A couple of years back I pitched a cartoon storyboard to Frederator called Blackjack & Zits, which was considered funny enough but it was also considered an idea that had been done before. I mean it's basically about a big dumb dog who likes to destroy things and a messed up cat with a broken back and an ill-fitting glass eye.
Approaching the design of the character I started with a series of sketches that culminated with this....
As you can see, the characters were originally called Blackjack & Scratch.
The Scratch name kind of implies that the cat character was always close to meeting his demise. However, I went with the Zits name because it seemed to roll off the tongue better.
As you can see with the sketch above, the character was crudely designed on purpose.
To help get that effect, I drew this sketch with a ballpoint black pen.
The whole idea was to make this character look like a mack truck hit him a couple of hundred times.
Unfortunately, when I went to do a cleaned up drawing of the character, I did a blue ruff and came up with this....
It's not a bad drawing, but it's my habit to want to take the ruffness out of a sketch and slicken up the line. I eventually ditched the idea of doing any clean ups of the character and created all model and storyboard sketches with an Ebony pencil.
