One of my regular clients is a toy company called DecoPac. They design many of the fancy birthday cakes you see in grocery store bakeries. They also create various toys and novelties to put on top of the cakes, often tying in with licensed characters and brands.
Last year they commissioned me to design a set of cake-top toys to tie in with the ‘Madagascar 3’ marketing campaign. I wasn’t told much about the movie other than that it had a circus theme, and DecoPac gave me some rough ideas of what they envisioned for the overall design. I worked up several thumbnails of each character, they picked the ones they liked, and based on those I worked up turnarounds.
Here’s the final art I submitted (click on the turnarounds to enlarge):
Recently I received samples of the cake topper set in the mail. Here’s a quick photo taken with my blurry pocket camera. As you can see, the background plac design has been updated with official Madagascar style guide art (which I was not privy too), but otherwise everything turned out pretty close to what I designed:
