Cartoon character portrait illustration.

This project was a commissioned cartoon character “portrait” for a client who wanted to use a cartoon version of himself for branding.

Project was pretty striaghtforward: client sent me a photo of himself, and asked that I put him in a Hawaiian shirt with him giving the “peace sign”.

Cartoon Character Portrait: Chris E. is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

My interview over at VectorTuts just went up, head over to hear me talk about art, illustration, cartooning, working for yourself and other fun stuff. Bonus: corny joke included!

VectorTuts.com Interview is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

Cartoon surfer girl character created for a pet sitting business in Hawaii.

This project was pretty straightforward, client asked for a surfer girl character riding a surfboard, with a dog and cat accompanying her.

I worked up an initial sketch, which the client liked but wanted the girl to be a bit more sexy:

I worked up a revised rough sketch, which the client approved:

A few more tweaks as I worked on the final sketch to be used as the template for creating the final vector art in Adobe Illustrator:

From there the color vector art was created:

Surfer Girl Cartoon Logo is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning

“Batfrog” llustration for the 2010 River Sweep t-shirt.

For the past few years I have been creating the illustrations for the Ohio Canal Corridor‘s annual Cuyahoga River cleanup River Sweep event.

For past illustrations, the theme was cartoon version of famous paintings with the River Sweep frog mascot. For 2010 they decided to mix things up and go with a Batman-inspired theme, hence “BatFrog”.

Initially the concept was to feature BatFrog perched atop one of the awesome Guardians of Transportation of the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge with the Cleveland, Ohio skyline in the background and the BatFrog spotlight in the night sky.

A quick rough sketch proved this to be unworkable as to include all the elements would require BatFrog to be quite small. The client wanted BatFrog big, front and center.

Next I created a revised sketch, which the client immediately approved:

Rough color was added to see how the design worked, and I experimented with some comic book style high-contrast shading. The color palette needed to be limited as this illustration would be screenprinted on t-shirts.

For the sake of completeness, I worked up a version with more green to the outfit, which we all decided didn’t work as well. A second green would have added another color to the t-shirt printing, and to keep costs down we needed to stick to 3-5 colors.

After creating the vector art in Adobe Illustrator, type elements were also added. The final art including the styled text uses only black, gray, yellow, green and blue. The white text tagline at the top of the image here was used for print materials only and a separate version without the tagline was used for the t-shirt printing.

I also created the Statue of Liberty frog-themed design for River Sweep 2009.

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

Rough sketch for a drunk “party girl” cartoon character design. Complete with Mardi Gras beads and a princess/birthday tiara.

This rough concept sketch was created for a current client project, and wasn’t used because another concept was more fitting for the company/website, despite the fact that they loved the drunk girl character.

She’s too funny to let go, so I plan on finalizing the character in full color vector art once I have the chance, but had to share her with you in rough sketch format until then.

Enjoy (*hic*)!

“Party Girl” Sketch is a post from: Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghill Cartooning