Horror Huggies; The Movie

("Disney's Horror Huggies" 2012 Paint & Photoshop)

There is no actual Horror Huggies movie, but how friggin' cool would that be? Am I right? I'm just a big fan of 2D animation, particularly classic Disney style. I wanted to make an illustration telling a narrative of some toys trying to get out of a toy store. I used a similar process that Disney animators use. The background is painted as one layer. The painterly quality makes it sort of blurry and not as sharply rendered as the characters, which helps them stand out from the background. It's a pretty common trick in photography and painting as well as animation. I then drew the characters on a piece of tracing paper, uploaded them to my laptop, and colored them in in Photoshop. The outlines, instead of just black, are all darker versions of what ever color the character is. The bear is outlined in dark brown, the bunny in dark purple. This helps the character look cleaner and more like part of the scene, while still clearly being 2D. I've always been interested in animation, although I don't think I would have the patience necessary to make cartoons. That stuff takes a LOT of work. But it was nice to see what Horror Huggies might look like in a cartoon form. 

The idea here was to draw the soul of an abused and forgotten toy rising out, sort of breaking out of a shell. I think I would like to do another piece like this with more of a background to add to that narrative, but at the time, I thought it would be best to concentrate on the three creatures. 

I decided to give each one a primary color, blue, yellow, and red. Partly to separate them from each other, but also because that specific combination of colors is a very common pallet used in plastic children's toys, and I so it seemed entirely appropriate given that these things are rising out of a broken toy.

Antisocial

("Antisocial" 2014. Photoshop)

There isn't much to say about this picture. It's a simple enough message. I wanted to do an illustration of a child being protected by their imaginary friends, lashing out with these make believe monsters. I sketched out a few variations of this idea, and I'd like to work on some of the others later on. I think my favorite part is probably the cooties buzzing around the above. It was fun trying to picture what cooties would actually look like.