This illustration was done for marketing materials for a recently opened shopping mall. The assignment was basically to visually design and show the different members of the consumer family and their pet moose who are regulars at the mall. Each character’s design had to elicit a specific personality and interests.
Continued from Part 1. So, here are the illustrations for the latter half of the year.
July: Holiday fun for the whole family. A look of terror on daddy’s face was deemed inappropriate (I suspected it would be), but it would’ve been funnier.
August: Picnic lunch during the harvest.
September: The apples are ripe for picking. The dude’s putting the moves on the girl while the bull is putting the moves on the apples.
October: New feed for the piglets.
November: The hunting season. In the first sketch the hunter with his rifle was in the foreground while the moose was anxiously hiding behind a tree in the midground. But the nasty school shooting incident that happened here in Finland had happened just before I got started with this gig (and on my birthday of all days). So I had to pretty much redo the sketch, with the gun out of sight, the moose relaxed in the foreground and the hunter in the background (well, midground really). The first sketch sucked anyway, so I didn’t mind.
December: Christmas elf visiting the farm animals. Ham is the traditional Christmas dish in Finland, so this just might be the last meal for the pigs.
Happy new year, folks! I’m a few days late for that, but, hey, the year is still young. And what’s a better way to start the new year than with a couple of big posts with images for the whole year?
So, this is the first batch of the images I did for LSO Foods’ calendar for the year 2008. LSO Foods is a major meat producer in Finland, producing both pork and beef. The calendar itself was produced for the actual meat producers i.e. the farmers that grow the animals. Hence the style of images was slightly romantic, but couldn’t get too cheesy or sweet considering the business is about raising and killing animals for food, and everyone viewing the calendar is well aware of that.
I got a short brief for each month (from the folks at ad agency Oivallus, who did the calendar design), and was then let loose to sketch. Every image had to include the colors of the corporate identity - a certain strong red and blue - which meant that the other colors used had to be fairly saturated and strong too, for the color schemes to appear harmonious and work.
January: Price Boar. Initially, the two men of the house looked more alike.
February: Laskiainen. On Shrove Tuesday, it’s a tradition in Finland to do just what the kids are doing in the image - in addition to eating a certain type of bun with whipped cream.
March: Piglets and promoting a new web service, which I’m clearly not promoting here, hahah. There’s a logo on the screen on the final image.
April: Unloading piglets. New, excited piglets arriving to the piggery. I used Google Sketchup for the background, which was a good call since I had to do it several times over and that way I didn’t have to worry about the perspective as much.
May: Spring pastures. Letting the cows loose on spring pastures, as well as doing the spring sowing.
June: Juhannus. Celebrating the Midsummer in Finland includes everyone escaping to their summer cottages, raising the Finnish flag, eating loads of sausages, drinking too much, bathing in a sauna & doing skinny dipping, drunkenly pissing over the side of a rowboat or trying to swim across a river too wide and drowning. Makes me swell with pride and patriotism.
I’ll be posting the second batch in the near future, so stay tuned for that.
This piece was done some time last spring, I believe. It was intended for an ad campaign, but was never used in the end. I think the campaign probably finished long ago and I finally got myself into doing some touch up on the image, removing anything that would connect it to the campaign or the client.
So here he is, football kid in candy colors.
Here’s a couple of commissions I did for the Finnish metal workers’ union magazine "Ahjo". With the general election coming up in just couple of weeks here in Finland, the first article was about how well the current government did achieve their promises and goals. The bottom line pretty much was that while the long term employed did fine, the short term employed and the poor - like pensioners, students and unemployed - didn’t.
The client wanted something resembles old soviet propaganda posters a little with the proletariat standing side by side. This is what the final result was - with a montage type composition and all.
Apparently I’m more influenced by the golden age American advertisement illustrators than socialist posters, since - while the feedback for the published illustration was otherwise positive - the client (fairly) pointed out that the guy seemingly overlooking the woman and the girl came of as a slightly sexist and aged concept. Whoops - and I had thought of the lady as some executive type the whole time I worked on the image.
So, for the illustration to the follow up article - this time about the promises of the candidates and parties - I made sure all the characters were presented equal. And what are the parties promising us? This time both long and short term employed should do better, while the poor are still left out of the agenda.
On the left are the initial idea and composition sketches for the second illustration. The right ones I sent to the client to choose from and they went for #1.
And here’s the final illustration. Notice that the client had changed to layout to fit a horizontal format illustration instead of the initial vertical. Luckily it was easy to tweak the composition to fit the new shape of "the canvas". The women are supposed to be "looking ahead."
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