Wylie Elise Beckert Illustration

Discontentment (and a solution) Posted on 11 Jul 2011

The eagle-eyed among you (the rapt audience that is the internet) may have noticed that the Catrocket illustration in my gallery has changed slightly; you can now see that the character clinging to the rocket is in fact a little girl and not, as you may have previously assumed, a koala in a bad wig.

Maybe you're familiar with the sinking feeling that a completed project isn't what it could have been. Not a complete disaster, just "off." Not a proportional payoff for the time and energy put into it.

Catrocket was one such creeping disappointment. I was thrilled with so much of it - the composition, the colors, the concept. So while digging through my recent illustrations for something appropriate for a promotional postcard mailer, I was surprised to realize that I didn't want Catrocket appearing in the mailrooms of art directors across the globe. I wasn't even too keen on having it in my online portfolio. Rather than scrap it entirely, I decided to take a second look at it and try to figure out where I had gone wrong.

The problem was, in fact, pretty obvious.
I'm not entirely sure what disconnect between brain and hand caused me to render the girl with the approximate proportions and anatomy of a sweet potato. Sleep deprivation is the usual culprit when I find something amiss in my life (milk in the cupboard, keys in the bathroom sink) but I think even in the very wee hours of the morning I should have been aware that a forearm is NEVER the same length as the bridge of a nose.


Fortunately, it was a fast fix; about an afternoon's worth of scribbling and painting to restore some semblance of humanity to the girl and turn Catrocket back into one of my favorites.

I vastly prefer the redo; the anatomy is less fancifully distorted and more in line with the style I like to work in. The girl also appears a bit older, which I think is a good thing since after all she'll need her wits about her to go adventuring on her own with the impetuous Catrocket and his reckless disregard for peril.