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.

by George Coghill -
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Positively Cleveland OACVB Awards is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

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What an awesome project to work on—creating cartoon Frankenstein artwork for a custom hot rod 1971 Barracuda. This project started life when Murray Pfaff of Pfaff Designs contacted me to create the artwork as part of a custom hot rod design he was working on for a client.

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:

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

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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.

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
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Sexy Bail Bondswoman is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

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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.

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

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This puma illustration was created as part of a rebranding campaign for a high school (the Perry Panthers). I was subcontracted by a designer to create the illustrated mascot portion of the project. The designer created the full logo and ancillary design work.

The school had been using puma artwork for their mascot that was not created by them, and therefore needed to have something original created. After initially attempting to create the illustration work himself, the designer eventually realized he needed an illustrator to create this portion of the project.

Initially the puma art was headed in a much different direction compared to the final art seen here. It had a full body, in a prowl stance coming towards the viewer. I attempted to rework the initial concepts created by the designer, but these were not received well by the end client.

After a few rounds of revisions, the designer and I realized we needed something original that was more reminiscent of the approach and style of the art the school had previously been using, with a more standard head-only design.

The final artwork came out great, and both the end client and the designer I worked with were as pleased with the final puma mascot character illustration as I am.

by George Coghill -
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Perry Pumas Mascot Illustration is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

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It’s been a long time since I’ve updated my blog with recent work, I have been (gladly) super busy with client projects, deadlines and upcoming work that I need to make time for now. A lot of really great cartooning projects have been recently wrapped up, with lots more good stuff on the digital drawing board right now.

The image above is a quick teaser showcasing some of the recent work — both finished and in progress — including: a cartoon Marines character for a t-shirt design for a Young Marines troop, a cartoon monster character for a self-published children’s book project I was just awarded, a cartoon ogre mascot for a video game portal website, an “inventor Mom” character with her home made robot, a tough security guard/body guard mascot character for an online data storage company, a puppy dog mascot character, a surfer character for a gyro/souvlaki restaurant, a frog version of the Statue of Liberty for the Ohio Canal Corridor’s annual event t-shirt, more avatar portrait illustrations for the Cleveland, Ohio travel & visitors bureau Positively Cleveland, and a fish mascot character and logo for a niche fishing utility product.

Whew! And that’s just the most recent. There’s lots more on the plate right now that’s upcoming, including novelty product concept & turnaround art, cartoon-style footwear designs for toddler’s shoes, and a space-themed t-shirt design for an upcoming cake design competition.

I’l be posting in-depth posts on all of the above work once things settle back to a less hectic pace. For now, I just wanted to pop my head up from the desk and get a teaser of some of my recent artwork up here. Lots of good stuff coming soon!

by George Coghill -
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Cartooning & Illustration: Recent & Current Work Teaser is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

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I recently finished up the first round of a series of custom avatar illustrations for the Cleveland, Ohio convention and visitor’s bureau Positively Cleveland. The initial set of avatar illustrations were for the “web women” of Positively Cleveland — the main online team for their website.

The client supplied a few photos of each person, and while one was chosen as the “master pose”, it’s always helpful to have a few photos of people to get an overall concept of what they look like. Sometimes a single photo of a person may not “look like them” to someone who doesn’t know them personally.

The artwork was drawn directly from the photos with obvious artistic tweaks from referencing the other photos to get the proper shape of the face and the proportion of features. These were taken pretty far as the color art sketches are concerned, as I wanted to get the look of the shading down before I went to the vector art stage. It was discussed early on to go for a trendy look and the flat shading is perfect for that style. The sample below is of a final color sketch with the photo of the subject for comparison.

Once the color studies were approved by the client, it was for the most part straightforward to get the final art in vector format. All the vector art was hand-created and there were some creative touches added at the vector art stage, in particular the hair highlights and shading. It’s much easier to work out the tapered line effect in Illustrator than it is to hand draw it in Photoshop.

The colors were chosen based on the branding palette, and I went with background colors from the company palette and chose shirt colors than complimented the background colors as well as the hair color. I had originally attemepted to use the company palette in the shirts as well, but as they were all close to primary colors it ended up look too comic-book-ish. I wanted these to have more of an illustrative style so I went with more muted secondary colors using the Illustrator Recolor Artwork color tools in the Color Guide palette to find appropriate starting points. The finals were tweaked manually.

Another consideration for the colors was to choose a color palette for each that not only was harmonious within the particular illustration, but also worked well with the others when seen together. By doing so, these should also work well with any future branding materials created for Positively Cleveland. At least as long as they stick to the branding colors.

The final art was exported and saved as print-ready EPS files as well as exported as small, medium and large JPEG images. While typically I would export a flat-shaded vector image as a GIF to keep file size down, in this case there was a subtle gradient in the background and I didn’t want to introduce the banding that can result in a GIF file with gradients.

The final art came out great and I was exceptionally pleased with the look of the hair in the middle avatar — her hairstyle just lent itself to the tapered lines and curves so perfectly. It was a natural fit.

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Custom Avatar Illustrations: Positively Cleveland is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

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I recently created this pinup Santa girl illustration for a local company that produces home-brewing beer kits. The client was developing a special holiday/Christmas blend, and wanted to also include an incentive in the package — in this case it was to be an empty 24 oz. beer bottle with a pinup Santa girl silkscreened on to the bottle.

The artwork was first sketched out so we could get the look of the girl down. My instructions from the client were to be quite risqué with the art, as they have a predominant 20-30 year old male age range as a demographic.

My initial sketch was rejected for being a bit too risqué — they didn’t want the suggestion of her being nude, and thought the girl was a bit too sexy when they were going for more of a cute pixie look for the pinup babe.

I have to agree that the final art is much better and more appropriate for the bottle. The original sketch has her maybe a bit too trashy!

So back to the drawing board I went, and worked up a new sketch based off of the original overall look of the first — the client liked the general direction, but wanted to change the look of the girl.

You can see from both of these sketches that even at the rough stage, I work pretty detailed. I tend to work out ideas within a drawing, as opposed to coming up with a bunch of half-assed variations for the sake of having variations.

Usually this rough concept sketch is the culmination of 5 or 6 individual sketches as I work out what is successful and what is not.

For this revised sketch, I just dropped the opacity of the original down and worked on the revisions on a new Photoshop layer. If you look carefully, you’ll notice the positioning of her legs as well as the canday cane has changed from this rough sketch to the final. It looked more natural and the design flowed better to have the space opened up.

This rough sketch was then cleaned up even further in Photoshop, where it was then placed into Adobe Illustrator as a template layer. There was very little question about the quality of the line work at this stage, which helps the vector creation process go much more quickly.

One thing that had to be addressed was the handling of the dark areas so that they weren’t lost when they met the outlines. Also, the consideration of the overall rhythm of the light and dark areas was a concern. I knew I was going to be adding a pattern to the background so I could keep the dark outlines. The bottle is actually an amber brown, and the ink printed is white, so this played a part in the overall design considerations.

The background is just a simple tapered line which was duplicated and then both lines were combined as a blend, which allowed me to easily control the number of lines and the spacing until I got it just right. Too thick and it would overpower the linework of the main art; too thin and it would get muddy when screenprinted.

The lettering was also created in Illustrator, and hand-arched using the Envelope Warp tool. I don’t have the fancy plugins that make this easier (and are worth it) so I had to make do with what I had. Illustrator’s built-in Arch warp just doesn’t do the trick. Try it for yourself and you’ll see the warping doesn’t keep the vertical lines straight, and it ends up looking like crap.

The back of the bottle also was part of the project, and it really is not much more than a repurposing of the lettering from the front with an oval with design flourishes to give it that “beer label” look.

The “barley” wrapping the bottom half was hand-created (again using the Blend tool for the diminishing shapes) and then the blend was expanded and the resulting barley grains were then made into a custom Art Brush so I could smoothly wrap them on the oval — the oval was copied/pasted in place, then divided up to leave just the arcs I needed, to which the “Barley brush” was applied.

Unfortunately I have not seen the final product, even though it was requested from and promised by the client. I dropped a line recently but have not heard back. I was looking forward to having one of these in the studio, but I guess it’s not going to happen.

This artwork was actually created over the summer, but per the client’s request I have not posted it until now as they wanted it to be hush-hush in case their competitors were checking up on them.

Hope you enjoyed this artwork as well as the work behind the scenes that went into creating it.

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
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Zazzle now offers custom skateboard decks. I recently uploaded this cool Ouija Board skateboard design.

by George Coghill -
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Ouija Board Skateboard is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

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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:

It should be fairly obvious that the illustration is a parody on the classic scene from the animated film “The Lady And The Tramp“, where the two main dog characters are sharing a piece of spaghetti over a candle-lit dinner.

The initial sketches were created with pencil and paper, and the final art created as vector art in Adobe Illustrator CS3 using my trusty Wacom Intuos3 graphics tablet.

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
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Commander In Beef is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

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