2011 Challenger – Ran Brown

Hello! My name is Ran Brown, and I am a freelance Illustrator/Graphic Designer/Cartoonist working out of my home in Ontario, Canada.

I’m the illustrator and webmaster behind the webcomic The End (currently on hiatus for the next week and a half while I am deeply involved in  making one of my best friends’ weddings awesome), the illustrator/writer for Strike The Earth!, which is a webcomic about Dwarf Fortress, and a member of the fairly new (but still awesome) collective called Open Fire!. You can also find my portfolio here, or follow me on Google+ or Twitter.

Last year I participated in this challenge, but only made it 14 characters in. I think my main issue, aside from time, was that I was focusing on making quality pieces and getting lost in that versus focusing on the actual design aspect of the challenge. I hope to remedy this and actually finish this year by doing most (if not all) of my entries in the style of the self-portrait to the left of this text. Yeah, they’re muppet-tastic, but I’ve used this method to redesign a bunch of characters for later chapters of The End with some pretty great success so far. There’s something about the simplicity and lack of lines that’s let me put together some really neat designs and focus on colours and shapes and asymmetry  that how I traditionally work just can’t do.

 

Anyhow, I’m really excited about the challenge this year. I’ve got a lot of ideas that I’ve done precisely no design work for, as well as characters for The End that I need to design but haven’t even started on as of yet.  I very rarely get to work on things that aren’t The End, and the thought of being able to do some work on some ideas that have really taken the back-burner in my brain sounds so, so awesome.

Good luck, all! Can’t wait to see your entries!

 

Category: 2011, Participants