OUAN602 PPP3: Qwertee

I decided to illustrate a couple of designs to enter to Qwertee again. I entered a handful when I was doing Responsive and I really enjoyed seeing the feedback I got for my work, it kept inspiring me to do more. Career wise, it's looking like I'm probably going to distance myself from animating and concentrate on my drawing skills, I thought this would be a good opportunity to polish them.

I really enjoy creating fan art of existing characters and you often see lots of weird and wonderful hybrids of characters being featured on t-shirts on Qwertee, so I decided to have a go for myself. 

• Catbus

For my first design, I decided to create a hybrid of Catbus, who was featured in Studio Ghibli's My Neighbour Totoro, and Catbug from the online cartoon Bravest Warriors.

I decided to do this because 1) I love both characters and 2) because of the play on words with their names. 

The design was very straightforward to do due to Catbug's simple features. I illustrated the majority in SAI and cleaned up in Photoshop along with adding the text. 

The term 'I'm Catbus' comes from Catbug's catchphrase 'I'm Catbug!' which hopefully the audience will know. Catbus comes complete with sugarpeas which he is famously known for dropping them. I do like this design, however I do feel like I could have made it a bit more Ghibli like. 

It is currently up for voting and I'm looking forward to hearing some feedback. 

• Vaporeon

My second design is a simplified linear illustration of the Pokemon Vaporeon. I have always loved anything that evolved from Eevee therefore I wanted to create a really pretty design for an Eeveeloution. 

I chose to design the water Pokemon Vaporeon with a watercolour effect. I drew the Vaporeon with very simplified features to amplify the colour. I used a mixture of the acrylic and watercolour brushes with a colour palette of different shades of blues, whites and pinks to create the desired effect, then blending them all together. I wasn't too keen on the design on my screen as I thought it looked quite bland but once I had added it to the Qwertee t-shirt template the colours really popped on the black t-shirt and I am very happy with it. 

Again, this design is now up for voting and I look forward to seeing how many votes it gets. I will continue to submit to Qwertee with work like this. I have considered submitting to RedBubble but I will only do that with work that is 100% my own characters. I know many people do it, but I don't really like the thought of making money with designs that features copyrighted characters.