Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

What can I say...at some point the word "puke-cumber" popped into my mind and conjured the image of a pickle that had to "call earl." Note that I'm now spelling it as pukumber.

This took longer than anticipated to finish, but mostly because I was playing with various things like the backgrounds and colors and stuff. The facial expresions were the first thing. The eyes and mouth weren't too hard, though I played with a few variations. The initial sketch was on paper and then scanned in and drawn over for the lines.

The punchline, then punchlines, occurred to me about halfway through. It took a few tries to draw two characters that could convey it. I didn't want to spend too much time or detail on them, since they are nothing more than the source of where the text balloons originate, in wild Muppet-esque colors. The basic cucumber image was easy.

I used a reference image for the way the yellow radial lines come up from the bottom. I have a better understanding of how to use the knife tool with Live Paint objects in Illustrator (hint: Make, then Expand, then Make again in Live Paint, but watch out for invisible lines turning visible; it's OK if they're ALL invisible and you have a copy of the lines in another layer).

And why pink puke? That's another story that involves Peru.