About nine years ago I was commissioned to produce artwork for a Ronald McDonald mini-comic. If memory serves me correctly the comic was to be given away with Happy Meals at McDonald's. The job came my way via Egmont, who edited and packaged the comic for McDonald's.
As with any licensed property, the client want the characters to be as 'on model' as possible and McDonald's were no exception. They really wanted Ronald and his pals to be exactly as seen in the style guide, even down to the colours. It took a couple of attempts to get the strip exactly as they wanted it. You can see the final results here. Above is the cover to the comic, and below is one of the four pages of the strip (before speech balloons were added).
I was also asked to provide a Funny Find It puzzle spread, based on the sort of thing I had done for Egmont's Know How magazine. There was more flexibility with this, and I was able to draw it in my own style. I believe the rest of the comic featured various puzzles supplied by Egmont.
I never saw the published comic unfortunately, so I don't really know what the actual title of it was or if there was more than one issue. (I only contributed to the one.) If any of you out there have a copy of the one shown here, I'd appreciate more info about it if possible.
Being a freelance artist often brings in unexpected jobs that make a fun diversion from the regular material. (Not that the regular material isn't fun too of course.) One such job came my way in (I think) 2005 when I was commissioned to draw cartoons for Kellogg's Coco-Pops breakfast cereal.
The client wanted a couple of puzzle pics. One, a double-page spread similar to the 'Funny Find-It' spreads I did for Know How magazine, and the other a spot-the-difference cartoon. The cartoons featured the Kelloggs characters, which had to be drawn accurately.
I can't remember now what they were actually printed in. I think they were for a giveaway mini-mag but I never saw a copy. (If anyone out there has one, please let me know.)
Anyway, I thought you might like to see the artwork, first in the pencil stage (which I had to send off for approval) and then the finished art.
Over the last 30 years about 99% of my work has been exclusively for comics. Maybe even 99.9%. I haven't kept count. However, sometimes I'll be contacted by companies outside of comics to do commercial illustrations for them. Often, it makes a refreshing change, especially when it's for a good client. (And every artist has horror stories about the bad clients, but I don't use my blog for muckraking.) It can be a rewarding experience and it's an area I'd like to venture into more often really. (As long as I can keep doing comics as well of course.)
One pleasurable job recently was doing a few illustrations for Meello, the crowdsourcing company for the built environment. There's the builder 'John' on this blog, and you can see him in context at the Meello website:
http://meello.co/
Perhaps I'll show some of my other non-comics work here sometime if enough people are interested?
