Flip Flop Flying

In an effort to delay putting the 1,000th Minipop only for just one more day, I thought that today I’d show you some examples of how they have evolved. When I first started drawing Minipops in July 1999, I was using Clarisworks to create them because it came free with my iMac. The following year, I switched to Photoshop, which allowed for more colours to be used. An aside: funny how just ten years ago, “web safe” colours was something one needed to be concerned about. Visually, though, the big difference is how clunky they used to look. Here’s a couple of examples, comparing the first two Minipops I did (the Beach Boys and the Beatles) with the re-drawn version done in 2003.

I look at these old ones and kinda feel like a teenager looking at his baby photos. There’s no effort to really make the heads distinct, and I hate the outlines I used to use. Nowadays, though, I use a naked Minipop template for every one of them, so there’s a bit more uniformity. One vaguely interesting thing that I kind of forgot about is that before the Beach Boys -the Minipop I’ve always maintained was the very first one – was a drawing of five random blokes in brown suits. I found this while digging around deep in the bowels of my computer’s hard drive. This was probably done the same night, but it did come before the Beach Boys. Here it is; they seemed to have no hands, or suits that needed alterations.

Anyway, all of this is serving to delay the ridiculous announcement of the 1,000th Minipop. I mean, it’s hardly waiting to find out what is the Christmas number one, is it? But, I’ve started the farce now, so I will continue. Feel free to keep on guessing which male, non-British, non-American the 1,000th Minipop will be. I’ll put it online tomorrow.