I was never completely satisfied with the illustrations in our style guide. I felt the faces didn't have enough expression, and the bottom-heavy body shapes weren't as cute as I was hoping for.
So when we began developing the animated series, the Doodlebops Rockin' Road Show, I hired Guru Studios, an up and coming design firm, to develop a new set of character designs.
This piece of art is a color digital print of an alternative character design style we initially considered. The faces and bodies are adorable, but we ultimately passed on this approach because we were worried the characters would be hard to animate. I wanted the characters to have more human body proportions so our animated dance sequences could include real choreography.
We eventually landed on the following design style which works better for a digital animation pipeline.
But it was a tough call, and this piece of art remained on my wall for years.