
As the father of two, Spongebob Squarepants has featured heavily in my life over the past few years. I have to confess that my morning routine includes an episode of Spongebob & co. whilst chewing through my morning muesli. I have been known to watch it at the weekend when the kids are still in bed! This is my homage.
This is not a ‘How To’ guide, just a look behind the scenes…

I had already explored using the pen tool to trace over a wallpaper image (the livetrace tool being somewhat lacking!) and decided to go for a 3D style look without keylines. I have always enjoyed seeing cartoon characters given 3D properies, like Homer Simpson in one of the Treehouse of Horror episode.

I began with the extrude and bevel tool with a fairly extreme perspective. I then mapped some ‘sponge holes’ onto the front. This took a few attempts to get right – if you are not familiar with this software, you have to make this part separately, with any active properties (blending, blur etc) and make it into a symbol before this stage can happen.

As you can see on the next image, I had applied a very slight blur to the sponge holes and this made the edges of the main form look too sharp (for a sponge!)

A two pixel blur was added to the whole form, just taking the edge off the hard vector forms:

The holes on the side were added separately after experimenting with the mapping tool. I had many problems with this as I think the surface area was too complex for the mapping tool. These are just overlayed with a multiply blend. I intended to distort them to fit the contours of the sponge but decided that it looked ok without.

Squarepants. Square. Pants. Squarepants. I used a combination of the extrude and rotate tools, as well as a couple of gradient overlay panels:

Mr. Pants legs were simply four short lines with a revolve applied…

The shoes were not so different, although made of separate pieces…

Back to the body, and then a few trials to establish how to make the arms (not as easy as the legs as they are curved). In the end I used five separate pieces for the right arm. I had spent a while trying the get the gradient tool to to work in a number of ways, but elected to use separate gradient filled shapes with a multiply blend to get the finger shapes to show. The Pathfinder tool was absolutely essential for this.

The left hand was made in a similar way as the exploded image below shows…

The sleeves were simple white shapes revolved:

So onto the face details. I drew out the eyes as concentri circles first and was going to add a radial gradient to them some depth, but then opted for a tricoloured line and a revolve:


I also added a small drop shadow to enhance the 3D effect:

The eyelshes were made in the same way, but each one had to be individually rotated…

For the cheeks I used two ellipses, each with a radial gradient fill. The orange layer on top was set to multiply in order to give it tranparency and interact with the yellow below – this gives is a gentle pink tinge.

The nose? I had to use the mesh tool here, adding highlights and shadows to the vector points around the top and bottom:

At this point it is probably worth having a look at what I have done so far…

The body parts are assembled and given some further accessories (collar & tie) and a paralellogram shadow.
And then the face begins to emerge…


The screenshot above shows that Spongebob is really coming together – another cheek, and the all-important mouth, and then finally, a Krabby patty!

The mouth was fairly straightforward; mainly gradients, inner glows, dropshadows and the mesh tool on the upper lip…
Then it was off to the galley for some vector cooking!

Again, this was quite straightforward – lots of combined use of the 3D tools with a few overlays, gradients and drop shadows.

I struggled with the lettuce and decided to make use of the Livetrace tool for this part…

And finally, Mr. Squarepants in all his vector glory!

I need to get out more…