The Spidey image that I’m so proud of looked nice on the front page, but I don’t think it represented me well enough to be landing page material. It was time to do a fun silly caricature of some sort for the front page. After some trial and error and a dozen sketches I settled on a cartoony/detailed style I liked. It’s an amalgamation of my evolving Photoshop painterly style and my cartoony Illustrator vector style.

I really wanted to go with the sketch of me on a Segway, as a tribute to Arrested Development, but felt it was a bit too whimsical. Comparing myself to GOB Bluth, may not be the smartest professional move to make either. I also thought about redrawing myself in the pose Spidey is in, but the sketches looked too much like I was doing a backflip. I had a dangerous backflip incident while camping once and did not like the look of that image. I ended up going with the one of me in a “read for action” pose with a sketchbook in hand. That is also an Iron Man glove in the sketch. Soon that artwork will see the day of light.

I’m pretty happy with the result that is on the front page now. I think the shadows on the hands need some work (the light source on them is all wrong!) and it needs some texture work. I’ll be touching it up as I also work on some complimentary Flash code for it. Here’s a little preview. I’m going to keep my new Flash skills I picked up building Loud Dog’s gallery viewer last month by building a game “inventory / stat” screen for my caricature. You can put silly clothing on me or feed me gross vegetables through the power of ActionScript 2.0 and XML!

I have important client work to wrap up the rest of this week, but should have the prototype up sometime next week.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.