Sunday, April 08, 2007

Storked!



More character design work. They wanted a drunken stork, and they wanting him to be reclining back a bit, so he could be leaning on something. Man, I love doing this kind of stuff!

The really interesting thing here is that I did a lot of the research, mental work, and sketching on this guy probably two years ago, for another client. How so? Well, that client wanted me to update a badly drawn character he had, named "Storko", for a line of baby's clothes, I believe. Yeah, I know, real creative name. Unfortunately, I underquoted the job a bit, because at the time I was wanting more character design work, and it seemed like a quick, easy one to do.

Long story short, the guy turned out to be rude, hard to work with, and kept wanting knitpicky revisions on the sketches. He landed up trying to "renegotiate" on the fee we'd already agreed to (which was, again, lower than it should've been). I always get a credit card upfront, but since we were only in the sketch stage, I didn't even charge him. Frankly, I didn't care. I was just ready to be done with him! I've never done this before and wouldn't again. I'd charge his card regardless.

Fast forward to now, (when I do much more of this character design stuff) and THIS job comes in. I quickly resurrected my "Storko" sketches and my reference photos from google, and took off. This guy came out perfect the first time I drew him. The client loved him, paid well, and everyone's happy.

The moral? Keep those old sketches, people! You never know when you'll get to use them. Sometimes old jobs aren't really dead- they can come back to life in another form!

The other moral? Don't work for anyone who wants you to redesign their "Storko" character.