Captive Animals of Chattanooga

On Saturday, Anthem did a company trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee. We rented a van and drove up there to hit up the Chattanooga's zoo and aquarium. Given that it was only a day trip, we had to move fairly quickly, so I didn't have time to sketch.  I wound up just taking a bunch of pictures.

What you see here is only a fraction of them. I took about 440 pictures, so it was pretty tedious going through all of them. These were some of the cleareer ones (and the ones with the best compositions). I have more that were blurry, but still looked cool. I'll post those separately. 

I may even do another post with some of the not-so-great ones. I took so many pictures, I feel like I should do something with them.

This is an old chimp named Hank. He sells propane and propane accessories.

Ah, he reminds me of the iguana I used to have for a pet. He was about that size.

Exhibit was MIA.

Monkey:   Old man tortoise didn't skip town. Those hawk scumbags bumped him off. I'll take 'em down, even if it costs me my badge!

Monkey:   No one batted an eye when those two first came to town.  This city's always been full of low-life hoods lookin' to make a name for themselves, but these guys weren't your run-in the-mill meatheads. They were smart.

Monkey:  Before anyone know it, this whole city was on the business end of one hell of a sucker punch.  They had the whole criminal underworld in their pockets in a matter of weeks.

Monkey:  I first got wind of 'em when a pro wrestler was found dead in his dressing room. Called himself the "Tanzanian Tank." Some punk-for-hire snuffed him out after he refused to take a dive in the big title match.

 

Monkey:  A real freak, that guy. He was part of some small time gang called the "Avian Anarchists." Wouldn't talk 'til we threatened to cut his screwball hairdo. Then he sang like the dirty bird he was. Thing is, the info he gave was bogus.

Monkey:  He said he was working for "Butterball Red", one of the biggest crime bosses from way back when.  The glory days of mammalian kingpins.  Nowadays, that old codger's too senile to order take-out, let alone a hit. 

Monkey:  Butterball working with birds made even less sense. Birds had never been a dominant force in the crimeworld, but that began to change.  When birds began gaining a foothold, every mammalian gangster in the city was up in arms. All hell broke loose with us cops right there in the thick of it.

Monkey:  Most of the big bird bosses wound up dead, or in the clink.  None of them could've been responsible for the "Tanzanian Tank's" murder.  Someone new was on the scene.

 

Monkey: I made a deal with "Softshoe Sal", an old boss I pinched, for a reduced sentence in exchange for info about the city's new scourge.  It was then that I first heard of the "Hawkins Brothers."

.....to be continued.

 

Wow. I have no idea why I suddenly went on some weird noir tangent there.

I couldn't resist. hahaha

 

  

  

  

I got a few lol's from this.

  

  

It's funny, the zoo is as old as I am.  At least as old as I will be by the end of this month.

 

 And now for the turtles!!!

I think this is my favorite picture.

 

A Whole New World Girl

There's been an obscene lack of art on this blog lately, so I decided to post concepts from one of Anthem's past projects that fell through.  I don't exactly remember what happened. I think our client's price was too low for the amount of work that would have gone into it. This was a project from last year (around August maybe), so I'm not sure of whatever became of the client's project.

Our client was planning to create a line of dolls more, or less like American Girl. The franchise would be known as "World Girl."  Like the American Girl dolls, each would have its own back-story and customizable clothing. However, these dolls would do more than just look pretty. The whole shtick with World Girl was that the dolls would also teach another language. I'm sure there was also supposed to be some online interactive version of each character that had lessons to follow. A lot of the details have been lost in time. All the info I got was second hand.  I never spoke to the client directly, or ever saw her in person.

The prototype for their first doll was that of an impoverished orphan from whom you'd learn Spanish.  Our first roll was to take their concept art and jazz it up.


I'm probably not a liberty to post the original concept drawing they provided, but you can get an idea of what it looked like in the sketches below. I was under the impression that I was supposed to recreate the concept verbatim, just drawn better. So that's what I set out to do. I even translated the kinda awkward pose, except less awkward. Unlike the structure of that last sentence.

 

You'll see a few sketches I did from looking at one of American Girl's illustrations of Josefina. She's part of their historical line.

  

I may have done this before I started referencing Josefina.

I actually Frankenstien-ed this sketch from two separate ones. I didn't like the body in one sketch and the head in another, so...... FUUU-SION HA!

I didn't design that dress, btw. That's what she had one in the concept we were given.

  

Now I did design this one. I don't claim to know anything about fashion (especially for little girls), but I think that'd work for a doll.

  

We got some critiques from the client that she looked too "Black." I suppose I can see that now. Those lips are pretty full. She's also got some thick 90's eyebrows there.

I guess it's that ol' chestnut about artists putting themselves into their work. My characters tend to "look Black" in one way, or another.  People even claim that the turtle from my film makes expressions like me.  

At any rate, I had to darken her hair and lighten her skin to make her look more Hispanic.  I don't know how well that worked.  Black is a color of many shades.

  

Regardless of her true racial identity, they also wanted her to look cuter.

  

Went a bit more stylized, but that was apparently too much.

  

I already had an earlier sketch that was more cutesy, so I threw some color on it.

Oh, but it didn't end there.  The costume had to go. I then went to work on some alternate dresses.  Again, I used American Girl for reference, but also some traditional adornment from various latin cultures.

I think this was the dress I wound up going with. Out of all the designs, it wound have been the simplest to animate (for the interactive web stuff). I also had to strike a fine balance between poor and fashionable. I was told that she had to look like a doll a girl would want to buy, but not so glamorous that she looks rich. She was supposed to be an orphan after all.

Once again, there were issues with the hair. I had to make it straighter and turn down the lightness even more.

The project went bust soon after. I did get a lot of art out of though.  If anything, I'll say that this was an interesting character design exercise.

Bend It like Bevil

I don't know why, but absolutely love to sketch unsavory, deranged, and downright repugnant characters. It's so fun to draw a bunch of freaks and monsters. I suppose just general weirdness facinates me.

A love of the darker, dirtier, more unshaven side of the human existence is not something I alone harbor. There are colleges of mine whom enjoy a good stroll through the realms of madmen as much as I do. Case in point, the author of the web comic "Get Bent."

Get Bent chronicles the disfunction of Carl Bent and his son Chuck.

I love how downright despicable the son looks at times. Some of his expressions kinda look like something from Flapjack.

The artist's website can be viewed here.