One of the real benefits to taking on freelance projects is the opportunity to challenge yourself with unexpected subject matter. Since we all have our preferred subjects and styles, it is really beneficial to get an assignment that involves none of those things. Keeps me on my toes. What would be the fun in working if it was all easy? (sarcasm, by the way, NONE of it has ever been easy for me.)

Now I have an assignment that involves sports. This is not a topic I am particularly interested in, but fortunately I AM very interested in figures in dynamic motion. This particular project is giving me an opportunity to work on the idea of silhouette. This is a fundamental principle in character design for animation that I have been very aware of lately, so the chance to put it into practice excites me a lot.

The big challenge of these drawings is that they need to read clearly at the final print size of about 1 square inch.

I’m also working with an existing style and the challenge of keeping the characters “on model” with the original illustrations. So once I had achieved poses that I thought would read with reduced detail and at a small size, I was challenged with getting the proportions adjusted to fit the original style of illustration without completely obscuring the poses.