Recent design work

I have spent a lot of time recently working on the Captain Capitalism designs. Too much, really. I have been taking Stephen Silver's brilliant designs as a starting point, but trying to bring them a little bit more in line with my own designs so that they will blend well into the parts of the next cartoon that I have already done, like this still from a scene with the "Greatest American Hero"-like character and Karl Marx that I have completed:

One major change that you might notice in the designs above and below is the lack of "self-colored" lines. I really like colored lines in designs, I actually have to restrain myself from doing it. But it really is a time suck on the production of the cartoons, it takes a lot of time, and since I only really work on these cartoons in the evenings and on the weekends it is pretty ridiculous. There are still a few, but not near as many.

I understand that any changes I made to Steve Silver's designs are a step backward. Stephen's designs are genius. But what I tried to do was work on top of that design over and over, and draw it strictly from memory. I also experimented with animating the character, in the manner that the character works in the cartoons; posing him, doing mouths and facial expressions. I made a few changes based on that, mainly in the arms and head structure.

Also, I have been looking a lot at Jaimie Hewlett's Gorillaz recently. I got the "Rise of the Ogre" book, and have been watching the videos. I love Hewlett's line style, with some simple straights, and the ways that the line with varies in his pieces. He also has an amazing sense of color, and I have been trying to incorporate what I learned into the designs, because I think they will work well in Flash.

Below is a sort of progression, from Captain Capitalism, (as he appeared in Nightmare of a Red Christmas), to Stephen Silver's brilliant redesign, to what I have been working on recently.

Of the other designs that Stephen did, the Castro design probably stayed the closest when he was brought into Flash and broken into pieces. The color change is because all of the undead reds are zombie colored, something that will be explained in two episodes.

The Lenin drawing changed a bit more, mainly because of the voice work that was done for the cartoon. I love the original design, but the voice that I had was much too deep to work with this character. I considered redoing the voice, but it took so long to get the audio done on this cartoon, and I need to move forward, so I tried to adapt the design to work with audio.

Mao stayed pretty close to the original design as well. Frank Gabriel did a brilliant read for Mao, and I can't wait to start animating it. Of all the characters, this one so far is the one that is the most complete and ready for animating.

I have become kind of a line nazi, you can probably see it the most in the Mao design since he is broken apart into animatable pieces in Flash already. If you ever worked with drawings done on paper that have been vectorized and brought into Flash, you know how much the lines can change. It is hard not to go into each line and smooth it out and make it even.
Because of the change in character design, I have redone the home page and the animation page. You can now watch some early versions of Captain Capitalism cartoons in the animation section as well. I took them down, because some of them are so bad that I was embarassed, but now I am kind of comfortable in the progression that they show.

The problem with a redesign like this is what to do next. I want to redo the entire website, and all of the merchandise artwork now, but with the time that I have to work on the cartoons that would take forever, so I am just going to move forward with the next cartoon, I have dallied enough recently. Furthermore, I am sure it is going to adapt even further as I work on animating the next cartoon.