Exercise - Making a mock up

For this exercise I chose a book that I have had for many years, and which is still a favourite.

The book tells the story of a group of boys living in a small seaside town in America.

They are facing the prospect of losing their homes through developers, and decide to spend their last day together.

They find a map in the attic of central character, Mikey’s house, and set off in pursuit of fame and fortune.

The original cover shows the characters hanging from a stalactite above a faded treasure map, and reading the blurb on the back of the book it is not hard to see what the brief was.

The brief was obviously to show characters from the book and film, in a perilous situation, to show adventure, treasure seeking etc, but I am not sure this is clear.

I decided to go with something that would reflect the style that had been created with the original cover, but with a different content.

I started by sketching out some ideas, using images from the film, it was important that I see if I could draw a good likeness.

Using these drawings I could then move on to a thumbnail sketch of the layout.

I drew several thumbnails, but I went with the first one, as I liked it the most, as it was the most balanced, as far as content was concerned.

I enlarged this image by 1.5 times, and left spaces where the text, title etc would go.

Following this, I photocopied some of the images of the characters I had previously sketched, cut them out, then using a lightbox I placed these under the enlarged layout and then traced the outlines.

Once these things were placed, I drew in the title text, finally, I traced all of this onto a sheet of Bristol board as this was close in texture to the original as I could get.

Because of the style of my painting I chose to use acrylic paint as the media to work with, because it is easy to correct any mistakes, and you can paint thickly or thinly as required.

Overall, I think this image has worked well, the only technical drawback was that the paper buckled slightly.

The colour of the parchment as the background, makes the other images’ colours stand out well, and the text on top, that will be added during production would be clear to read.

Exercise - Client Visuals

For this exercise I chose two representational images to work from.

The first one, was produced by Brighton based,  illustrator and felt artist, Karen Rao.

Karen produced several images used for packaging, by supermarket chain Lidls, for their range of sweets.

She uses computer software to generate the images.

Images A and B - Show exercise in scaling up.

Image 1

This is the first draft I did of the original illustration, with as much detail in it.

It was difficult to reproduce this image at the larger size, and it took several goes to get the positioning right, barring a few of the sweets.

Image 2

This version of the image has had some of the detail taken out, but you can see that these shapes may be sweets of sorts, but not necessarily midget gems.

Image 3

All of the details taken out and the image breaks down totally, you are not able to make any sense of the image, you cannot tell what it is, so therefore you could not make a simplified version of it.

The second image is by ,New Jersey based, William Laird, who specializes in Advertising, Book, Web content, Product and Packaging illustration.

He uses Pencil/Pen and Ink, Airbrush, Oil Paints and Photoshop to produce his illustrations.

The illustration I chose doesn’t have a title to it, but I liked it because of its realism, and I would assume it could have been used for advertising etc.

This image was more straightforward than the Karen Rao one to illustrate.

Image 1

This image is actually pretty close in detail to the original, except perhaps a few of the sesame seeds on the plate might be out of place.

Image 2

I started to take the detail out, beginning with the sesame seeds on top of the bun, and the plate, you can still tell what it is, a burger of some sort.

At this point even without this detail being drawn in, it is more easily recognizable than the  Karen Rao illustration.

Image 3

More detail has been taken out, but still an identifiable object, in comparison to the Karen Rao image, which lost any structure to it at this stage.

If you took any further detail out it would cease to be a burger at all.