Emmy award-winning Director/Producer Erin O’Malley needed a vanity plate or title card – the short animations or still images you see at the end of a TV show – for her production company. She had me put together proposals for her concept, a woman punching at the camera accompanied by the audio “What Doing?!” (which had a personal story behind it for her). She also wanted to include nods to her Irish heritage and to having grown up in Tucson, Arizona. A cool idea for the tattoos on the characters is that they could be updated for each project, to honor the cast, crew or some project-specific experience.
These images will be used as the starting point for an animation. (Process pictures are below or see here for the custom lettering development.)
Mood Boards
We explored a few more options for the visual style, but these were the favorites and we went with the Tattoo/Old Hollywood/1920’s.
Sketch to Final Art
Character branding is always tricky, I like to start by designing the character first because it can be difficult to align on the right features. Then I move on to layout and lettering ideas before going to color and final art. This character was to be a nod to her Irish heritage but we wanted to leave the race somewhat open to interpretation as she was to be a symbol of female power and pride as opposed to a likeness of Erin herself.
Animation Reference
After getting the layout approved, I provided these key poses for animation reference. Hopefully, I’ll have that ready to share soon, or maybe you’ll see it after watching some show.
