Pug sticker

I recently asked my Facebook followers ideas for something cool to draw for a sticker design. I received hundreds of ideas but one that really caught my attention was the pug. There's nothing special about this idea more than any other, but when it was mentioned, I instantly wanted to draw the pug's face. Here's a brief rundown for my work process, which was quick by my standards.





Once I had the quick sketch drawn (above) I scanned it in and traced over it using the pen and blob tools in Adobe Illustrator (an aside: I've been contemplating upgrading to Creative Cloud...more on my experiences with Adobe CC on this blog when I embark on the process.)

The pug on his own, while cute, didn't really seem to say or do much as a design. Rummaging through my old sketchbooks yielded an old concept I began toying with but never developed at the time. It centered around the old Mark Twain quote: "It is not the size of the dog in the fight, it is the size of the fight in the dog.

So I used an old trick of mine of incorporating a gigantic shadow to represent the inner spirit, last seen on my koala t-shirt design:

In the final example (below) you can see I tried to make the shadow a bit more convincing in terms of illuminated light hitting the subject matter. Though even here, I had to exaggerate the angle of the light considerably (not to mention ignore the absence of an actual light source in the frame).

The above has been sent off to the sticker printers at 10x6cm size - just the correct size to fit on the back of a smartphone such as the Samsung Galaxy SIII or the iPhone4.