Scooby-Doo Sample Page

This is a sample page I drew earlier this year to tryout for DC's Scooby-Doo work.

No Evil part 2

This is a big one. It took so long to get this next post that I decided to post all the designs from the League of Evil spots. Below, Klekthos, who was pretty much figured out during the pitch phase. The ad agency came to us with rough sketches, and Klekthos was one of the few that was close to being designs from the start.
Same with this character below, Midnight Queen. Just a few design samples to get her finalized.


The henchman I pretty much tried to make them look like Moltar, but the agency was too worried about infringing on the Toth designs, so it got changed slightly.



Magmor had a few rounds but the biggest trouble was locking down the color and the cracks in the skin. He's supposed to look hotter on the inside.




Below, the Roach, another character that was pretty much designed by the agency with their rough sketches. I just tied it down and put it in the correct proportions.

Now, Neurosis to quite a few rounds of designs to get correct. My favorite is design C on page 3. Nice clean lines. Definitely closer to the original Toth inspiration, but the last few characters really deviated from the Toth/Superfriends world, IMO.









Sharak was a cool character. Again, my favorite design was from the pitch. I didn't think it needed to get any more complicated than that. But the writers really had something in mind so we eventually moved away from these vertical shark designs towards a horizontal shark.











Next, David 4000. It changed quite a bit.





And finally, Zzzat. It went from very stylized electricity to something more simple, which I was happy with since it's closer to what they would've done on Superfriends.





OK. That's all for now. Next post will be all the designs created for the one Scooby-Doo parody.

No Evil - Dr. Triclops

Continuing my walk through of the design process as Art Director for Net10's "No Evil" ad campaign, here we have Dr. Triclops, despot of the League of Evil.
Dr. T's design was mostly figured out during the pitch phase of the project (see last post). I was mainly inspired, of course, by the original Lex Luthor design from the beloved Superfriends. Years ago, my animator friends and I always hated this model sheet because if you take a moment to look at it, Lex looks like a different guy from pose to pose. However, when I look at it now I see the sort of ham-fisted drawing style that I know and love and see it for what it is: representational art. When you're a kid, there's no mistaking it for Lex, even if on the left he looks like Daddy Warbucks and on the right he looks more like Maggott from the Dirty Dozen.


So the crew at Droga wanted to make sure that we didn't go too close to any of the established designs. Even though I'm pretty sure you can't copyright bald-muscular-white-guy, they insisted on exploring various facial details.
Of course, I generally try to amuse myself during the process and push it as far as I can, while also knowing that they probably won't go for the more extreme ones. This also helps lead them back to a simpler design that sometimes a client won't want to choose right away because it's the first thing you did.
They were pretty much digging A from above right away and next they were wondering if the third eye needed an eyebrow:
Below is pretty much the final result. The client wanted to make sure the animators knew that the third eye was a functional eye, so I jotted a few notes. And this is about as far as I got with any well drawn model sheets. This was a part time position, and it was on top of VB designin' full time, but the real reason is due to the pace of the schedule. Although we wondered at the end if it would've paid off to concentrate on perfect model sheets and therefore cut down money spent on key-drawing revisions. It just didn't seem prudent to make model sheets for all the characters since this wasn't a real show.

I knew Lex would have a range of emotion, jotted down these roughs that never made it to inks where I would have fixed things I didn't like, and do the flip test, etc. Even though they are finished in ink, I still think of them as roughs because they don't have those extra steps, and it shows. It's fun to "tie down" with ink, though, and a good practice to get into.Same thing with the hands. I knew it would come up often with the human characters, and these are pretty much the kind of human cartoon hands I've been drawing for ten years, no doubt based on having animated Toth-style HB characters even back then.