DRAWING WALTER (HOWIE! Behind the Scenes) ✏️

We are so happy with the awesome response you all have shown towards HOWIE!, our quarantine animated project. The second episode is more than halfway done, and we want to get it out as soon as possible. Since the show seems pretty simple in terms of the visuals, I wanted to record a bit of the process on the back end to maybe explain why it takes me weeks to put an episode together.

Every time the story calls for the introduction of a new character, we describe their qualities to our resident character artist, Eric Gershilevich. He returns with some sketches, and almost always nails it on the very first try. Then I use his sketch as the foundation for the character and begin building it up with vector shapes, brushes, and lines in Adobe Illustrator. This character, Walter, took a little over 2 hours (done in 3 sittings) to get right, and that is just the base pose with the base mouth. I usually end up drawing about 6 faces/mouths for each character depending on their emotions in a scene, and 3-4 body poses to add variation. These are just off the top of my head, inspired by the original drawing. I also get to play around with all things related to color, like hair, eyes, and skin tone. Additionally, I enjoy coming up with the color combinations for the clothes as well. Once that’s all said and done, I’ll send a first pass off to Mitch for notes, and we continue to refine until we can put them in the scene and start working. Every episode from here on out will expand the world of HOWIE! which means repeating this process with each new character we meet. We are grinding to get all 5 episodes out as quick as possible, but are taking the time to make sure the quality is always there. Thank you for your patience, we hope you enjoy this BTS timelapse :)

P.S. there is almost definitely a better way of doing everything we are doing to create this show, but if we weren’t just winging it, what would be the fun in it?