I loved Fraggle Rock as a kid, though I don't know if I really watched very much of it. I do remember my mom telling my brother and I that there was a new kids show coming on, and we could stay up to watch it. Strange as it seems, it was originally an HBO show, on at 8pm, which was our bedtime. I believe it was shown on Sunday nights, so perhaps Jim Henson was hoping to recreate the success of Disney's long standing Sunday night program, something in prime time for the whole family. I don't remember watching more than a handful of Fraggle Rock episodes in this time slot, but somehow, through merchandise, books, and reruns, the world of Fraggle Rock became pretty familiar. Though my memories of it were pretty vague, I do remember that the thing I liked most was the atmosphere of the setting. The fraggles lived in these endless caves, all colorfully lit (like the caves in Star Trek, where was all the light coming from?!), which always looked cozy and warm. I was never claustrophobic- far from it! I used to love to take a coloring book into the deep closet that was under my grandparents staircase and sit and color behind the coats, for hours, with a flashlight as my only illumination. So living in a cave seemed like great fun to me. Anyway, thankfully we now have Fraggle Rock on DVD, and I often put it on to listen ot in the background while I paint. I took a break from a larger project today and just started doodling in Photoshop, and I decided I'd doodle some Fraggles. They all have things in common, but there's an endless variety of colors and features that can be mixed and matched, so I thought it would be a fun thing to doodle. My plan was to just draw a pile of them, just fill up the page. And since I'm still kind of figuring out how I prefer to do this digital painting thing I think what I'll do is post it in stages, as each character comes along. Here's what I've got so far:
First off, this isn't supposed to be any one Fraggle, in fact, I would like to have them all be new Fraggles, not ones from the show, though my daughter says this one is Wembely. But it's not- Wembely has green body fur and overall is more yellow green than this guy. Anyway, I really stumbled over how to do this, not quite knowing how refined I wanted this painting to be, so he's not as pretty as some of the others might be. Hopefully I will remember to save some more preliminary progress shots along the way so you can see how each one evolves. This guy's looking at another Fraggle, who's not there yet, but hopefully will be tomorrow. See you then!
This year there are 21 weekdays in October, and for each and every one of those I'm going to post a Halloween piece of some sort. The delightfully dark doodling starts October 3.
Fur on the body and the arms are defined now. Love making these little guys look soft and squishy.
And finally, his hat. I seem to remember that the fraggles wore some sort of hat like this, though it looked like it was carved out of a gourd or something. But I felt the overall shape looked a little too Smurfish (especially with that Papa Smurf-ish beard), so I wanted mine to be a bit more angular. And I tried to make it look like a patchwork.
Francesca is the final character I was asked to design for the MaleStandard website. I hope to be able to provide them with more artwork for these characters, or for any new ones that they decide to introduce. As I mentioned previously, if you decide to go over to MaleStandard, keep in mind that some of the subject matter is very adult and is not recommended for anyone under 18.
Stay tuned!
Below, I slightly refocused the eyes of the yellow Fraggle, and you can see I began roughly laying in a third character.
I decided to give her eyes that were not quite typical for Fraggles, but still Muppety (it's a word- at least in my house), and that made her kind of feminine looking. I'll probably just leave her this way until I get some of the Fraggles around them blocked in, and then go back and finish what still shows. This will ideally be a very crowded group shot, so in the end it may just be a bunch of heads showing.
Roxi, known on the site as the Bar Temptress, hails from Hawaii and is site's resident bartender. If you'd like to read more about her, or read some of her own writing, click here, but as I mentioned with Demi, the content is mature, so please don't click if you are under 18 or likely to be offended by such content.
She's one of the writers over at a new (and still under construction) website, malestandard.com . I was thrilled to be asked to design Demi, and all of her friends. I'll be posting those friends as the weeks go on, but for now you might want to learn more about Demi. Warning: The writing and much of the subject matter on malestandard.com is very adult, so if you are under 18 or just don't like that sort of thing, please steer clear. Everyone else, click here.
