This series of illustrations was created as background images for a typing tutor video game “Typing Instructor for Kids“ by Individual Software. The game had already been created, however the developers wanted to create a bonus level and needed new illustrations to be included in the game.

I was given the task of creating three illustrations: the underwater ruins, the sunken ship, and the domed “Lost City”. The artwork for the ruins can be seen above, and the sunken pirate ship and the Lost City can be seen below:

An overview “establishing shot” illustration of all the elements was also created:

The final art is somewhat obscured by the content of the game from what I was told. These illustrations were used as background elements to the main action, which was overlaid on the artwork.

The architectural elements were a bit of a struggle for me as I typically work on cartoon character design, but it was good to flex the muscles in a different direction. I especially enjoyed working up the atmospheric coloring for the underwater look, as well as adding atmospheric depth to the artwork.

Very fun project to work on, and the guys over at Individual Software were great to work with.

The Lost City – Video Game Illustrations is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

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Recently I have been working with Positively Cleveland, the visitor and traveler’s bureau of Cleveland, Ohio on some illustration work for their promotional and marketing materials. The publications in which these illustrations were used went on to win awards in the Ohio Association of Convention and Visitor Bureau’s 2009 “Middy” awards.

In addition to an extensive series of custom illustrated avatar portraits which I created for them, I also created a stylized illustration of a “greatest hits” Cleveland skyline. Additionally some general spot illustrations were also created. These were all used in the award-winning Positively Cleveland 2009 Annual Report. The award was received in ‘Division 4-E – Annual Report’.

Positively Cleveland was also honored with another award in ‘Division 4-D Travel Guide’ for their 2009-2010 Cleveland Plus Destination Planning Guide. For this publication, I created illustrated scenes of prominent Cleveland, Ohio landmarks and destination areas. These were incorporated into layouts which included photographic people. I was only involved on the illustration side of things. My illustrations were featured on the cover, the inside front cover, as well as throughout the guide for each major section intro.

Tight deadline, detailed architectural illustrations and a full workload at the time made this a very hectic project, but in the end everything came out great and learning that the client also received awards made the entire process more than worth it. Samantha and Mark over at Positively Cleveland were nothing less than stellar to work with on this as well. And a special thanks to my illustrator friend Scott Thigpen, who helped me out on this project to meet the deadline.

Below are the specific pages from the Destination Guide featuring my illustration work. The client was looking for very loose, abstract depictions of each location.

Positively Cleveland OACVB Awards is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

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The process started off—as usual—with an initial rough sketch to make sure the client and I were on the same page. Of course, we had a phone conversation before this to make sure we both were on the same page as far as the artwork.

The spark plug “Frankenstein’s Lab” lighting towers needed to be included, in addition to the main Frankie art. At this stage I just wanted to get sketches for all the elements to make sure the look was headed in the right direction. Client’s response: Frank looked too “Fred Flinstone-y”! And I had to agree. He wanted something more aggressive, so I literally went back to the drawing board working on some variations.

I was kind of stoked, as usually the characters I develop are more cartoony and I like to work in a more “realistic” style when I have the chance. I thought the followup Frankenstein head sketch came out great:

Verdict? A bit too aggressive. Back to the drawing board.

This guy (above) was more for style than the actual look. Needless to say the client wasn’t keen on this one either. The next one was getting closer:

Besides not being right for the project, this sketch has some general issues with physiology and proportion, despite this being a rough sketch. I was struggling with the “snarl”. And the hands are looking odd. But the good thing about this sketch is that it led to what became the final:

We toyed with the idea of how to play on the “neck bolts” of Frankenstein, and thought of this idea of him cranking on them with a big ol’ wrench as I was working on the sketches. Client loved it and we moved to the final.

One of the limitations of the art was that it needed to be all in gray tones, and very few (2-4 maximum). Also, the final art was intended to be very subtle, so I needed to choose gray tones that stood out enough from each other, but not too much.

After creating the vector art version, I started working on variations for the gray tones with all the elements. We went through a few variations before settling on this as the best solution:

The Mopar logo needed to be included, and I added lines as a graphic element. It all makes much more sense when you see the car template overlay in conjunction with the actual artwork:

And here is a version with the final Frankenstein art cropped to the template. I made the transparent areas a light magenta to help them read better visually:

The artwork was transferred to the actual vehicle as follows: the top of the car was sprayed the lightest color – silver. Then they printed the artwork on adhesive vinyl with cuts along all of the color break edges. That was applied to the top of the car. Each of the remaining two shades were pulled away and sprayed, then remasked until the shades were done.

Murray sent me some build photos of the actual car, which I’m sharing below:

(The last photo is a detail of the hubcaps)

This was an awesome project to work on. Murray Pfaff was great to work with, and we had a lot of fun creating the Frankenstein artwork. Seeing my art on the final vehicle is a blast! I’d love to work again with Pfaff or any other custom hot rod designer looking to incorporate some killer illustration work in a hot rod design. Drop me a line if you’re interested!

Mopar Collector’s Guide Magazine featured FrankenCuda in the September 2009 issue. Here are the relevant pages:

FrankenCuda is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

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This sexy bail bondswoman cartoon character design was created for—you guessed it, a bail bondswoman. The client wanted a woman character design that was sexy, but not too sexy, and had to be professional-looking as well.

After working on some initial rough sketches, I realized we needed a prop to make her stand out as a bail bond agent. I thought a big chunky ring of skeleton keys would be perfect to get the idea across that she had the keys to freedom in her hands.

A very rough sketch was worked up with pencil on paper, then scanned into Photoshop for cleanup:

The cleaned up sketch in Photoshop, with some rough tone added:

Note the cleaned up sketch is considerably different that the original rough sketch. Typically for my rough sketches I work very fast and loose. I want to get the overall feel of the character and the general proportions down. When the sketch is brought into Photoshop, I have much more flexibility to tweak, resize elements and the like. Sometimes the intermediate sketch stages are lost due to erasing, but lately I have been saving all the phases of the sketch stage in the Photoshop file so I have a reference for later.

While the client was pleased in general, she asked to see a more leggy, sexy version of the character. I worked up a rough version to give her a quick idea of how it might look:

I think this version has some potential (but would definitely get some reworking if we were to have gone with this approach for the final character; the head needs some serious fixing). The client decided that this was a bit more sexy than she wanted, and approved the earlier rough sketch.

With the client’s OK, I went back to the initial rough sketch and cleaned everything up to prep it for use as a template in Adobe Illustrator, where I create the final color artwork.

The woman character herself didn’t change much from the rough sketch, but you’ll note the keys got some more attention. I wanted those to really be dynamic, and also enlarged them a bit so they were a bit more prominent. A careful observer will see that I pulled the keys & hand from the unused sketch, then enlarged them for use in this final sketch.

This final sketch was approved by the client and ready for the vector art stage. The final sketch was placed into Adobe Illustrator as a template, and used to create the hand-created vector art paths. Once the color was complete, hair highlights and overall shading was added.

We went through a few small rounds of color tweaks, most notably n the hair color. The original had an orange that was less red than the final seen here.

Great project, great client and I was very pleased with the final artwork for the cartoon character.

Sexy Bail Bondswoman is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

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This t-shirt design was created for the 2009 Ohio Canal Corridor’s annual River Sweep event. The Ohio Canal Corridor exists to create a park system that follows the route of the historic Ohio Canal. River Sweep is an annual volunteer cleanup event, and part of the gift package that volunteers receive is a t-shirt. I have been working with the Ohio Canal Corridor for a few years now designing the -t-shirts.

The initial sketch started out in a much different direction, as seen below. I was thinking much more frog than Statue of Liberty, and the client had more Statue of Liberty in mind with some frog elements. The frog is the mascot of the River Sweep event, and the ongoing theme is to work a frog into various famous paintings such as the Mona Lisa and American Gothic (some past themes we created for the t-shirts).

Back to the drawing board, with a new rough sketch of the Statue of Liberty as the focus. The client also wanted to include elements of a burning river, a small poke at the history of the Cuyahoga River catching on fire some tears ago (it’s much better now).

The client approved this rough sketch, so I went to work creating the final line art sketch. I knew I wanted to go with a clean-line illustrated quality for this one, as opposed to a more cartoon-style approach. I felt it would read better as the Statue of Liberty if the illustration were more formal, allowing the frog element to work better. Below is the working sketch for the line art. Created using a Wacom graphics tablet and Adobe Photoshop.

You can see we added a tire to swap out the tablet in Liberty’s arm—a small joke to reflect the “cleanup” aspect of River Sweep. Nice suggestion from the client.

At this point I left the frog face blank, as I wanted this to read as the Statue of Liberty first, and then match the style of the frog face to the existing line art.

Once the Statue’s line art was complete, I added the face of the frog. The face is a bit exaggerated as far as size, as I wanted it to read well.

This artwork was approved and I went to the vector art stage in Adobe Illustrator. Once all the line art was complete, I started working with the background elements. Being a screenprinted t-shirt design, one must take into account the limited number of colors available to print. In this case, we were looking to stay at around 4 or 5 colors.

My initial design is below.

The client loved the overall look of the design, but wanted more color. I experimented with variations on the sky, using the red and yellow already present in the flames.

The above approach was intended to minimize the impact of the red  and yellow so it didn’t take too much attention away from the focus of the frog/Statur of Liberty. As I expected, the client asked to see a red and yellow version with the expanding rays from the initial design.

Above is the revised design, with some tweaks to the rays; I increased the number of them, but we all agreed it was a bit busy. The red and yellow rays were definitely how the client wanted to proceed.

Above is the final design, the rays spaced out a bit more. I think in the end, considering the limited color palette we had to work with, that this final design worked out great.

River Sweep 2009 T-Shirt Illustration is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

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