On the blog for my caricature concession company (my “real job”), Caricature Connection, we’ve started a weekly challenge for all of the artists. So far, unfortunately, there’s not a lot of participation. I’m hoping that changes. I am going to occasionally post some of my challenge entries over here as well, to share them with you guys. I hope you like them. This first one is from this week’s challenge, Trick or Treat. I’ve been reading Amid Amidi’s amazing book, CARTOON MODERN, and was inspired by it to do something very design oriented. I thought it might be fun to show you the stages I went through here for this piece. In my continuing quest to be able to be “paperless”, I drew this all digitally, on the Wacom. The first sketch (the one on the bottom) was in Photoshop, then I colored it. Then, to try another style, I colored over my lines (this is the middle one). I liked it, but it still looked rough to me. So, I imported it into Illustrator as a template, and traced over it with MANY, MANY layers. I think about thirty of them! It was a lot of work this way (surely there’s an easier method?), but I really kind of like the final piece.