Fisher-Price: Doodle Pets!

I really enjoy working on plush. I had a crash course, on the extensive Zootopia line of plush when working at Tomy International as a Design Manager.  My experience with patterns is limited but I excel at the characterizations, it's a forte' of mine. 
Among the deeply satisfying and more successful lines of which I've been a part over the years was the Doodle line for Fisher-Price.
Part of the joy then was that I remember working on Doodle Bears way back when I started freelancing at Tyco Toys, in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey.  .. It was the salad days of the Doodle line!

by this time in Doodle Bear history Fisher-Price wanted to explore and expand the Doodle line beyond the classic bear.  They also wanted to go smaller and cuter.  The first task I was approached for was in pushing into the rest of the animal kingdom, trying different doodle critters.

Here are some of those, as eventually rendered for presenation;

Once the look of the line was established, more exploration was done for soft accessories and playsets to expand the line.  The smaller scale of these pets lent themselves to slightly larger price points, with more play other than drawing on them with markers.

So I came up with some soft playsets, shown below.  They were well received enough to continue onto further definition.

..  First, a couple of additional pups beyond the dachshund.  Followed by a simple pet carrier that opened into a soft play and nap area.  Of course the bedding made a great canvas for doodling.

Then onto the themed sets, which folded or rolled up to contain everything, but expanded to become a play environment.

 

.... And here is how they turned out when produced for the toy shelves. 

.. Even the carriers with pups came out great.  Again; another instance of not to much changing in the entire process. I always consider that a job well done, in doing what I do.

Zooballs!

Back in the 90s Tyco Toys called on me to do some conceptual work for their plush line.

The pitch was simple; They're plush animals that are round bouncy balls. (Ah, minimalism!)  
The real task was in making them cute, fun, and marketable, like Beanie Babies (which were HUGE at the time). ..In fact, the price point and consumer niche was geared to compete with the Ty Toys phenomenon. 

Really, there was nothing that was not fun about this project.  I was given free reign regarding what animals to caricaturize, and no limit in the number generated.  It was 'blue-sky' concept work, so I had a good time seeing what I could come up with.
There was some back-and-forth of sketches and ultimately the creatives at Tyco whittled it down to 18 different character balls.  Most of them ended up being designs of mine, with about 5 of them being done internally (which they had me redesign for the sake of consistency).

..And they now had a name:   

Zooballs!

Another great thing about this project was that what I initially came up with was pretty much what ended up on the toy shelves.  A rare occurrence, as typically other designers and/or marketing people will add their own tweaks along the way. I guess everyone thought what I came up with was dandy enough.  ..Though, as mentioned, there were a handful that never made the cut.
..like these poor orphans;

The ones that did make it through the gauntlet needed final renderings for presentation and manufacturing purposes.  There were no Zooball prototypes in existence and these were going to be fabricated overseas, so they needed some solid reference material.  Tyco asked me to generate 2 views of each Zooball character to send to Hong Kong.  'Mugshots' ..if you will.
Here are examples of just some of them;

..for the record? No; I didn't actually pick the names for these guys.

That was someone else's lucky job.