New Things & Do-Overs

One of the things that has been on my to-do list for a while has been re-doing my Hello Hotcakes card. It was one of my favorite cards in my shop but I wasn’t happy with the image quality. I learned very quickly that colored pencil doesn’t really scan all that well. As you can see below…

During its run, it sold pretty well. I mean, what’s not to like? It’s pancakes and butter and syrup and butter. But the biggest reason I wanted to redo it is: my work doesn’t look like that anymore. This card is almost two years old, and my work has evolved since then. So I’ve been wanting to give it a facelift so that it would fit with the rest of my work.

One of my serious goals for 2016 is to get more comfortable with digital drawing/painting. Yeah, my degree is in graphic design but I’m mostly skilled in typegraphy, vectors, and shit. Stuff like this was considered too “fine art” or “illustration” to be taught in the department. As if having a wide range of skills was a bad thing. And due to state budget cuts, I was restricted to staying within my major’s curriculum. (That’s the shitty thing about going to state universities, but I could never afford to go to a place like Art Center. But that’s a story is for another day.)

Here’s tonight’s progress with the messy sketch layer turned on so you can kinda see what it’s supposed to look like.

Hand-lettering the final version of “Hello Hotcakes!” isn’t going to happen until near the end. And here’s what it looks like with the sketch layer turned off…

I still have quite a bit of work to do on it, including the final lettering and final line drawing that will give it structure.