Bogdan Trole

Allow me to introduce Mr. Bogdan Trole. Bogdan is the 'work experience' kid over at People Magazine, and he's been lucky enough to get his own spot in the magazine.

Bogdan is a sub-human character, and according to the People team, "just climbed out of the primordial slime". For over a year he has been referred to around the magazine, and has recently started making comments around the People Facebook page.

It was time to bring the little fella to life.

The trick with this project was to keep him young-looking and likeable. He's more of an idiot savant than an ogre. So I eagerly set out to draw up a few quick variations on his head - as well as different poses - to see which way the team wanted to go....

They liked "C" and "3", so I went ahead and drew up a sketch in a pose that they could use easily throughout the magazine.

We also needed him to do a 'thumbs up', so I figured it into the pose that I could draw an alternate right arm to kill two birds with the one stone.

Next up was inking (I did this digitally, trying to retain a true brush feel - I just didn't have the time to use traditional materials on this project, although I really wanted to) and added some flat colour.

I sent the client a few colour variations on the shirt to choose from. I always preview on a mid-grey to see how the colours work on a background other than white. In fact, I have in my working file blues, greens, yellows etc. just to make sure it can be used across the magazine easily.

And once brown was chosen, I went ahead and worked up the colour and shading to final art. Here's our little fella making his debut appearance in last week's issue of People:

Thanks for stopping by! And grab yourself a copy of this week's People mag if you're into celebrities, nude girls, nude celebrities and gormless sub-human freaks.

~ Anton