What the heck do you do anyway?

This is going to be a short one but very informative. I’m going to break down my job which is kind of weird in the best way that I can. I’m what’s known as a brand licensing illustrator. 

So, I’m constantly asked by friends and family like ALL THE TIME, so what the hell do you do? Basically, companies like Nickelodeon, that have character based properties have what they call style guides that help with the licensing of that property. These guides contain company approved art that licensees or people or companies that get paid to license that particular property can use. For example let’s say you’re a sock company and to sell more socks you license a particular cartoon show. The company that owns that license will send you their style guide for that license.

You’d take that style guide and use the approved art it contains to enhance your socks by having that art printed on the socks that you produce. My job is to illustrate those style guides. I basically produce approved character art for those companies or licensors. That said, I can work on both sides of the industry. I can work for the licensors and sometimes the people who buy a license for a particular property will hire me to produce approved artwork to put on their product. 

I have the ability to work in a bunch of styles and looks to produce artwork that the owners of that property will pretty much approve on receipt. Sounds simple but it’s a much trickier thing to do than you think. Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself. Sit down and draw Bugs Bunny… ON MODEL. If you can get Warner Bros. To approve that art, I’ll give you 5 bucks and my first born.

Disney as a company has to be the pickiest. When I worked for a small Manhattan toy company. One of our licenses was Disney and every product that we designed would have to be examined by a team of people whose job was literally to look at the characters and make sure they were drawn correctly. Oh man, the stories I could tell… however, as I progressed in my art career I learned how vital this process was. Imagine 10 different companies all producing Disney products. To keep the look consistent across that industry the characters had to be drawn correctly or on-model.

While I was learning that particular skill (illustrating different characters on-model) the amount of times that I had to redo things was insane. Now, it’s second nature to me but I spent many sleepless nights mastering styles with a pencil & then carefully inking things in that particular style were long and hard. Inking digitally made things a little easier but that was a skill within itself that I had to get the hang of.

So, that’s basically what I do along with producing children’s book art. Now, sometimes these things crossover. A good example of that is when I was hired to do a Teenage Mutant Ninja kids book. It was the pretty much same deal. The characters had to be on model, while they were telling a story. I had a lot of fun on that project but it was exactly the same thing as illustrating a style guide. I hope that kind of explains what I do all day.

Now, you can add comic book art to the mix. The only difference is that I get to work in my own style!

So, if you have a property & need a brand licensing style guide for it, give me a call. I’m also well versed in web design so I can put your style guide online for you and secure it with various security protocols so that only your paying licensees have access to it.

Well people, that does it for this post. I’ll see you all in the next one! See ya when I see ya!!!

L