Polar Bear Design Sketches

Here's a series of sketches where I had to design a Polar Bear character.
At first I thought it might be quite tricky to come up with enough variations of a polar bear, but done in a simple cartoony style, a long line here and a shorter distance there made all the difference and completely transformed one design to another! It's quite hard to do simple drawings too quickly, as a slip of the pen can alter the look of something too much and end up not looking like the image you were going for.
But I was really happy with the way these turned out, and am getting really comfortable sketching straight into Painter.

My Team Your Team

Have had loads of fun playing this game which I was shown from Kevin Cornell's excellent 'Bearskinrug' site (http://www.bearskinrug.co.uk/). Basically you play with another person and try to come up with superhero types that beat the previous character's skill or power - the more ridiculous the better! This pic is a run of heroes my girlfriend and I did recently.

I found it a nice way to relax and doodle, and you tend to come up with characters that you wouldn't otherwise think of doing. Give it a whirl!

First post!

Well here we go, my first post to my new blog! I've chosen a piece I'm currently working on in my day job as a designer and illustrator. It's for a series of books telling recent significant events in history (first car to the town, huge storms and snowfalls, that sort of thing). Anyway, I did it all in Corel Painter X on a Wacom tablet (as is most of my stuff these days), and is the first time I've illustrated anything like this - it's come out pretty well, methinks!

Any comments welcome, more stuff to follow soon!