I thought it would be cool to share the process I went through while working on a freelance job.
So this guy needed a cartoon character drawn to be the mascot for his business. He presented me this image as a starting point for what he needed.
I’m not sure if he drew it or had someone do it for him, but he recognized that it obviously wasn’t working. He was trying to convey a certain attitude (note the flipping of the bird) and apparently that is supposed to be a face palm he’s doing. I donno. Anyway it was kinda crappy and he needed someone to fix it.
When I made an offer to do this job for him I drew couple sketches to show him what it could potentially be.
I did two very differently shaped characters to give him some variety. One’s attitude is a little more serious, and it’s funny because he’s the littler one, and the bigger one looks a little bit more like a jokester.
The client immediately liked what I was doing and chose me to do this job. He decided he really liked the shape of the little one, so that was really easy.
I cleaned it up a bit and sent him 4 variations of the character. He wanted the character to look similar to the original one as far as what he was wearing. I thought he’d look cool in a hoodie so I threw that in for fun and he ended up really liking #2. He wanted to see what he would look like with a fade haircut.
I gave him a fade, but you couldn’t see it with his hoodie on. So, I took the hood off. He thought it was badass and said to go with that.
I inked and colored it in Illustrator because he needed it vector. I presented him with a few more options. He said he wanted to stick to red, black, white, and yellow, but after this he decided to add skin tone and blue jeans. So I threw those in and…
Done. I would go into super detail on how I did this, but it’s probably nothing you haven’t heard before, and I don’t think very many people will read this anyway.
