Thursday, April 21, 2011

"Reading is AN ADVENTURE!"

This is a bit of process for one of my latest illustration projects.

The idea behind it was a metaphorical illustration for a corporate client. In this case, I took on a kid's book company and used as my basic metaphor "reading is an adventure".

brochure illo roughs
This was my first set of comps - basically, the little boy being taken literally on an adventure.

fullpager-print
However, this final, like the comps before it, was not particularly metaphorical at all. Instead of implying that reading was an adventure, it simply shows a little boy going on a bunch of adventures with an Indiana Jones type character.

Reading-is-an-Adventure
So, after the crit that exposed the rough edges to this concept, I added a couple of elements that would drastically change the concept to imply the power of the kid's imagination, which is really the point of the illustration. The descent of adventurer and boy into the depths of a sinister amazon temple became an imaginary journey down the kitchen stairs... creeping past undead amazon warrior(esses?)s became sneaking past a brother's room, down the hall. This way, I could both showcase the idea of adventure while emphasizing the safety of keeping these safely internal (inside the house and inside the head).

Basically, this was my attempt to salvage a project's concept without having to re-draw the whole thing.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

End of Term Work!

It feels SO GOOD to be finishing up the year - but with that satisfying closure comes a bit of sadness. It's been a good year.

Here's one of my final projects. The idea was to take two or more distinct genres, meld them together, and develop a variety of narrative landscape pieces from there. With that in mind, I thought up the research settlement of Delta - a human frontier town on a far-off low gravity world. Of course, there's not only humans living on this planet - there are strange, radially symmetrical native species and a whole host of interstellar refugees in the region, as well.

overview
Here's a view of the town from the air.


interior---market
Morning at a very multi-cultural covered market.

Hunt Final
The natives pursuing their next meal.

shootout-at-the-OK-corral
Kal-Tuhn gangsters (some of the less savoury members of the refugee species) flee from a water robbery.

transport
Two motorists along the Delta-Karakhun Highway get into an altercation.

More soon! (Bikers, robots, and more!)