Grow – Illustration Concepts
As the Grow website is at the minute very text heavy, I’ve decided to experiment with illustrations in order to break up the content. This post will look at the steps I have taken in designing the Grow Characters from Scratch.
Stage One: Sketching
First I do some rough sketching in order to get a feel for the shape, size and features of the characters. This illustration will encompass the notion of multi-ethnicity and sense of community, which are some of Grow’s goals.
As you can see from the sketch below, I’m striving for a heavily stylised and quite abstract cartoon character. I believe this is inkeeping with Grow’s informal and fun attitude.
Stage Two: Mapping out and drawing in Illustrator
In stage I map out the basic shapes in illustrator. In order to keep the charcters as simple as possible, I tend to construct them out of either rectangles or circles. I then customise these shapes by adding or taking away points with the pen tool and reshaping the curves.
More shapes are built up until the basic look of the characters is complete. At this stage I may also add in some simplistic shading and highlighting.
Final Stage: Photoshop
As you can see the characters are quite flat and uninspiring when they come out of Illustrator. I like to use photoshop for colour correction and to add subtle light and shadow to give a sense of depth.
I accomplish this by using the ‘Magic Wand’ tool to select the large blocks of colour in turn. I then use the ‘Burn’ to add in the shadows in the relevant areas. I recommend you use this tool at a low exposure setting around 10 or 20, above this the shadows can start to look a bit harsh. It is best to build the shadows up in layers.
Here’s the final result.
