Friday, May 30, 2014

Illustration Friday: Temptation (Slojo Intro)

Illustration Friday: Every Friday a word is given on the website, IllustrationFriday.com. Artists and illustrators then submit an image that represents that word all during the week.
This week's word: TEMPTATION
Thinking of the word temptation reminded me of an old animate clip i made. Click "Start the Cartoon" below to watch the clip . . . 

This is an old animated clip from 2000, one of my first Flash animations when I was still learning Actionscript coding. It features a sad sack character, Slojo, who used to be a clown. The premise was simple, he's the most unlucky person in the world and generally bad things happen to him for no given reason. Even when he does good things for others, karma is not on his side.


It was important to give Slojo normal, yet clown-like features. I didn't want the character to instantly be recognized as a clown, but looking at him you can see the former clown that is still his persona. 

Even though I wrote several 5 minute cartoon shorts for the character, I never finish animating them. It was a hectic time with the Internet bubble breaking and the company I was working for had to let go of about 85% of my fellow co-workers. 2000 wasn't an inspirational year . . . and then of course by 2001, things became even worse.