Corgi Coasters - Making of! (Patreon)

I recently finished this collaboration with my friend Phil of Ember Prototypes. (Yes, this is the same Phil I went to China with). He has an adorable corgi named Milou, and he thought it would be fun to immortalize her on some coasters. He's an incredible engineer, but actually he almost became a chef, so he wanted to do a cooking-themed set of drawings. 

I love Milou to bits so of course I jumped at the chance! Here's how that went down... 

(And before I go further, yes the plan is to sell these coasters! Phil is still tweaking the manufacturing side, but once they go up for sale I'll of course let you all know :) )

First I wanted to get the hang of drawing corgis. These are obviously very loose drawings... on purpose! I was hoping to get down to the "essence" of what makes a shape look like a corgi, and in the end I had started to figure out what shapes were important. On the third page here I started doing some brainstorming about what kind of cooking I wanted to feature...

From there I made a bunch of preliminary sketches. Phil said he wanted the coaster to be a "hexagon" shape, so I used that as my start and just started filling them in. I use the numbers here to communicate with Phil about different drawings, and he used these to choose the "top 4" that I would be working on. 

Here's one example of the "pencils" that I sent to Phil for first stage feedback. We used this to talk about the pose, and other details the he wanted changed or refined... and then...

And here's the final lineart that got lasered onto the coasters! Yay!

This was a really fun collaboration, I love getting a chance to make stuff with my friends :)