I went out to lunch with friend Phil Rynda & classmate (& McMullan student) Tom Herpich, as well as just-met-her-but-she’s-awesome-as-octopus-on-a-stick Natasha Allegri the other day. I got the pleasure of looking at tons of Adventure Time drawings that they’ve been working on for the last couple of months. Their work blew me away. The characters are so simple, but they’re incredibly expressive. The backgrounds are detailed and gorgeous. And the whole show is candy-coated with a sweet glaze of ridiculousness. I really can’t wait to see the show.

I made these while waiting for an iPhone game to compile. I love the challenge of trying to cram as much shape and character into as few pixels as possible. It forces me to come up with ideas for representing the character without directly drawing their details.

(ref image)

For instance, if you look at Jake’s snout, it’s basically two hanging flaps of skin hanging from his nose, split by his mouth. I couldn’t draw the outline of his snout, so I opted for two darker pixels to represent the shape. It took me a while to find where his eyes should go without butting into the white of Finn’s cap.

Fun to do! Back to coding time now.

[edit: Fred Seibert asked me if I had any larger images, and I whipped these two up.