Oooooh yeah. I was supposed to update this thing today. Almost forgot.
So, little bit of unnecessary, space-filling, back story… I’m 26 and I just moved back in with my parents about 5 months ago (after 8 years of living out of the house). It’s not ideal, but it just happened to be the best way for me to go to school and keep my debt down. As embarrassing as it is, and as much as it keeps pretty girls away (who am I kidding… It’s not like they were lining up when I lived alone) living with your folks does have it’s advantages. Mom cooks dinner, free on site laundry, and, most importantly, low cost of living. Not having huge financial responsibilities (or a job), kinda frees up your time. So, with my abundance of free time, I decided to take out a little bit of extra drawing “work” that I didn’t have time for or wouldn’t have accepted when I was doing actual paying work.
So, right now I’m working on a “on spec” project. “On Spec” is short for “on speculation” meaning “on speculation that we get money from this”. Basically it’s a back end deal (whew that sounds dirty)… You do a ton of work, up front, for nothing, with the assumption (and eventual fruitless hope) that you will sell this project to a publisher and make money off of it. We cartoonists have another term that sums up your chances of actually making money off these jobs: “Not friggin’ likely.” Generally, I only accept jobs that either 1) have a paid page rate (meaning no matter what happens, I get paid) or 2) will definitely get published. Like I said, “On Spec” work has neither. I will sometimes make an exception… And this instance is one of those exceptions.
This project is something my buddy Nick (who’s last name I’m going to omit due to the fact that he has 12 pen names and I can never remember which one he’s using at the moment) and his friend John (who’s last name I will omit because I honestly don’t remember it) cooked up and asked me to draw. I forget how Nick and I met up, but we’ve worked together on a few anthologies and he has a good track record of actually getting my crappy drawings published. Actually, an amazing track record. Something like 100% or so. He might be a magician… Anyway, since contacts are everything in this business, knowing someone who can get my work out there is a good contact to maintain. In any case, this project is tentatively called “Imaginary Friends” (yeah, I don’t love it either). It’s basically a “kids” comic that we’re gonna pitch to a couple of publishers (though we’re mainly gunning for Image’s Shadowline imprint). Like I said, the project is NEW (I haven’t even gotten the first draft of the script), so we’re still in the “design” phase of the process. So, with a lack of new actual pages to show you, here’s a few of my character designs:
This is Timmy. They want some sort of symbol on his chest and the back of his hat… I kind of defaulted to a picture of saturn (kind of like a Space Man Spiff thing) but I wouldn’t say I’m in love with the idea. If anyone has a better idea for a symbol, please let me know.
And this is Danook, Timmy’s imaginary friend. Note the diamond shaped eyes and pupils as well as the pointy ears with “antenna” on the ends. I guess those are the features of the “imaginary Friends” (we really gotta change that name).
Again, this is for kids, so I’m trying to adopt a more cartoony style from my normal stuff. The style Nick and John wanted me to gun for is like “Lilo and Stitch” or “Monsters Inc.”. So, I’m trying to develop a style that looks cartoony, but still has  weight and mass to the forms. Basically, I don’t want everything to look 2D. Let me know if I’m succeeding.
