March 30, 2017

Crown Drawing

March has generally been a busier month with some traveling and a heavier workload. This past week I've managed to take on a side project to get a pencil back in my hand. It's easy for me to get caught up in the digital world and designing on the computer, so I really value breaks that involve paper and pencil. 

A friend came to me asking for a drawing project of two crowns. I was tasked with recreating each crown and adding some design elements to them. Initially both were to get a swirl design added, however, there was a need to make one of the crowns more masculine. I began by sketching out each crown on a 5"x7" piece of Rives BFK. From there I used microns to perfect the outlines. I cleaned up the sketch marks I initially had and then went in to do shading and detailing with various graphite pencils. With that looking well I added the extra design elements. To the queen crown I kept the swirls per request. The king crown provided a bit of a design challenge, but I ended up sketching several options where the client chose one he liked the best. I completed that with the same micron then graphite process to get the final drawings. Below is an animated gif of the progress made with the queen drawing.


Throughout the process I filmed the progress of each drawing with my GoPro Hero 5 Session. I've been experimenting with the time lapse settings and believe I have found the sweet spot. Stay tuned for a future post of time lapse footage. Below are the drawings along with some detail shots. 





March 06, 2017

March Catalogs: Seasonal Content

We've added a new part to some of our print catalogs that features fresh, new seasonal products in a new visual way. The marketing team strategize with the merchandising team to select products that customers are most likely wanting at the time the catalog shows up in their mailbox. For March, the focus included wheel mods and exhaust mods based on previous data. Four pages of this new catalog insert would feature those two categories. For additional pages feature the newest products that have just been released.

For this March catalog, I designed the seasonal content for AmericanMuscle's 2015-2017, 2010-2014, and 2005-2009 publications. The design direction was to focus on new lifestyle imagery of the products so that this content section looks unique to all other pages in the book. To accomplish this, a lot of time was put into sifting through in-house photography and customer submitted product shots. While it took more time than a normal spread, in the end it came together quite nicely. 

Below is the 2015-2017 Seasonal Content:






While the design is mostly photography-driven, there were some typographical elements I got to include such as the Wheels messaging, the axle-back vs. cat-back banner and the spring messaging that introduces the new products for March. A few additional product image thumbnails were also added to the layout to better explain and/or display the products. 

Below is the 2010-2014 spreads:






Below is the 2005-2009 seasonal content:






All inserts took on a very similar layout with the products and photography varying. The content as a whole has a unique look to it when comparing it to our normal product-heavy catalog pages. Hopefully this new look gets the customers inside the books even more to discover new mods for their Mustangs.

March 03, 2017

ExtremeTerrain Sweepstakes

ExtremeTerrain.com is having a $6,000 Custom Wrangler Build Giveaway and I designed the creative. The initial design direction was a Wrangler off-roading in the mud. I sifted through our in-house lifestyle photography and found some more recent photos of a Jeep we have not used much yet in our XT graphics. There were various shots of this Wrangler in the mud, however it didn't include very much greenery in the images. Since this sweeps is running March through April, I decided to retouch the photos and composite in some leaves. 

The initial photo had some foreground elements, mostly sticks, but this inspired me to add a brand with leaves. I used a Gaussian blur filter on a stock branch photo to make it look like it's in the foreground and out of focus.


I also added some subtle green grass and leaves to the background. From there I placed this main image in various email and on-site templates and added copy. Below is an email a-spot and on-site banner showing the slightly different copy elements and design.



The social team requested several alt images, and I took the same approach as I did with the original image. I found two other angles of the same Wrangler and added touches of green throughout the scene. Below is one of the alts.


Check out ExtremeTerrain.com for the latest sweepstakes and aftermarket Jeep Wrangler products.

March 01, 2017

Time Lapse Rose Drawing


First and foremost, GoPro's are awesome. I've been meaning to capture the progress of my drawings and paintings and finally purchased a GoPro to do so. I used the time lapse feature and began to mess with the speed settings. While this one is a little more choppy than I was initially going for, it certainly does the job. This drawing took about 30 minutes, and I did speed it up in post at 200%. The drawing is graphite pencil on Rives BFK.