Caddy Shanks illustrations

I did these two fun illustrations for Caddy Shanks, a virtual golf and games facility in Sarasota, FL. I found the gig on Craig's List. I sent some samples of my work in and had a brief exchange with them, but they didn't end up actually hiring me until a few months later. They told me they needed two illustrations based on their pre-existing mascot, Angus (the original drawing of which is viewable in the header on the front page of their website). I was told that they needed a drawing of Angus riding a Mario Kart-like car through a wall, and another of him playing Nintendo Wii, and that these illustrations would be blown up to be quite large and placed on their walls. I did these two rough illustrations for the client:
I was so happy with the composition and energy of these sketches, that I blew them up and traced directly over them to do the pencils:
I had to use a bit of reference material for these drawings. I Google Image Searched racing uniforms and I used Google Sketchup models to draw the Wiimote and the car. I honestly don't know how to draw complex mechanical objects without Google Sketchup. That's one of the reasons, probably the primary reason, that I wish I went to school for illustration. Here are the finished inks:
Since I knew these were going to have to be blown up to a very large size, I made them vector graphics, as opposed to raster. This meant scanning the images at high resolution and contrast and using a program vectorize them. Most people use LiveTrace in Illustrator to do this, but I've never been able to get that to work for some reason and have stuck to Adobe's old Streamline program. I'm not great with Illustrator, so I actually Multifilled and Flattened the images in Photoshop and then vectorized the resulting blobs of color and placed them behind the line art in Illustrator so that I would not have to trace each block of color by hand. I'm sure there's a better way to do this. After selecting each of the colors, and adding some Miis in to the background of the Wii image at the client's request, I had the finished images you see at the top of this post.

I was pretty happy with these. There's definitely a strong Mario influence in the way I drew the character, a choice I made because of the involvement of the Wii and the client's Mario Kart reference. Every now and then I try my hand at drawing some more stylized and light cartoony images. I think I'm getting better by building on previous efforts, and it's a style of illustration that I'm looking forward to exploring more.

Come back next Sunday to see some of the more traditional design work that I've been doing lately. Become a fan of my Illustration & Design on Facebook to keep up to date!

BONUS: Here are a bunch of photos of the illustrations up on location.