Cartoon Soldier

Here are a couple of cartoon soldiers from different parts of the world and different time periods in history. Perhaps I will start a series of these. This gives me a good excuse to keep experimenting with various techniques. Outlining with different tools and rendering the colors differently gives you an infinite amount of possibilities.

Sneaker Pimp

Here is a character design I did for my good friend Steven Jones, for his clothing label, Soul Ova Gold. Steve's urban clothing line should be launching some time in Spring of 2008 and many of the T-shirts will be featuring artwork by yours truly. To keep up to date on Soul Ova Gold, goto www.soulovagold.com
Next up is a character design for a short comic book story and a grumpy old man wondering why all the beer is gone. This caricature is based loosely on actor Burgess Meredith, from Grumpy Old Men.

STEVE MASSERONI

My good friend artist Steve Masseroni just launched his new website recently and it is a must see site. I had the pleasure of working with Steve on a project called The Silver Cord this summer. I had a good time collaborating on the pages with him. It was fun and a great learning process, plus I met some new friends. Here are 2 of the pages we worked on together. They were pencilled by Steve and I provide the color under his art direction. If all goes well , Silver Cord should be out in the book stores sometime in 2008. Everybody involved has big plans for this project, but I can't say too much about it at this point. So head over to Steve's site, to learn more about the Silver Cord and see why this brother of mine is so Rockin'
http://www.mazz-art.com/

Cartoon Character design

Here are a few sketches of character design I have been working on recently. I decided to explore a different approach to the coloring. For these I don't concern myself with rendering to the point of detail that I achieve with some of my other pieces, but instead keep the detail to a minimum of detail and very little shading. I pick a flat color, a darker tone of that color for shade and a darker version for the colored outline. This gives it a nice animation character design quality. The inspiration for these come from a combination of everyday people I see around me, and character designers/cartoonist that work on animated films like the kind put out by Disney, Dreamworks animation, Pixar, anime etc.
No matter what style I work in, I try to make sure I keep my own signature style in there somewhere. I am working on a bunch of other characters done in a similar style, so I will be posting them as I complete them. I find this style fun, easy and liberating, so I decided to explore it further.