How to Not Really Animate Something.

Illustration > Mr. Dave’s Best

When I was a student at Art Center, a producer for Dick Clark Productions somehow got my number and called me up with a gig (I still don’t know how that even happened). He asked me if I could do some animation titles for American Bandstand. I said, “Yes, absolutely” (as I’m want to do) and of course I’d never animated anything before in my life. Luckily I had an out when he said he didn’t have any money to pay me but I’d be in the end credits. No. Thanks.

Anyway, I never did learn how to animate. I’ve come close by doing some TV spots in San Francisco with talented animation studios. I even sort of animated some low budget stuff for VersaMe and Continuum, but those weren’t the same as the real deal. But then I found that Procreate, my favorite tablet drawing app, had a feature that recorded your pen strokes while you drew! So when your drawing was done you’d have a time-lapse animation of your drawing...well, drawing itself. I know what you’re saying. “That’s not real animation either!” I know, but it’s closer? Hahaha.

Anyway it was fun to take that app feature and figure out how to use it in a unique way. I mean, you could just record yourself drawing a character or something, but in the end you just have that finished character or something. So I had the idea of doing a slow reveal. Where you really didn’t know what the drawing would be until the very end. Or maybe you’d know what it was, but you didn’t know why I drew it until the end.

I’d been putting a lot of creative energy into my Mr. Dave’s Best brand and I’d been sharing one theme a week on Mr. Dave’s Best Instagram account. I made these little videos the “Saturday Night Mystery Movie”, where I challenged viewers to try and guess the video topic before it was revealed at the end. Fun, right?

I’m sharing here a collection of my most favorite Mr. Dave videos. I don’t think any of these represent my best illustration work. Not at all. The whole thing was more of a conceptual piece. My challenge to myself was to get through each of these drawings quickly. I didn’t want the videos to be too long or illustrate themselves too fast. I also did each drawing in one take. Maybe this was just user error, but if you screw up a lot (like I do), it’ll totally mess up your video. And I was working with no previous sketch or practice at all. I was just banging them out. I exported the videos from Procreate to my Mac, where I’d pop them into Adobe Premiere for a quick edit and some title additions. The music is all SUPER public domain from a website I found filled with all kinds of terrible, scratchy, atrocities. Mostly a bunch of recordings of Edison (yeah, Thomas), recorded by Edison, telling terrible jokes. Anyway, I thought the clunky antique music fit well with my retro brand and bounced hard against my decidedly non-traditional themes. How many video topics can you guess before they end?

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How to Draw in the Future.

Illustration > Mr. Dave’s Best

I sure like to draw. But I don’t really have a set style. At least, I don’t think I do. I guess I just never really found a niche interesting enough to gnash on. I’ve spent my career using my drawings to help get concepts across to creatives and clients, and to decorate the products I’ve made myself. So being really versatile was great for that. Heck, for a while I was getting freelance jobs in San Francisco just to draw other peoples ideas for them. This page of weird drawings was part of a personal project I started to get my head out of a really busy time and to stretch my illustrative muscles a bit and let loose.

FINAL: Mr. Dave’s Best Stickers really let me go to town in whatever direction I felt like. And Procreate let me choose the best digital tool for each topic. For example, I liked the rough charcoal feel for these poor chickens.

I’m a terrible painter. Watercolor, acrylic, oil...oh, I suck so bad at that. I came up in the world drawing with markers. Especially the bullet point Design Markers (my blood is 80% xylene). I’d eventually do all my drawings on paper, scan them on a big HP flatbed I had, and then color and manipulate them on my desktop. I illustrated Safe Baby Handling Tips that way. In the end I’m glad I have all the original drawings on paper as a tactile keepsake, but what a pain it was. I’d had a small Wacom tablet, but it was always too awkward to draw while looking at your screen and not your hand. Kinda like rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time. Then I really invested in one of those Wacom tablets that mirror your desktop. Better, but all the giant cords and transformers…still not ideal. Procreate on the iPad? Oh yeah, that’s the ticket. So convenient. So powerful. So easy. It made me want to draw again.

FINAL: A little mishmash of Unicorn Poop and People Not Getting Well Soon.

FINAL: I produced a few Mr. Dave’s Best Posters. This one I made for an elementary school silent auction. I made another poster at the same time that would have been…inappropriate.

Everything here was done digitally over a span of about a month and a half, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had drawing. It didn’t hurt that I did a lot of it in the quiet moments during a long trip through Amsterdam, Prague, Budapest, and Austria. Imagine sitting on a wood bench in the shade alongside a canal in Amsterdam, drinking a cold beer, pantsless, drawing away on your iPad. That was totally me. Except with pants. I added that last part to see if you were paying attention. But seriously, that’s what’s so great about being an illustrator who lives in the future – you have a complete art studio that fits flat in your daypack. All in all, I did over 150 drawings on various topics that would eventually become sheets of stickers sold under the banner, Mr. Dave’s Best.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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How to See If People Like What You Make, Then Be OK If They Don’t.

Design > Product

This is really weird. But it was supposed to be, so I achieved what I set out to do. I’d been working on a lot of really fun but intense projects that all sort of ended at the same time, so I felt I needed to stretch my legs a little and do something for me. So I decided that thing was to make some fun stickers. The thought was that I’d make sheets of bizarrely themed stickers and then turn the best ones into postcard sets, and then canvas bags, and then...you get the idea. I’d take everything I knew about what gift stores are buying today and illustrate my own odd little brand to offer folks.

FINAL: The idea behind Mr. Dave’s Best Stickers in three photos. A sheet of weirdly themed stickers. Which you could peel off and put to equally weird uses to delight your family, friends and co-workers. A genius product that was way before it’s time.

FINAL: I was especially pleased with how the back turned out. Yes. I wrote the copy all by myself.

FINAL: Oh, there were all kinds of topics. I could go on forever. But fate had different plans!

Kids! Hahaha...I love kids. My friends’ kids all call me Mr. Dave (I live in the South, you know) and I think it’s hilarious so that’s what I called my line. I went for a retro look to offset the not-retro-at-all themes. Sort of a brand subterfuge to make people think they’re about to see something really sweet and wholesome and then it turns out to be stickers of cats pooping.

I put a challenge to myself to do, like, 30 full sheets to prove that the idea had legs. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t get bored halfway or feel like I was running out of ideas. That ended up being over 150 individual drawings! So I took 5 sheets that best represented the line and them printed in China on the cheap. I thought I’d test out the concept on Etsy while running them past a bunch of gift boutiques. I quickly found that, um, people don’t come to Etsy to buy stickers, much less stickers of run-over animals (see Roadkill). Great for the unique, bad for strange. Gift stores didn’t know what to think. Hahaha. It was a mess. I don’t know what I was expecting, but no one wanted any part of that shit. They didn’t get the topics or anything. And these are people who’ve known my sense of humor for years. One store asked why it was so old fashioned. What? So I got my stickers into a big box store. Well, one big box store. Cost Plus World Market. The one closest to my house.

FINAL: Actually, there was a sort of categorical plan. Knowing what I know about the gift and greeting card industry, I was able to focus on weird themes in distinct categories: Animals, Fashion & Culture, Food & Drink, Home & Garden, and Health & Fitness.

FINAL: Oh, I also made postcards and posters. You can see more high-brow designs in the illustration category.

Here’s what I did. I went in one day, found some items that were $6.95 (Mr. Dave’s MSRP) and took pictures of their price tags. I went home and printed out the tags and stuck them on the backs of 5 Unicorn Poop sticker sheets and 5 Dead and Dying Succulents sticker sheets. It was just days before Christmas, and World Market had a special little section for unicorn stuff (plush, notebooks, junk like that) and a special little collection nearby of potted succulents. Perfect places to surreptitiously drop my sticker packs and make a hasty retreat.

I returned the next day and found they were not only still hanging there, undiscovered by World Market Employees, but one of the Dead and Dying Succulent sticker sheets had sold! So I kept going back whenever I was in the neighborhood or needing more Hoi Son Sauce, and the selling proved to be slow going. After a few months they took down those special little displays. I thought that was the end of my experiment, but I found my stickers had simply been moved to another part of the store. I kept checking back periodically and was sorry to see that the savvy World Market shopper was really not interested in Unicorn Poop stickers. I hadn’t sold any. But there were only 2 left of the succulents. Yay? What’s weird is the stickers never made it to the Clearance shelves. I’d have been so sad if they had, but they just continued to be repositioned around the store. At month seven, I couldn’t find them anywhere and thought, “Oh, well, it was fun while it lasted.” But the next day my wife sent me a picture showing they’d been moved up to the checkout impulse racks – just three Unicorn Poop sheets hanging below the gluten-free gum and salted licorice from Norway.

FINAL: The great World Market experiment. On the left is where I left my Dead and Dying Succulents stickers and on the right the sad aftermath months and months later. Just a couple Unicorn Poop stickers left!

I’m so sorry, I don’t think I have a point here. Hahaha. I guess it’s that when something doesn’t work, try and learn what you can from it and move on. Or make a quasi-illegal game out of it to keep yourself amused while you go on to the next adventure.

DAVE SOPP – Creative

Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com

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