I was drawing caricatures at a Bat Mitzvah recently, and a distinguished gentleman seemed to be spending an unusual amount of time watching the process. Eventually, he commented that he thought my drawings were "amazing" and asked for my card. He owns a toy distribution company and thought he might like to utilize my abilities for some of his products. I didn't think much would come of it, but two days later I received a call and drove to his warehouse for a talk.
He sells mostly small items with licensed images from Disney, Marvel, etc., but for years has desired to do a line of his own, while supposedly struggling to find an artist able to render his vision. Apparently my work thrilled him enough to give it a shot. For our first project, he wanted a design for a plate and saucer set, with a dinosaur (specifically T-Rex) as the focus, to be geared towards the 4-7 age set, with the dino being cute, yet also fierce. I didn't know what that meant, so I sent quite a few variations for him to choose from, and this is what he decided on. Not that I see much of the cute in this, but he said kids are so sophisticated now days, it takes a lot to keep their attention. I guess this particular dino best fit his idea of the concept, for now.
After sketches, some color comps, tweaking, and oks from the client, I started on the final, and this is the end result. Though my preferred medium is watercolor, I thought this project would be better served with acrylics. The challenge was to keep the colors simple, mostly primary, yet differentiate the values enough to visually pop each element in the design. There are probably ten layers of re-painting in some places as I made subtle adjustments getting everything to "read" as dynamically as I could, yet still work together as a whole. I wonder…as a child, would you enjoy eating your mac and cheese off a plate like this? :)
