United States Major cartoon character mascot design

This cartoon illustration of a U.S. Military Major was developed for a client who needed a cartoon mascot representing the concept of "Major Change". For some reason at the outset I had thought this was to be a bulldog in military garb, not an actual human. The bulldog chomping on a cigar pretty much defined the direction for the early sketches (the client and I had clarified the details beofre we went to sketch stage, so the bulldog idea was nipped in the bud).

Many sketches of the soldier were worked up prior to arriving at the final design. This was another illustration project where I spend quite a bit of time at the initial sketch stage getting things just right. I don't like to sunmit any ideas to the client until I am happy with them, and many times this results in my having gone through so many revisions and tweaks that by the time I get the "initial" sketch to the client, I've already worked things out to where the first sketch they see is the one they go with. I rarely send rough sketches out, usually finished roughs, and as I mantioned these have been rigorously worked over by the time the client sees anything.

We had to tweak the hand doing the salute as I had a funky Don Martin thing going on that needed to be toned down. Other than that the final vector art you see here had very minor tweaks from the initlal vectoring.

I also liked how the client referred to the pseudo-retro background shape as "that Star Trek thing"!

Need custom cartoon illustration? Please contact me.

entire contents ©1995-2008 George Coghill