POP

Done mostly in Painter with a "base" drawn in Photoshop-- no outside textures, and no vectors were used.

This is more or less what I think of when I hear the word "pop", hehe. But that’s basically what I had to do. Illustrate the word.

I've really had fun with the whimsical lately, though I still like to try grounding the ideas in some practicality. This is basically an illustration of kids playing (or not?) with pedal-powered toys. I initially asked myself: what if Fisher Price had handled a pedal-powered zeppelin or glider? I was sort of thinking back to the wildly impractical proportions of a “trike car” I used to ride: [link]
(You probably had one of these too—I’ve seen a lot of ‘em!)

Anyway, I’ve long had a fixation with human powered (usually pedal-powered) vehicles, especially flying machines. While I didn’t really use any hard reference for this whole image, I was inspired by the White Dwarf pedal-powered balloon for the boy’s toy vehicle, and projects like NASA’s “Gossamer Albatross” pedal powered glider project for the spiked pink glider. I studied a diagram of the Gossamer Condor (a variation) to get an idea of it.

The mean neighbor girl has an especially sharp counterbalance on her vehicle (so the spike actually does serve a purpose for the flight), ideal for bringing down her victim playmates. Depending on how you interpret it (do you think these characters are capable of dying?) this could be seen as dark humor or just light fun.

Putting the face on the zeppelin was so much fun! I didn’t think I could really enjoy doing cute stuff that didn’t quite make sense. I think I also expanded my horizons with this in the sense that I’d had sort of a phobia of doing a cartoon-ish style. (I think it came out a little better than I expected. I realize that the boy is kind of homely, but I like it like that.) I’ll definitely consider this style and approach in the future.

Done for Ed Kinsella, Andrea Wicklund, and Robin Eley.