Experience Designer @slalom. Founder, designer, and Illustrator @wattle_n_daub. Boring people to death with UX, illustration, typography, and identity design.

May 6, 2016

Day 7b: Grumpcake

Refining my process for character illustration is going to be important

I love illustration. I love characters. I want to illustrate books and make characters for games etc etc. I don’t care what I just know that I love it. So as a part of this process I am working on my illustration of characters and coming up with ideas. I dont have a ton of time so I’ve started on a backlog of sketches that have been sitting in a folder waiting.

Todays selection…the grumpy cupcake.

His buddy the angry marshmellow may soon follow

I grabed some inspiration for the cupcake hair and the other parts of his cupcake-esque features. This is something that I feel could have been pushed a lot more with additional sketching. However, I just went with what I had already and brought it all into illustrator.

I took inspiration from a couple different cupcakes and combined them together more or less

Through illustrator I started to play around with gradients, highlights, and building out some depth. Switching up his legs made him feel a little less hobbit-ish. All in all, he came our pretty good though, as I said before. I think that additional sketching would’ve helped me either simplify or exagerate some of his features a bit more and found a pose that really speaks to his grumpy demeanor.

All the best!