Boo Berry

I'm happy to present to you the final piece in my General Mills cereal mascot series. This time one of my favorites, Boo Berry.

 I'd like to share an what the process of creating this piece was like from start to finish. First step, is to come up with a redesign for the Boo Berry character.

Boo Berry was the most challenging of the 3 characters to redesign. There isn't much to him except for the hat and the bow-tie, so I wanted to make sure I made my redesign somewhat recognizable. Maybe not to the point where everyone sees it right away, but as long as you can make a guess and believe that it could be him.

I like to just scribble random ideas down in my tiny moleskine sketchbook. A lot of the time these wind up looking really ugly and not too special, but it helps me not care so much about the quality of the drawing thus helping me focus on the design. I really live the bottom right sketch (above image), but I thought it looked too far off from Boo Berry. I hope I get to use that design for a later project, but we'll see.

Next, I try doing some digital sketching. Sometimes using a different medium helps change the way I approach drawing and I'll come up with different ideas . I wound up sticking pretty close the the bottom sketch (above image).

Now that I'm happy with a design, I decide to start building up a composition and a story. During the design stage I try to keep in mind that there should be an overall story to go along with the final image. I sketch some rough ideas for what I want going on and different ways to show the many scenarios. I wound up falling in love with the last sketch (bottom right, above image).

I roughly drew out everything once I settled on a sketch. From there I lowered the transparency and executed the final drawing on a separate layer above the sketch. This way I don't have to worry about hiding the sketchy marks in the painting stage.

Next, I do a some really rough coloring under the final drawing. This way I can figure out how I want to organize values and colors. When I moved onto the final painting I did a lot of color picking from the above image.

Above you can see that I've rendered out the entire image...except for one important part...can you tell what it is? Yes, I didn't sign it yet but I also left out Boo Berry. The reason for this was that at the start of this piece I knew I wanted to have Boo Berry transparent to make him look more ghostly and also it looks cool too.

 I place the drawing of Boo Berry on top of the background and render away at the character. Once he's done, I used a layer mask to add transparency to certain areas.

And that was it! This was a really fun piece to work on and I feel like I really pushed my self in certain areas like the foreshortening of his hand reaching out for the basket of blueberries as well as the transparency of the character and every the rendering of the foliage up front. All of these are things I haven't really done much of before I they're all packed into this one piece. I hope you enjoy looking at this piece. I really enjoyed painting it.