Swearing Budgies of the World - Further development

Although at this point I am pretty happy with my budgie illustrations, I still felt the need to play around with the elements and see if I was missing a trick. The budgies have a cartoon-like feel to them, which I like and which I think owes a lot to the bright colours and thick black outline. However, I wondered what they would look like with a lighter touch or perhaps a more geometric, "graphicky" feel. It was at this point that I looked at Charley Harper's beautiful work. Here's an example:



I really do love these ad it would probably be quite easy to do something like this with my budgies. However, they do look very sixties and I don't really want to go for a retro/kitsch look. Besides, I also don't really want to rip off another designer, so I had better come up with something of my own.

This budgie is my attempt at something altogether more geometric:



He has a certain charm but I am not convinced that this will work as a whole series. Perhaps I could just remove the thick black outline...



Again, this is interesting and certainly worth playing around with, but I don't think it really works. It's probably time to move on with the rest of the poster design.