It's a turtle, not an alien. One of many indicators that this design didn't achieve its goal of letting me have a nice easy afternoon of not massaging the ego of the client. In other words: Ungood Art. Seeing as today is the thirteenth of the month, traditionally Ungood Art Day on JSVB, I thought I'd better show this turtle. Or alien. It doesn't matter, as the design got dumped.
The PoCo Wheezers are a corporate bicycle racing team who wanted a logo that showed them being athletic and maladroit at the same time. Thanks, corporate team. At first, I considered a turtle, which is a slow animal. The turtle wasn't enough, but a turtle on a bicycle didn't appeal to them so I tried a unicycle. That appealed less, somehow. The drawing is pretty good as long as you don't mind E.T. The Extraterrestrial wearing a necktie and carrying a briefcase to make him look more like an executive. Although I ended up doing a lot of work leading up to the deadline, I agreed that this design was too Ungood to be used. Who knows, though, maybe someday someone will want a reptile riding a unicycle.
Even more Ungood were my attempts to put a human face on the turtle. Knowing that all you really need is the expression in the eyebrows and the appropriate crookedness in the smile to capture any human face in caricature, I made the attempts below. It turns out that eyebrow expressions and smile crookedness is really hard for me to draw.
Being an artist is almost exclusively about making bad decisions, starting with the one where you decide to become an artist. All the artists I know are fully compatible with making mistakes, and are used to them by the time they've made something out of their careers. Experience teaches the artist how to overcome those gaffes and salvage something useful out of the effort. An artist's technique is equal parts skill and the ability to overcome pitfalls. There is always a budget for error, something that many clients don't grasp. The corporate world doesn't like to reward mistakes, at least not under public scrutiny.
Of course, like the baseball player who swings at futile pitches, the artist won't get anywhere on blunders alone, home runs have to be hit eventually. Any artist who perseveres will learn how to master their craft and score those runs. The difference is: will the stadium be crowded with fans, or will you just be hitting rocks with a stick in the backlot of a deserted warehouse?
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