My computer’s resources were being consumed by some work the other day. While I was waiting for the process to finish, I whipped out a couple of post-it notes. Cats seem to be my go-to animal when my mind is bored. (I’m sure that’s both frightening and unsurprising.) I wanted to break away from my usual sketches of the toonzone mascot and played around with a different design.  For reasons unknown to me, I became enamored with the idea of giving this cartoon cat a scarf. I included the original post-it sketch done in marker and pink pen (which, unintentionally, looked too much like a Pokemon), a second, tightened pencil sketch and a third of the character in a pose.

Here’s a recent sketch and final submission done for a t-shirt. It was done for a group that participates in charities that support the research of pediatric cancer. I had a lot of fun on this one and the freedom of going in pretty much any direction. So, I decided right away to make it an animal cub of some sort. I felt that by making the character a cub, kids would be more able to relate to it. Also, by not drawing a human child, I was able to avoid pinning it down to any particular race.

I definitely wanted to make it an animal known for being tough. I was torn between a lion, tiger and bear. Though it could have been cute, I decided against the bear because I would have gone with a darker color scheme on that design. I wanted to keep things bright and fun because it was for a project representing kids affected by cancer. The only reason I didn’t go with the lion was because I liked the way the tiger came out in the rough pencils.

As the group calls themselves the “Cancer Kickers”, I wanted to have the character playing soccer and kicking near the logo. I also decided on adding a swoosh behind the tiger’s kicking leg because I wanted to add a little bit more motion to it.

You’ll find my most recent sketches here and hopefully you’ll enjoy some of them.

Bringing this blog’s design in line with the rest of the site had some challenge to it. I had to pull the header HTML out to a separate file. I had to shift the blog over slightly to match the rest centering of the rest of the site’s content. The width between the two is different because 1) the blog has enough vertical content to cause a scroll bar to appear and 2) a scroll bar causes there to be less screen width for your content to center across. Basically, if you open the blog and another page of the site in tabs, you should be able to switch between the two and see no shifting of the header and background.

I also made the background seamless. Neat.