Project 2: Animals of the Rainforest Tote Bag - Step 2

The second step in creating the project, of course, is to render it in digital format.  I did this using Illustrator.  I began by creating a single fern leaf and making that into a brush, and doing the same thing for a strangler fig leaf. This way I could paint the background scenes for each animal with relative ease and change colors as I chose.  If you would like to access a tutorial on creating a brush in Illustrator, I highly recommend tutsplus.

Every animal received its own slightly unique coloration and arrangement of ferns and fig leaves. This was to give the finished design a feel of being more natural, as nature is rarely uniform in anything it does.

Eventually all of the animals heads were finished to my satisfaction and it was time to start the next phase of the project: putting the design in place.

Project 2: Animals of the Rainforest Tote Bag

This idea goes way back to my days in school at the Art Institute Online.  Our project assignment was to pick a retail restaurant or store chain and design a shopping bag appropriate for the venue.  At the time I was completely enamored with The Rainforest Cafe, and so this is the venue I chose to work with.  My initial potential concepts were for a canvas backpack-style shopping bag, a tote bag, and a more traditional square paper shopping bag (made on recycled paper, of course!).

 The first step in creating the bag was research. I combed through lots of web pages looking into what kind of plants could be expected to be found there - I was looking for plants that would be easy for me to draw with the skills I had at the time. I chose the fern and the strangler fig to model my plants after, since these are very common to the rainforest and are also easier to draw.

 Next was to choose from among the many animals possible. My final selection included the capybara - the largest of the rodents; the sloth, the leopard, and the ocelot for the mammals, the African grey parrot, the Macaw (though, why I chose the less colorful Macaw I'm not sure), the quetzal, the harpy eagle, and the toucan for the bird species, and finished it off with the red-eyed tree frog and the Monarch butterfly.

Unfortunately, during our many moves the sketchbooks containing my original concept artwork was lost. However, I did scan images from the finished project to help me recreate everything.  The bag back, however, which contained images of each of the animals along with some facts about each one was also lost and so I will have to look up the facts again and re-create that part.

Now, to get to work.

Project 1: Stage 4

I dropped the four characters I created into a basic layout and realized that adding in the other two characters I had planned would just make things too cramped, so I decided to drop the keyboardist and backup vocalist from the band.  

I didn't really like the background too much, though. It just seemed too empty.  So, I kept playing with it. This is my second attempt. I still wasn't happy with it, though. I placed it into Illustrator and added the band name - The Roots of Rock - as well as an album title - From the Ground Up.  It was looking better, but I still wasn't quite through yet.

I added in the individual root vegetables to fill in the gaps between the empty spaces.  

After I was finished, though, I thought that maybe I should add some squares behind the root vegetables to kind of give them a special emphasis.  

It just ended up making the design too busy.  However, I decided to use that idea to make a coordinating fabric design. Here it is below:

That concludes Project 1: The Spoonflower Root Vegetable Design Contest.

Project 1: Stage 3

Beet, the drummer, is finished - and definitely turned out even better than I anticipated.  Spud, the lead guitarist, was next and came out with equal charm, as you can see.

Project 1: Stage 2

Carrot top, lead singer for our Roots of Rock concept, is finished.  The execution went smoothly without any unexpected glitches and came out pretty much exactly as I envisioned it.

Rutabaga, our bass guitarist, however, has hit a snag.
The source image I used to create the bass artwork leaves me with space for a thin body, but rutabagas are big and round.  I'll need to either adjust the spacing of the arms or the size of the bass, either of which might throw off the proportions.

Fortunately, after a little playing around with the arm positioning, the Rutabaga is finished and ready to rock.  Next up will be the drummer (beets), the lead guitarist (potato), the backup vocalists (onions), and the keyboardist (radish).

Project 1: Spoonflower Design Contest - Root Vegetables

I love graphic design. I love the process involved in taking an idea and turning it into something tangible, visible, and beautiful.  That's why I have decided to create this blog, to show how a graphic designer takes an idea and turns it into a finished product. This is a behind-the-scenes peek at creativity in action from beginning to end, and hopefully it'll be worth the reading.

I love sewing, for the same reasons that I love graphic design. You start with an idea, and end up with a finished product that is not only beautiful but also practical and meaningful.  You can't love sewing without also loving fabric, and fortunately I have found a place where I can combine all three passions - Spoonflower.  Spoonflower also happens to offer a weekly design contest which in turn provides the perfect venue for demonstrating graphic design work in action.

The current contest is for ditsy prints, but since I've already submitted my contest entry for that, I'm starting this blog with the Root Vegetables contest. The deadline for entry is October 4, 2011.  That gives me one week to come up with a final design.

When I first saw the topic of the contest, I was a bit dismayed. Root vegetables do not exactly make my top list of inspiring things, but that's part of the challenge of being a real graphic designer - finding a way to take a subject and find something in that subject that you can embrace, some creative way to think about it that makes you excited to do the artwork.  After all, if you aren't excited about your finished product you can't honestly expect that anyone else will be either.

I started off by collecting images of root vegetables, preferably with their plant foliage still attached. I was looking for anything that might stand out in terms of color or shape patterns.  The color palette (excluding the plant foliage) is reds, oranges, purples, and whites.  Shapes are rounded rectangles, circles, and triangles. Nothing struck me, or stood out in particular (although as I am writing this I wonder what kind of quilt pattern could be formed from root vegetables shapes).   I decided to try a different direction.

I wrote out the word root. I added an s to the root, for roots.  Roots can mean a lot of things. Roots can be family, roots can be origin or beginning.  Origin, I thought, is the name of a rock band. That's when I started to think about what instrument each root vegetable would play if they were in a rock band.  I chose the carrot as the lead singer. I love carrots, and I don't think there are very many people out there who don't.  I thought of the potato as the drummer, then the rutabaga - the largest of the root vegetables - as the bass guitarist.  Lead guitarist could be the onion - another perennial favorite for those who cook.  Keyboardist could be the turnip, with radishes as back-up vocalists.

With this in mind I made out a rough draft sketch.  As I got to thinking more about it, though, I realized that the beet would make a better drummer (play on the word beat).  

I still have a few other concept ideas that I'll work on sketching out, just to see if any of them turn out better than this concept, but so far it's my favorite.  The other ideas are a block grouping of the root vegetables with their names emblazened beside them; a watercolor-style print of the roots growing below ground (think scientific textbook illustration); and now my quilt idea.

Stage 1 always begins with information gathering and a lot of thinking.  No idea gets turned away in the beginning, as you never know which idea will work out best.  Sometimes a concept proves too complex to pull off in the time frame allotted, sometimes it just doesn't work out the way you'd visualized at first, and sometimes it just doesn't carry the impact you'd like it to have when you finally get it all done.  That's why it's important to have multiple ideas you pursue, so you give yourself (or your client) something to choose from.