Where do cartoon ideas come from ?

I'm putting together the latest cartoon strip for a regular corporate client I have. It often takes a while to get the ideas flowing for this job and then about seven appear at once. So at the moment I'm sat here at the ideas table sipping strong tea, doodling and waiting for the first bolt of inspiration to strike (or the kids to come home - whatever happens first).

Anyway for interest, here are a couple of recent cartoon strips.

Yes I know they're the size of a pea. There are 2 solutions to this ... either
i) sit really close to your monitor and squint and imagine what they are about
or
ii) click on the cartoon to see a bigger version

Enjoy!

The Grass is always greener ...

I recently completed some images for a landscaping company in Toronto for use as business cards, advertisements and gift certificates. It featured a cartoon version of the company owner as a basis of the company logo - I've done a number of jobs like this and they're always fun.
Now if only my garden could look as swish as that - at the moment my lawn looks like the set of Little House on the Prairie...

10 baby board books sitting on a wall - well at the printers anyway

I recently completed work on a series of 10 tiny children's board books all about transport for Make Believe Ideas.
This project was like a great big game of Pictionary. I had to draw something like 50 pictures of all sorts of different cars, bikes, trucks, planes, diggers, trains and capture their essence on the page so they were instantly recognisable.

Additionally, I tested out a new drawing style that I've been playing with for a while and was pretty pleased with the results.

So here are some excerpts to whet your appetite! Another fun job!

A new recruit !

Hoorah! We've just had a baby boy !

He's called Finn and as the card on the left says when he's not sleeping and feeding he seems to enjoy parping and testing out how loud his voice can go.

This card was created with my 3 year old daughter's help. She more or less made up the rhyme - she seems to like doing this. Over Christmas she managed to embarass me on a number of occasions in public by singing Jingle bells with her own words ... it went "Jingle Bells, Botty smells".


Daddy the red faced reindeer!

The Client's Rough

No no no! I don't mean that the Client is as rough as a badger's bot. Au contraire ... no no and thrice no! Clients are always extremely nice and lovely. I'm using the apostrophe to indicate possession. This is a post about the different ways clients show me their briefs *

Generally it's a lot of words, but other times people show what they'd like with pictures. Here is a great brief I got this week from a client I've worked with previously. He's a great guy, full of energy and he definitely likes to communicate with pictures. The image below shows his picture on the left and the final design on the right.




Now that was a clear brief. The picture practically drew itself!
See this image and others similar on our Cartoon Character Design portfolio pages.

* i.e. requirements, not underpants

A look inside the sketchbook

One of the jobs I've been working on this week has been designing some cartoon characters for a picture book ... or maybe a cartoon strip.

With this sort of work I draw and draw and draw and then, after a quick break for a wee and a brew, draw some more to try and get a feel for how the characters should look.

Here's a sample page showing some pretty raw pencil sketches.

Strip Biscuit

I do a regular cartoon strip called "The tea in team" for an agency based here in Harrogate called RawCreative. It's used for corporate newsletters and it's one of my favourite jobs. For each cartoon I spend a good few hours staring into thin air, my preferred method of coming up with cartoon ideas, then sketch them and scan them and launch them off into the ether to be reviewed by the client.
The client normally picks the one I least expect them to and I get to work drawing the full strip and scanning it into my computer to complete for production(add text/tints etc).

But the best bit of the whole thing is choosing a biscuit to accompany the title bar. I like a nerdy title bar like this. Lots of cartoonists do it - but in my mind the grandmaster is Ben Katchor - just check out his collection Cheap Novelties.

Biscuits used so far include teatime favourites like Bourbons, Jammy Dodgers and most recently the classic sugared beauty, "Nice".