Jim and Barb

For those of you unfamiliar with the exploits of Jim and Barb, they are characters from the Catchup Advisory Board commercial parody from A Prairie Home Companion.

The characters are played by Sue Scott and Tim Russell who are really the Mel Blanc's to Garrison Keillor's Jack Benny.

After doing a recreation of the Hank and his horse Seymour from the old Narragansett Beer Commericals I thought I would re-imagine Jim and Barb in that sort of art style made famous by people like Jay Ward and UPA Animation Studios in the 1950's and 1960's.

I drew the characters and outlined them with a brush pen. Then I added the gray tones on Photoshop. The bottle of ketchup was taken from a photo online and I added a Poster Edge effect on Photoshop as well as black border using the Layer tool.

Sort of to give it that xeroxed look they used with the Narragansett bottles in the commercials.

If you're unfamiliar with either the Prairie Home Companion radio show or the Catchup Advisory Board sketch, here's a clip of Sue Scott and Tim Russell performing it. I get a kick out of it every time I watch it.

And now for something (somewhat) completely different...

For those of you who have known me since way back when, I use to draw cartoons all the time. I did cartoon characters all the way up till my last year of college in the school newspaper.

I usually don't do cartooning much nowadays except for in the classroom. I suppose it's like riding a bicycle for me. Even though I do work that is vastly different from the stuff I did in High School or even college, I can still dig into that little storage locker in my brain and dig it out.

Which is what I had decided to do when I saw this contest Narragansett Beer was holding for their upcoming Father's Day Tie. I had chickened out last year but I decided to take a brave stab at it this year in the only way I know how.

And spending the day watching Looney Tunes gave me all the inspiration I needed.

Since I connect Narragansett with 1950's and 1960's Americana, I really wanted to tap into that. No puns intended. So, I wanted to create this Dad in the image of people like Steve Allen, Phil "Sgt. Bilko" Silvers or Arnold "Top Cat" Stang.

I really drew heavily upon Hannah-Barbera, Rocky and Bullwinkle, UPA characters, Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng. Especially some of Frelengs more stylized and sometimes simplified designs from the 1950's.

And I threw in a little John K. just for good measures. Although, I know it doesn't show up in the results, I've always loved John K's stylized characters and had that in mind when I was creating this.

Also, another rule of the contest was to use Narragansett imaging for the design. So, I incorporated a great number of the bottle designs into the character. The design of the tie was taken from one of the old designs from the Narragansett cans. The color of the hair was also taken from the same thing as the tie. The shirt was taken from the colors of Narragansett Lite and the trousers were from the color of the label on Narragansett Bock Beer.

The glass he is holding is from an image on one of the older labels.

I created a background image for the character which will use the design from the Narragansett Lager.