Alum Choir Progress

Here's my progress for my latest freelance job. I posted the finished piece in my last post, but I thought I'd go ahead and do a progress post too :)

Here was the very first sketch - as you can see some of them need quite a bit of work haha. My original idea was to work with an animal called a binturoung/bearcat - which is the mascot to my high school. However, my client (aka my choir teacher) wanted me to focus more on "alumni". SO, after a couple of days of seriously pondering that over - I cam up with this - showing the choir as we are now - grown and walking different paths in life. Getting married,  having kids, graduating college, traveling, in the military, and budding professionals :) She loved this idea and so the next step...

...was to refine the design! I took all of the characters and began to draw the second draft. Here you can see that I changed the position of some of the characters so that there was more balance in the piece. I also changed some of the facial directions so add in some more variety :)

I decided to do that piece in Adobe Illustrator....which may or may not have been a good idea haha. I was not trained in Illustrator and I don't know it very well....luckily, I live with 3 people that do. I've done all of my freelance work these past few years (especially logos - including my own) in Illustrator. Vector just works better for printing unless you have fancy dancy super printer and beautiful cotton paper (which this will NOT be printed on) hahaha.  

Luckily, I only had to dook it out with Illustrator a couple of times before I got it to work just the way I want it. I was commissioned to only design the front of the pamphlet, so that's why the back is so blank. I DID, however, plop my name on it.

As I gift to the choir, I did not charge for this piece. The alumni choir show is being done to help raise money for the choir - which is need of some new uniforms after a freak dry-cleaning accident D:> I had some of the best friends in choir, so I don't mind helping them out this time :) And I will be part of the show next week - super excited for the little reunion.

Aviris sketches and a Choir Project

I was recently asked by my old high school, choir teacher to design the pamphlet cover to this year's alumni choir variety show. My high school's mascot is a Bearcat - otherwise known as a Binturoung. I was given free-range on the design, and I like drawing animals, so that's what I went with haha. These are my current sketches:

While I was feeling sketchy, I went ahead and decided to give a couple of scenes from Aviris a go. I'm really working with the designs of the characters (other than Nikita). But even though their looks are evolving, the character's have always had certain relationships with each other :) I finally wanted to show some interaction between some of them.

Here's Adele (Eulalia's friend and Alonzo's younger sister) with Dulio (Cirino's brother). Dulio doesn't warm up the group very well, but Adele likes him, despite his deformities, and follows him around like a puppy - much to his dismay and amusement.

And here's Nikita chatting with Cirino about something or other. These two don't start off as best friends, but as the story goes on their relationship begins to blossom. Cirino is Dulio's younger brother.

That's all for now, but I'm still feeling sketchy...so who knows! I may upload more soon :)

(lawl, notice how I can't draw environments. Also, I totally reference an image from Brave and an image from Tangled haha)

Business Card and Logo Process

 So I have finished my logo and business card designs :) Shall I share the process? I THINK SO.

Step 1) Sketching: This is where I started off. I was trying to incorporate different things into my logo design. The tape holding the J and M together were for editing, the three ovals represented that I am the "third" (I like to sign my artwork as JLMIII). The hook on the J was supposed to represent the hook of a story. I decided to go with just the hook because this is obviously too ridiculous haha

Step 2) Trying to learn Illustrator: I grabbed a couple of ad/graph friends and got taught the basics of Adobe Illustrator. I started messing with the J and hook shapes and lineweight. However, these are awful.

Step 3) Actual Hooks: I started getting reference of actual fishing hooks and going from there, mixing and mashing different aspects that I liked and then warping the heck out of them to get the exact shapes that I wanted. This led to these scrappy sketches. I ended up going with the 2nd design - fishing line and all.

Step 4) Getting the Cards in Order: I opened up Illustrator and started going at it. Eventually I came up with this silly dummy that had random words like "Bangarang" where I wanted information to go and was editing as needed. I knew what colors I wanted so I played with them. I also played with the layout of information.

Step 5) Final Designing: After getting magnificent critique from my ad/graph friends, this is what the final design came out looking like, complete with catchphrase. WOO!

Step 6) Conforming: The printing company I'm going to be ordering from has a specific template for their business cards (as do most places). This was me taking my final design and just resizing it to their template. You can see how it slimmed out a little :)

Here you can see the template with the safety and bleed lines.

Possible Logo Idea (and Siblings update)

I'm really trying to work on some self-branding because the art sale and career fair are coming up at school within the next month or so. Logo's are NOT my specialty by any means, but here's what I've been playing with:

We'll see how it goes.

I've also been working on my Siblings piece (even though I've definitely slowed down on it since I've been playing with my bear character more)

That's all for now. I've got a lot to do for the art sale! Super excited! John and I have been thinking of opening an Etsy soon. We'll see :) More on that later.