From the Freelance Files- 3M Calendar

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This was an odd job from early last year. A design company was doing a calendar for some client and one of the months they wanted a comic book “superhero” designed that would represent a color process or technology from 3M called “Q-Def”. They wanted a little humorous look to it, rather than a more serious comic book look… that’s why they called me.

We needed to explore some ideas of the look of the character, so I gave them 4 different concepts. Three human characters and a robot:

Then I worked a bit on the “Q-Def” logo. I really hate doing logos, but this was not too taxing:

They liked the robot, but were not sure if they wanted something more obviously robotic ala “Iron Giant” or something that might be more of an “Iron Man” look. So I did a couple of robot concept sketches:

Ultimately, we combined a couple of different elements from the two robots, simplified the cityscape and ditched the logo for a simple title on the breastplate. Final pencil rough here, color final at top of post:

A lot of concept work here, and these are just the sketches I showed to the client… I probably did three times this many drawings noodling around trying to come up with different ideas. This is a good example of why you need to consider how much work you will spend on the concept stages of a job when pricing it. I did and was paid for that concept work as well as the final.