Here's a painting I recently finished for my dad's company's catalogue cover. The business sells rehabilitation equipment specialising in overseas imports for children with special needs.
I've been doing the catalogue cover each year since 2006 when I was 14 years old and if I could lay out all the catalogues side by side you could see the progress I've made since then. From 2006 to 2010 my front cover 'design' was a whacked on a photo of a featured product like a wheel chair and some text in front of it. Since last year I asked permission to illustrate the cover and this is what I produced:
The product the image is showcasing is an enclosure called 'Safespaces' designed for children with destructive habits and who suffer tantrums. The entire thing is designed so that these children can throw things and jump against walls without getting injured allowing them to get tired and calm down. It's an ingenious product and a godsend especially for carers and teachers who get injured when trying to stop uncontrollable tantrums.As you can see the painting is pretty basic. I used Photoshop CS3 and a lot of the magic wand tool to isolate colours once I accidentally flattened everything.
This year for the 2013 catalogue I asked for a list of products that the company wanted to showcase and I got 7 very different products. Eventually I narrowed it down to the squeeze machine, a sensory machine designed for autistic children who enjoy the feeling of being embraced and squeezed. The Columbia Spirit Car Seat which is a special car seat with customisable ergonomics. And the Trekker Walker which is a piece of equipment that assists children, particularly with cerebral palsy, to walk unaided.
I have no idea how I came up with the concept of bears using the squeeze machine to steal fish but I'm glad at the end that my dad was happy with the result. It took about a week from sketch to finish but I had to do layouts and text for the catalogue as well which took up most of my time.
Some of the references I used when sketching the characters included Joey Chou's illustrations and a tutorial about composition I found on the internet which I will put up a link to when I get onto my mac. Also a tutorial about how to render in Photoshop came in handy.
