Recent Work

This is one of a group of illustrations I did for a good client of mine. Since over the years I've done so many gift caricatures, whether they're of single people or huge groups for corporate clients, it's fun to do this kind of thing. My guidelines were " Two young hip people, one guy and one girl, using lots of tech.... laptops, blackberry, cellphone, ipod, etc. At large conference table." It's on their website, and in some printed materials for them, so in order to have a lot of flexibility with the images, they requested I leave plenty of open space around the characters, with no real background behind them.

I'm actually getting a lot more of this type of project where I can do my character design/cartoon illustration style, and I like it. I'll try to post some other recent examples as well.

The Toony Bin: Cereal Mascots

The Toony Bin's character design challenge this week was for Cereal Mascots. I figured most people would do Toucan Sam, Snap Crackle and Pop, Tony the Tiger, stuff like that. So, I found a site that has tons of cereal mascots on it as a reference. I saw these two characters, Klondike Pete and his donkey, Thorndike, from a cereal I barely remember called Crunchy Nuggets. The original illos of them were pretty great, actually. I don't think I improved on them one bit! LOL
Really, I just thought they looked fun to draw, and wanted to play around with a couple of new Photoshop brushes for the coloring. I think there's some interesting things I learned with the brushes, but I have a long way to go with them before I do a convincing watercolor look. Actually, this looks a good bit like colored markers now that I look at it. Anyway...

Crissman Quads

From the files....

About two years ago, I had a good client of mine contact me. She wanted me to do some artwork for some friends of hers. A young couple, they'd just found out that they were having QUADRUPLETS. Naturally, I might add...no fertility drugs involved. That's EXTREMELY rare.

Their friends and family wanted to start a website where people could make donations to help out financially if they wanted, but mainly just so that people could follow the quads' development.

I was glad to help out, and did the above drawing for them.

http://thecrissmanquads.blogspot.com/

Keelan Eats... Boy, does he!

Awhile back, a dear friend of mine encouraged me to keep this particular blog all business, for fans of my art, and to keep personal stuff, well, personal. I agreed in theory, and started a few other blogs for those who want to read more personal ramblings. One of those is my workout blog "Keelan's BodyShop" and the newest is, "Keelan Eats". On this one, I plan to put in restaurant reviews from all over the world, from mine and my family's travels. ( BTW, if you've eaten with me before at cool places and want to send me some photos of those restaurants so I can post them, I'd really like that.. I hate to miss out on mentioning places I've already been to).

Anyway, I've always appreciated reading restaurants reviews so I don't have to try things "blindly", and my family and I eat out so often, that me writing my own restaurant review blog was probably inevitable.

If you're interested, give it a visit. Hope you find it entertaining and useful!
http://keelaneats.blogspot.com/

Let's TOON Caricatures! : New Look

Yep, times are a-changin', and so is my Let's TOON CARICATURES book. I am coming DANGEROUSLY close to the end of our second printing of this title, and I am shopping it around to some new printers to do our third. Someday, I am going to update the entire book and bring it closer to how I actually draw these days ( I drew some of the material in the book a DECADE ago). But for now, I am just updating the cover (and maybe a page here or there... we'll see). With a new kid, a new dog, and an ever evolving drawing style, I had to do SOMETHING.



In contrast, here's the original (current) cover. I don't want people to think it's a totally revamped version of the book, so I wanted to stay in the same basic style and look of the original image. That was a bit of a challenge, to meld my current style with that of a decade ago. I think it worked pretty well, though. It DOES make me look forward to a totally new version in the future. One of these days....

The book continues to surprise me, training artists around the world for over six years , and it's sales are actually stronger than ever ( thanks to a combination of Amazon.com, our websites, and our retail stands).

Here's to the future... the new cover is just the first step!

Harley Quinn

A good buddy of mine ( hey, Loco! ), mentioned he'd like to see my take on the Harley Quinn character from Batman Animated. Since I've been playing around with teh trial version of Sketchbook Pro 2010, I decided to sketch her for him in that program. Finishes and letters were done in Photoshop, by the way.

Mr. Saturday Night

This week's "Toony Bin" submission. I didn't know exactly what they had in mind with the subject, but just decided to let my pen roam. In the new Sketchbook Pro 2010, to be exact. I downloaded the trial recently, and have been trying it out. There's a few things I'd change here and there (isn't there always?), but overall, I liked how this guy turned out. BTW, I even colored it in Sketchbook... a first. All I did in Photoshop this time was the chalky bg.