the making of the happy journey collective piece

As promised, here's roughly a stage by stage making of the piece for the happy journey collective. I'm doing this just to give an insight into some of the processes I go through while creating my work.

first off is the idea generating stage.

I basically draw something like little thumbnails (either contained or open) where I'm not really interested on the quality of the drawing but on the initial idea as a whole. Also how compositionally sound the structure of the piece would be.

Early on, before even putting pencil to paper I usually have a few ideas that I think would work with the brief given. Sometimes I just grab any piece of paper and draw all over it so that I have a record of what I was thinking when it popped into my head at the time, just like above which was drawn on the back of a print out which was close to hand. The reason that I do this is that its quicker to generate as much ideas as possible without being hung up on things such as style and detail, its just the idea at its purest form and its also a quick way of seeing if it would be worth going down that direction for the final.

Usually after doing these thumbnails roughs, I select the ones which have potential and then develop them further into more structured roughs that would sent be off to clients. Because this was more of a personal project and I knew what I was after, I just moved on to drawing the parts for the final.

So here I started just drawing the character above since I knew on what I wanted the style of the piece to represent. I decided to create the packaging and other objects on the fly while I worked on doing the line work in illustrator with the use of my wacom tablet.

after working on the line work and creating the set pieces such as the packaging, the piece looked like this.

I was going to put in some type with things like 'karate chop action' and 'eagle-eye sight' but decided against that as I wanted the backing card to recede into the background rather than fighting with what was meant to be in the foreground.

Its just a matter of selecting the right colours to compliment the piece. I always have an idea of what colours I want to use, I usually go by the rule on 'what does the colour think should come next' it just basically means that I start off with one colour and then judging by how another colour sits with the initial one in a complimentary sort of way and then build up from there. I also add a limit to the amount of colour used as this adds to the complimentary aspects. the colour selection was used to recede part of the image like the backing card as well as to pull the figure and the plastic coffin shell into the foreground.

resulting into the final piece.

This might not be as in depth but it shows the basic stages that i go through in the creation of my work. I was thinking i might do one of those stage by stage videos where the image builds up at some point in the future, but we'll see.