If you haven't already, you should go check out Chris Savino's
Adventures In Milk blog. He's putting together a short film about a boy obsessed with cereal. The film opens with a cereal commercial that harkens back to the old Jay Ward Cap'n Crunch ads of the 60s. Check out his blog for the animatic. Good stuff! Anyway, a while back Chris and I went back and forth regarding the Bloops cereal box that would be used in the film. I said I'd love to do it, and I'm finally getting around to it now. So, I thought I'd share my work in progress. First up, here's Chris' rough of what he had in mind for the box:
As you can see, Chris is looking for a throwback to the cereal boxes of the fifties and sixties we all love - a cereal mascot looking very eager to get his hands on the delicious 'real' pieces of cereal floating down from heaven. Because I'm a huge fan of these vintage boxes I got his idea right away, and I couldn't wait to get started! The first thing I did was start roughing out the character. Once I worked out the pose based on Chris' rough I started messing around with different expressions:
This first is a funny but fairly neutral expression. I was basically just getting into the groove of drawing the character. I knew he needed to look a lot more excited.
Next I tried the 'licking of the lips' expression. Fun, but Chris' character is too nutty and cartoony for this. Bloop needed something a little more crazy.
Getting closer. The old John K. biting the bottom lip thing. I do like this one, but perhaps he looks more like he's in pain than excited?
Here we go! I opened up his mouth and angled up his head a little. He looks like he just CAN'T WAIT to get his hands on those delicious fruity loops that are dropping down in front of him. I think I'll go with this one and push it even more in Flash. More soon.
For the character cleanup I really wanted to retain the loose, sketchy feel of my rough and Chris' overall design style, so I dug out my Rocky & Bullwinkle books and DVDs for reference. If you've seen Chris' storyboard for the commercial, you'll know that this look is important to the whole retro style of the commercial. However, it's tricky to translate the roughs to clean without losing some of that wonderful life! Back in the day - whether intentionally or not -
the artists managed to keep the same sort of wacky, rough style in the cleanup by keeping it fairly loose as well (see image right). That is, not worrying about lines being a little wobbly, intersecting corners, and perfect circles not being... well, perfect! The drawings were still tight and everything was there, but the artists weren't so concerned with a picture perfect cleanup. When I cleaned Cap'n Bloop here I kept that in mind, did it freehand and kept it quick and loose. I could have probably even been a little more sloppy! One example of what I'm talking about here is if you look at the little finger on his right hand, it overlaps his middle finger. That's not right, is it? Shouldn't his middle finger be IN FRONT OF his little one?? awww who cares!? Stuff like that is interesting, organic, and really lends itself to this wacky style of cartooning. For this kind of cleanup you must as Yoda says 'unlearn what you have learned'. There's a few other cleanup no-no's in there as well. Can you spot 'em?
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