The Yogos pitch

I rarely ever draw in a professional capacity. I simply don't draw often enough to have the turnover and quality of a professional concept artist. Whenever I'm asked to do concepts I pass the request on to my longtime collaborator Don Flores. So, I felt pretty intimidated back in late 2008 when Laika's commercial department tapped me to do some concept art on a commercial spec pitch for something called Yogos. I was unfamiliar with the product, so they handed me a fistful of the hard, colorful candies. They were disgusting. They tasted like the leftover crust in an old strawberry yogurt container fished out of the trash, which is not surprising, because that's exactly what they were. Hardened yogurt balls.

I'd like a bag of old hardened yogurt balls please

The concept for the commercial was a cartoon of kids in space having a "Houston, we have a problem..." moment when they run out of Yogos. They wanted the drawings to look like they were done by kids, but not look cheap. My take on this was to make the drawings simple and use ink and watercolor washes for the backgrounds.

We didn't end up winning the bid and the product was discontinued shortly after that. Possibly because they didn't choose us for their marketing. Or possibly because they were selling bags of crusty yogurt balls.