Character Posters Through the Years

As promised in the previous blog, here is a brief history of my Character Posters.
Over the last 10 years I've attempted many, but to date only four have been completed, namely the versions from 2000, 2001, 2004 and 2009. Here they are;


I always had a mandate in mind that I should do one of these posters every year, I suppose the main reason being that my cartoons use several different styles and I used to like drawing them all together to see where I could merge the styles together. I was always worried that by employing different styles I was confusing my development, (hence by the time I drew the third one in 2001 all characters were drawn similarly). Lately, I've realised that having different styles only adds to the overall diversity, so in the latest one I have drawn each one as different as necessary. A couple of these include characters designed by my colleague Nathan Manders, as a nod to our history or collaborations.

Anyway, the current 2009 batch of characters looks as follows;

Over the last year I have been drawing each character seperately and adding the designs to a reference database, and this means I can pluck any character out at any time and use it in any context (such as a character poster). By this April (12 months after beginning the project) I should be able to add several more characters to this picture. So, watch this space.