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.