Advertising agencies need illustrations now and again. I like the work. A couple of years ago, a very fine agency asked me to work with them on the area 9-1-1 account. It was all about educating the populace about using cell phones to contact 9-1-1. Contrary to what all conspiracy people and most average folk will tell you, 9-1-1 cannot locate your cell signal through some rapidly-becoming-commonplace technique of triangulating. I will not speculate if there are any agencies outside of an action movie that can click computer buttons and find your cell phone, but in the real world? 9-1-1 is pretty helpless to find you because of the way cell towers shuffle signals around just to keep the whole mess working on a day-to-day basis.
Wow. That got off onto a tangent. Back to the point: I have fun doing the initial sketches for advertising projects. They didn’t have any idea what sort of characters they wanted, only that they wanted to do a comic book and it would have to have characters in it. Fun. I drew a few dozen for them to start from. Here are a few:
Lots of fun, being given a parameter like “It’s about cell phone callers and 9-1-1. Other than that, we have no idea” Your imagination can go off in any and all directions, because you never know what’s going to strike the client as appropriate or fun or just happens to dovetail with some other idea they forgot to mention to you in the meeting.
I left out the sketches that led up to the actual characters. Honestly, I left out a LOT of sketches that didn’t lead to anything. Yet. That’s the other fun part. There’s a pirate character I’d love to trot out for something else another day. I wouldn’t mind using a couple of the sketches here to do something fun one day.
But there’s no time for that now- Now is when you get the characters as they were (are) used:
