Animals Dancing: Drawings and my Design Process

I thought it would be fun to share my sketching and design process from a recent series of characters I created for work. The theme was "Dance Party" and my assignment was to come up with six cartoon animals that each referenced a style of dance.

At work, I draw everything digitally. It saves a lot of time and makes corrections simple and easy. The tablet I use is a Wacom Intuos 3 (medium size). It took me awhile to get used to drawing digitally with one of these. My lines still don't come out the way I want them to and sometimes I have to redraw a line several times to get what I'm looking for. These are meant to be rough drawings at this stage. The drawing program I use Sketchbook Pro.

For the poses, I tried to stay loose and be gestural. I tend to exaggerate the pose slightly in the beginning, so that when I add more details the pose won't look stiff (ideally).

Here's a link to the final product. This set of animals was designed for machine embroidery and are for sale at Embroidery Library.

Thank you for stopping by and checking out my work. I hope this was helpful and inspiring. Please leave a comment or send an e-mail if you have any questions.