Today is Good Friday, the day Christians celebrate the torture, crucifixion, and death of Jesus Christ. So why is it called “good?” Good question.
Earlier in my career I illustrated this 8-page cartoon Gospel tract. I hope it will explain the answer.
Happy Easter!
A few months ago I was hired by the terrific team at Minneapolis agency RPM Connect to illustrate an in-store display for Act II Popcorn, a brand owned by ConAgra Foods. RPM came to me with a fun concept (two kids bouncing around on a sea of popcorn) and a rough layout for the signage, then asked me to work up a sketch:
ConAgra gave us a thumbs-up to move forward. Due to printing limitations it was decided that we could only use five colors: Black, Red, Blue, Gold, and White. I could use any percentage of the colors I needed but we decided not to risk mixing the colors. In other words, I could use 30% red to get pink but I couldn’t add black to the red to get maroon. It was a bit of a challenge but in the end I think it worked out well.
I created the artwork in Illustrator. I made sure to place the kids and the floating popcorn bits on different layers so that the designer could have a little flexibility when fitting them into the different layouts. I didn’t bother illustrating all of the popcorn on the right-hand side of the artwork since I knew it would be covered up by the blue-and-gold “swoop” shape.
Here’s the final artwork I submitted:
And here’s the final header RPM designed for use in stores:
Look for this display in your local grocery store, and then grab yourself some yummy popcorn!
As a freelance illustrator I’m often hired by ad agencies and marketing firms to create “comp art” or “marker comps”, which are fast, rough sketches used to pitch an idea to a client. They can be black-and-white or color, depending on the deadline and budget, but they are a lot of fun to do. Because clients are very protective of their ideas I am often asked not to reveal the comp work publicly. But every now and then someone gives me permission to tell the world what we were up to.
Recently I was hired by the Texas-based Launch Agency to help pitch a mascot idea to The Bramton Company, makers of a line of pet waste disposal products called “Bags On Board”. A few months earlier, Launch hired me to help them update the “Bags On Board mascot. Now, they wanted to pitch Bramton with the idea of having someone in a mascot costume hand out fliers and free samples at pet stores around the country.
I whipped up this color sketch to help sell the concept. It was a large, hi-res image done completely in Photoshop.
After some consideration the client ultimately decided against the costume concept. In the world of marketing that kind of thing is not uncommon. In the advertising industry a flurry of ideas come and go every day. It doesn’t make sense to do a highly-polished illustration just to get across the seed of an idea that may never even get off the ground. So the comps I’m asked to do are usually just glorified sketches, though I try to make them look nice enough to make the concept clear and appealing. Either way I still get paid, and I usually have a lot of fun helping out in the process.
Several times a year I am called on by local ad agencies to do marker comps. “Marker comp” is an industry term leftover from the days before computers. Back then if an agency wanted to pitch an idea to a client they would sometimes bring in an illustrator, plop him in front of a drawing board stacked with paper and markers, describe what they had in mind, and then ask him to quickly do some color sketches of their ideas to show the client. A picture is indeed worth a thousand words. It’s much more effective to sell an expensive idea to a client by showing them what you have in mind rather than by trying to describe it in words alone.
Today most of the artwork is done digitally. I usually do comps in my studio on the Cintiq and then deliver them via email (although I do own a portable Cintiq that allows me to work on-site if needed). Everything is colored in Photoshop rather than with markers on paper. But the term “marker comp” seems to have stuck.
Since everything in the world of advertising has to get done yesterday marker comps are often very rough and done under very tight deadlines. I recently did some black-and-white comps for a client where I only had three hours to sketch eight concepts! That’s a very extreme example but it does happen. If an illustrator can draw fast, draw well, and be creative all at the same time, he or she will be very valuable to an agency.
Usually I am asked to keep my marker comps confidential. There are various reasons for this. Sometimes a client will want to protect their ideas from being stolen by a competitor. Often the agency simply gives all rights to the comps to the end client which leaves me with no control over the art. Other times an agency might not want it to be known that they brought in outside help to work on a project. Whatever the reason, most of the marker comps I do are kept under wraps which makes it a bit of a challenge for me to advertise that service.
Every once in a while a client gives me the “thumbs up” to publicly display something that I’ve done. A few months ago I was hired by a freelance designer who was, in turn, working on a project for a local agency. The idea was to pitch a specific retail display to Target in the hopes that Target would allow them to set it up in their stores. Unfortunately I don’t remember who the end client was or what the product was they wanted to display. I was simply asked to sketch up an area of open shelves in a typical Target store (specifically the “camping/lawn-and-garden” area of the store), and then the designer would fill in the shelves and end cap with some of his display ideas using Photoshop.
The designer gave me a few reference photos and then I drove down to my local target to snap a few more. This was the end result that I submitted to the client. It’s one of the more “neat and tidy” comps I’ve ever done so I’m glad I’m able to add it to my portfolio.
I was digging through some old artwork and found some alien concept sketches I did way back in 2006. These were some “villain” designs from an educational project for kids that was to take place in outer space. As far as I know things never went much further than this before the project came to a stand still, for reasons I’m not privy too. (I did get paid for my work.) The client has asked that I not reveal any specific info about what they had in the works, so here you go….some silly aliens from the studio archives.
Any time I look back at old sketches like these I notice things I’d like to improve or do differently to make the designs stronger. That just means that with each passing year my skills are improving and I’m developing a keener eye. At least, that’s what I like to think.
Here’s another Christmas illustration I’ve been working on as part of a self-promotion campaign. It’s really fun to be able to noodle something up just for me without any restrictions based on client’s needs.
One of my all-time favorite stories is Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”. Recently I’ve been getting inspired by watching and re-watching some of the film versions of the story. My favorites are the TV movie starring George C. Scott and the musical “Scrooge” starring Albert Finney. With all those Victorian-era images swimming around in my head I decided to doodle up this character. My wife thinks he looks like a chestnut vendor. I kinda like that.
Merry Christmas one and all!
