Bearded Baby has landed, and his beard is major. I drew him tonight after spending the day trying to solve XML mysteries and adding metadata to art for MICA. I worked on a related baby illustration yesterday too, but scrapped it after I decided it was creepy looking. It’s really easy for baby drawings to be creepy, you can’t define any of the features too much or it just looks like an overly perky beast. Hence, Bearded Baby is a very flat baby.
Bearded baby has been a meme of sorts among MICA Communications & TSS employees for a while now. I’m not entirely sure I remember exactly how this idea ever started, but I suspect it was the result of some discussion about what sort of baby our very bearded Director of Web & Electronic Communications is destined to have. From there it morphed into our code name for a large-scale, complicated project that was in dire need of a short, easy-to-remember name. (The project doesn’t have anything to do with beards or babies, although people with beards and people with babies are among the target audiences, since those two groups do compose a significant portion of the general population.)
But I digress. The illustration seen above is the result of a request from the aforementioned bearded Director for a classy baby illustration for a friend. After completing the classy baby, I used the opportunity to re-purpose that baby head as a bearded baby. Not that this baby isn’t classy, beards can be classy, but I do think this baby would be more overtly classy if it had a top hat and a handlebar mustache though. But that’s probably just my own personal conflation of “classy” and “old-timey.”
I kind of want to revise this illustration yet again and make it a Terminator baby with some metal and a red laser eye or something. Too much? Should I just make the aforementioned old-timey baby as described above? Or are there other odd babies I should draw?
Tags: beards, classy, illustration