cartoon Mascot Illustration
I recently finished up this ‘Theology On Tap’ cartoon character mascot/logo project for a youth ministries client.
The client is a youth ministries minister, and his new program is focused on bringing discussions of theological matters into more casual settings to try and reach additional young people.
The artwork is intended to be used on various advertising and promotional materials, as well as a t-shirt design.
I thought it odd at first, but I suppose there’s nothing really wrong about talking about religious matters in a bar, right? And I suppose a minister knows the deal. My only concern was to create a great illustration for him and his project.
Anyways, read on for an in-depth overview of the process to create this cartoon character mascot/logo from start to finish, including unused sketches created along the way.