After a great time at the Fall Picnic I decided I should post some of the sketches I made while there. So what does this tell you? I spent the entire time drawing instead of socializing? No, but I was trying to get some sketches done so I could get a few things off my plate… Of course not stuff that I needed to get done, but stuff I wanted to draw.
When I started this project I spent a lot of time whining about character design and how I just didn’t have any clue as to how I wanted the characters to look like. I have changed the characters throughout the summer and took a little time this weekend to hopefully come up with a model of Cecil that I can use in the future. Why Cecil? Why not me? To be honest Cecil is easier for me to draw, but also being at a caching event I had people ask me about Cecil’s pathtag and if I had a new one yet.
Now, of course, for some the question is “What is a pathtag?” A pathtag is a collectible signature item used in geocaching. No you don’t need one, but unlike some other options it is affordable, and you can design your own with just photoshop. So I have (or is that had) a few designs for “Professor Zoom” my original caching name. Then I created a few for Cecil since he caches too. Cecil started out with a simple design, and then I created a new version where his face glowed in the dark (radioactivity experiment gone wrong). Finally, a group called the “Jedi Council” opened up and Cecil had to join, so he had a Jedi Council tag. After the adventure of this summer (about 18,000 miles & hundreds of caches found and people met) I have run out of tags!
So either I go back and reorder (boring) or redesign…
I did ask for some ideas and these are no where near final designs, but I thought I would share them here first.
The one as Cecil from Star Trek would go together with the Jedi Council one, but… I wasn’t sure, so I just started playing around and that ended up with work on a “Cecil Archetype” or Master Cecil design, I did a few and ended up with one that I at least liked.
As I was drawing I realized that Cecil has ended up being almost a classic animated character design (his face). So I tried another design thinking back to 1940’s WWII propaganda and came up with what I hope is a winner- I just need to tweak some details so what you are seeing is very rough, but I think it is the next tag- the question becomes color and what other things do I want to do.
So you’ve read this log blog entry without seeing the final Cecil design…
I have some clean up to do, but think this is a Cecil design that I can grow. Next Sue and me… Will I give up Sue’s hair? Only time will tell.