Sketchbook Update

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I’m a strong believer in keeping a daily sketchbook.

I’m also a hypocrite. I often go days or weeks without cracking mine open.

Don’t get me wrong. I do a lot of drawing but the overwhelming bulk of my artwork is created for clients with strict guidelines and objectives that have to be met. Between commissioned work and the never ending slog of running a freelance business (emails, phone calls, bookkeeping, self-promotion, writing proposals, running errands, keeping a blog, etc.) its getting harder and harder for me to curl up with a blank page and sketch for my own study and enjoyment. Lately I’ve been feeling a bit like a professional athlete who plays hard during the actual games but then never has time to exercise or come to practice.

As a result I’ve started to feel a bit stale in my artistic development. I’m catching myself falling back on reliable tricks and habits rather than pushing myself to learn and grow. That’s a slippery slope towards creative death. So lately I’ve been forcing myself to get back into it and crack open the ol’ sketchbook more regularly. My goal is to do a page a day. Some days I make it, many I still don’t, but I’m determined to keep pushing ahead.

Most of my sketchbook drawings are not very cartoony. In order to be a good cartoonists I believe you first have to understand how to draw realistically. You have to have a solid grasp the real thing before you can convincingly simplify and caricature it. So when I sketch I usually study real people, real poses, real clothing, etc.

I also do a lot of very bad drawings (though I don’t have the courage to show them here). You can’t grow and improve without making mistakes and my sketchbook is the one place where I give myself total permission to mess up royally. If all my sketchbook drawings were perfect it would only mean that I was drawing things I’ve already mastered. That’s a great way to get stale fast.

Here’s a few recent sketches. Nothing in this particular batch is from life—all are from photos or video stills.

Interview With Yours Truly

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Artist David Paccia runs a blog called David Wasting Paper. Among other things he has posted over 100 interviews (and counting) with various illustrators and cartoonists. As of yesterday I’m one of them. Check it out.

Trifecta BBQ Sauce

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A few months ago I was hired by the Trifecta BBQ sauce company to create an illustration for their new brand of BBQ sauce. It was a fun project which I blogged about showing the steps from intial concept to final artwork.

I’m an illustrator, not a graphic designer, so I did not do the full label design. I just created the artwork and then the Trifecta people hired someone else to design a label around it.

Here’s the final artwork I submitted:

Trifecta-Final6v2a

The preliminary bottling has now begun, and earlier this week I received six bottles showcasing the new label design, hot off the assembly line. I’m told this is not the final design—they are going to make some minor changes—but I thought I’d post a quick photo anyway:

I can’t wait to slap some steaks on the grill and give this sauce a try! This is the perfect time of year for it too. Here in Minnesota the snow has only been gone for about a month, the leaves are sprouting on the trees, and there are no bugs….yet.

There’s also a Trifecta website in the works at trifectasauces.com. As of this writing its not live yet but it should be going live soon. If you enjoy a good BBQ it would be worth giving Trifecta a try.

Act II Popcorn Header

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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!

Comp Art: Costumed Mascot

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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.

Marker Comp for a Target Pitch

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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.