Summerbelle Final Art

Summerbelle Final Art (detail)- Greg Newbold- digital

I just finished up the illustration for the Summerbelle fruit carton. It's always fun to work with John Ball at BDG. I really enjoyed the process and it turned out to be one of my favorite jobs of the year so far with virtually no changes. I have to reinforce the fact that I followed all the steps that I have taught to students in the past which basically follows the basic recipe for illustration success. I have outlined it before, but it bears repeating:

1-Think. Get the idea right in your mind before you start, so you have a target you are shooting for. Think of possible alternate solutions and list them. On this job, it was pretty clear what the intention was, but I brought the idea of the umbrella to the solution which ultimately was what worked best.

2- Thumbnail Sketches. This is the most basic form of ideation on paper. Don't just chicken scratch out something vague and indecipherable. Take some care to get proportions, shape relationships, angles, POV, and value patterns defined at this stage. No details yet, but the "skeleton" is established. I made sure the angles of the pose were as dynamic as possible given the parameters of the space.

Final Summerbelle Art by Greg Newbold with graphic design by John Ball

3- Reference Gathering. In this case, I went to the trouble of renting a real costume and props from a professional theater resource. It cost a little more, but this was a good paying project and it was worth the added expense. I posed my model based on my thumbnail ideas and took lots of photos. I gave myself 2-3 alternate poses as well in case the client did not like what I proposed. I submitted two versions for consideration and the umbrella pose won out. Having great photo reference saved endless headaches and guessing.

4- Final Drawing. I draw my final drawings by hand despite the fact that this project and most of my illustration work is painted digitally. This gives me a chance to make adjustments and edits that deviate from the reference material, to stylize and to generally put my personal fingerprints on a piece.

5- Value Study. I made sure that my final drawing had the values and shadows established in a monochromatic fashion. My actual physical drawing has a certain amount of value in it and I reinforced it with multiply layer glazes of gray before stepping to color.

Summerbelle carton looking sweet with art on three sides

6- Color Study. I work out the color plan before diving in. When I don't, disasters happen. I've been doing this for a long time, so I admit that sometimes this is a mental color study for me. I thought about how I wanted the colors to pop based on the input from the client. The overall desire was that it wanted to fell light and summery. I did a quick Photoshop paint over on top of my sketch at a small size just to reinforce my instincts and then dove into the final art.

  

7- Final Art. At this point, most of the questions had been asked and answered. It was just a matter of getting all the details painted and then making sure the nuances were appealing. For instance, I went back into the shadows of the skin tones to bring some cool light into the up facing planes and warming up the down facing planes or adding reflected color as in the underside of the arm picking up the orange glow of the citrus fruit.

Fruit Crate Detail

Just a detail shot of a work in progress. This is for a California fruit grower and will go on their packing crates. The rows between the trees still need some work, but the trees are finished. This is about a fourth of the overall piece. I'll show the finish when I wrap it up.

Olive Oil Label

Last fall I got the call to create an olive oil packaging label for a major big box club store. This sounded right down my alley, so of course I put forward my proposal.  The designer was a little cryptic about who exactly the client was (Sam's Club) until I landed the job a few days later.

Final Sam's Club Olive Oil label

The challenge with most packaging illustration is the fact that the art rarely gets to take center stage. I usually gets relegated to subordinate player with logos and product names front and center. For this one, I could have simply illustrated the perimeter, but I wanted to have a complete piece at the end and not just another illustration with the center missing. I chose to paint all the area behind the logo as well. I couldn't talk about it until now, but since the product in on shelves, I figure it is public knowledge. This one is painted in Photoshop.

I Made the Recycling Bin!

The highlight of my walk the other day (other than chatting with my dear wife) was to come upon a piece of my art in the recycling bin. Some might think this strange, but I was excited to see my painting poking out of the blue can waiting to be dumped and eventually shredded into oblivion. I rescued the box so that I could reenact the moment for this post. So this begs the question-  is Illustration precious? My answer would be NO, nor do I think it should be considered as such. Don't get me wrong, I love having a painting framed and hanging on my wall after the fact , but the nature of illustration creates art that is transitory and temporary. Magazines are read and discarded, newspapers even more quickly than magazines. Paperback novels are rarely read more than once by the same person before being passed along or discarded. Packaging is torn open and tossed, posters and playbills serve their purpose and go the way of everything else in our disposable society. So, to find my art in the recycling bin got me a little giddy. First of all, I had never seen how the box art turned out and second, I was surprised to see that the client was still using my art  ten years after the fact. I admit, that I did not always feel this way about my illustration. I had the mindset that my art WAS precious, that heaven forbid anyone should ever alter or crop my work to fit their needs and worse yet, That someone should create a new piece of art by cobbling together parts of different paintings in some demented artistic Frankenstein experiment.

Part of this painting filled the bottom of the box design

But this is exactly what happened on this project. I had a client in California contact me with a rush job that did not allow time to create new art, but the client loved a mock up that combined the fields of one painting and the lake and mountains of another. Would I be willing to allow use of my work in this altered state? I admit I had a moment of horror followed by a moment of hesitation. How dare anyone ask me to compromise my artistic integrity this way? How could I allow the monstrous grafting together of two of my favorite children's book illustrations? Then I had a pause. The money being offered was decent. More than decent considering that there was no work to be done on my part. I said yes and sent off the scan and the invoice.  I have since decided that this was exactly the sort of thing that illustration should be used for- to decorate or illuminate a moment in our lives. I am proud to know that so many of my pieces of art have served their purpose and, like that yam box, have made their way into a recycling bin. I'd love to see even more of my art poking out of those blue cans on my walk.

Everything Including a Bicycle

Detail from juice label project- unused

A couple of weeks back, I posted some of the labels I did for Mountain Sun Natural Juices.Those pieces actually made it onto the product, but I also did two background labels for proposed product lines that never actually (as far as I know) went into production. This is the piece I did for the proposed "sport drink" line of juices. It was intended to be a natural alternative to Gatorade and would consist of real fruit juices with added electrolytes and vitamins, etc. 

Sport Drink label for Mountain Sun Natural Juices- approx. 17" x  5"- acrylic

They wanted the background illustration to depict all sorts of outdoor athletic activities such as runners, cyclists, etc., in a more urban setting (parks, neighborhoods and such.). The logo and the flavor spot would go dead center as in the other labels, so I curved the path around and placed the other characters and elements so that they would not be obscured by the type (at least I tried- this didn't exactly work with the other labels either). Here's how it turned out, and I did get paid for the piece.

Bottled Up

Detail from the Tropical Juice line label

A few years back I did a series of fruit juice labels for Mountain Sun Natural Juices. I created four different background paintings as well as about twenty different flavor spots that were inserts into the logo.Here are a few of the labels as they were printed. Packaging tastes changes about as fast as the tides, so these labels have long since disappeared, but I thought they turned out beautifully.

They were also nice enough to send along a case of assorted flavors of juice with my labels on them. I still have a bottle of the cherry cider (which was probably one of the tastiest) on my studio bookcase. It's far past it's "best if used by" date, but I can't bring myself to crack the top and dump it just yet. I guess if the cap explodes someday, then the decision will be made for me.

Tropical

If you look at the work I have done over the years, you'll notice how many times I have had the chance to create this type of stylized landscape. I have a lot of fun making these pictures and the stylization seems to lend a bit of a surreal feel to the scenes without removing the sense of reality that the attention to detail gives it. This painting was done for Mountain Sun Natural Juices as a wraparound background label for their tropical juice line. I also did a number of tropical fruit details that were inset into the center of the label.

I.F. - Savour

Over the years I have had a chance to create many illustrations for packing clients. I did a whole series of pictures for Pilgrim's Pride chicken to be used on their Rotisserie Chicken line.The cardboard sleeves encased the plastic domes that hold each fresh deli roasted chicken.

Each package depicted a scene from a different locale to imply the flavor from that region. I ended up doing eight different flavor location scenes including Asian, Backyard Barbecue, Tuscan, Indian and this one, Mediterranean. It's always interesting to do packaging work because you have so many different elements to accommodate. This one included leaving room for type as well as the die cut shape.

Oh, Sweet Revisions

Every once in a while, try as I might to avoid it. There comes a client who whether through fuzzy vision of their own concept or fuzzy communication of such, turns the studio upside down. In yesterday's post, I mentioned that getting the character of the farmer right on one particular box was, let's say a bit of a challenge. No worries, I am always up for an adventure, right? Or so I tell myself. When it boils right down to it, changes are a nuisance at best and at times degenerate in to a full blown nightmare. But the client is always right. After all, they hold the purse strings and I am not about to not get paid for my blood and sweat.

George next to a "Frankensteined" comp using pieces of several old paintings

No need to do a portrait, just a passing resemblance...

As John Ball of BDG put it, the concept was simple enough- create an illustration depicting a strong, iconic farmer that had an "oh so slight" passing resemblance to the owner of the company. Basically, we were looking for a rough caricature of the owner so that when people who knew "George" (we'll call him that because, well, that's his name) would think, wow, that looks a little like George
.

well, can you take out some wrinkles and make the nose smaller?

I took the photos I was given and came up with what I thought was a fair resemblance, not concerning myself much with a likeness, because that wasn't the objective.

First version of the painted face with new sketches and George for comparison

Yea, but can you change the angle of the face and make it look more like him?

Things were going great until others started putting their fingers in the pie and you all know how messy a pie can get when too many fingers are in it. Personally I prefer my pie with only my fingers in it. Sometimes I let a good creative director or designer stick in a thumb if they ask nice, but this situation quickly spiraled into a pie fight. I ended up doing several sketches and two full painted revisions of the face before finally satisfying the client- PHEW!.

2nd to last and final versions of the face

In the end, I took one of the actual photos  and painted over the top in Photoshop so that there would be little margin of error in the likeness (minus a few wrinkles and a slight rhinoplasty). I think deep down they wanted more George Clooney than the actual George, but in the end, everyone was happy because they got what they wanted and I got paid. And got paid again, and oh yea, again- I asked for a bit more dinero on each round of revisions because the portrait likeness was not part of the original agreement. Just goes to show you never get what you don't ask for and money makes those annoying changes feel oh so much better.

More Produce Packages

Yesterday's post elicited a response from John Ball of BDG that included a bunch more examples of the packaging work that my illustration has been featured on.

I have done a combination of full color as well as line art pieces for John and it's always a fun challenge to take something as potentially dull as a cardboard box and make it lively and interesting.

This particular box has it's own story that I will have to save for another day. Let's just say that getting the character of the farmer right was a bit of a challenge. But hey, it's our job as illustrators to make the client happy, which in the end I believe I accomplished.

Tomato Time

The garden is running away from me this fall. Too much produce and not enough time to get it all into jars. Must find a few hours to take care of the tomatoes and help make pickles. I am grateful for the productivity though, and the garden has done as well as any in previous summers. I have had the chance to work on a number of packages and labels for produce growers through my associations with California agency Ball Design Group. John Ball is great to work with and it's always fun to be waltzing down the produce aisle of the local grocery store and see your work. This is a little thing I did a couple of years back that is still floating around in the stores. It made it's way onto boxes for a number of things including the tomatoes and peppers. I always do a little fist pump when I see it, even if it only printed two inches wide and nobody else really knows or cares.