(Insert stupid Blog name here)

 

Just contacted Fred and have one reserved for me

Thanks for the compliments! I have never printed anything like them before, so I went to OfficeMax and asked the manager of their print & document services department what I should do. Guess they gave me some good advice

I won't post Dave's original sketch here unless he wants me to

 

I don't mind. Although it's really, really, really, really rough and the result of about 5 minutes of Wacom scribbles in Photoshop. But it served it's purpose.

 

And yes, he is wearing striped underwear in my rough. To really distance this character from the traditional storybook guy I really though he should be a curmudgeon. An almost unlikeable character with a nasty attitude who's always frowning or grimacing. Think Louie De Palma in cookie form.

This man is causing me nightmares.

 

I don't mind. Although it's really, really, really, really rough and the result of about 5 minutes of Wacom scribbles in Photoshop. But it served it's purpose.

 

And yes, he is wearing striped underwear in my rough. To really distance this character from the traditional storybook guy I really though he should be a curmudgeon. An almost unlikeable character with a nasty attitude who's always frowning or grimacing. Think Louie De Palma in cookie form.

 

Here it is:

 

It did the job of getting Dave's concept across to me, although I decided against making him an underwear-wearing grouch. I thought more of an action-hero approach would be more suited to the game. Kind of odd that a cookie wearing underwear is somehow more disturbing than one not wearing anything.

 

I really liked the idea of giving him some sort of consistent attitude throughout the manual. That was an important factor in making the whole thing work.

Dave's rough version remind me of the Toxic Avenger!

 

It'd would had been funny watching more history of Gingy getting tortured with a cookie cutter before being baked.

 

The hardest part in all of this? Making the frosting on his hands and feet look good.

Just an after thought, I felt you should of added some frosting to fill the eyes of Gingy to make them more defined, it would make his expression much more relevent than it is now.

As an animator, I always believe the center of the character is in the eyes (like the window to the soul). I know Gingy is just a cookie cut out and maybe it really was your intention to make the eyes empty to remind us of that, but even Gingy's lifeless eyes in the shrek films gave me the same impression. Again, may have been intentional, but that's just me.

 

Anyway, very nice job. The game always become much more fun to play when such nice looking artwork in the manual sets the stage up in the player's mind to see it happen in their imagination while playing the game.

I bet most people don't realize that happening to them while looking at your label art, but we artists always do! It's the power to convey the emotions through pictures and I see alot of it exploding on the cover!

The reason I made the eyes that way was I wanted them to look as if someone had really piped them out using frosting. There were other ways of approaching them, and this has some compromises with it, but I wanted them to look like frosting - not actual eyes.