Peek Inside a Pickle Sketchbook- From Initial Sketch to Final Design.
Behind a shiny finished product is always an excitable brainstorm and quick doodle on whatever you can get your hands on at the time. Although we have no cliche ‘drawings on a restaurant napkin’ for you, here's a selection of a few sketches (in various sketchinesses) and their final outcome, to have an inside look into how much can change, and hopefully how much can improve, from that initial idea to the final piece.
Fosse Park West- Blaby District Map Mural 2020
Illustrating for maps is a long old process. Getting a balance between something that feels creative and dynamic but also able to give accurate information requires a lot of thinking and A LOT of drafts. Here’s a pretty early draft, before this we plotted all the points on Google My Maps to get our bearings. There's a pretty interesting looking fox in the bottom right hand corner, before fox drawing was second nature to us. As you can see pretty much everything has changed in the design (apart from the actual geography of the area…) so a lot of tweaking was needed to get it to its final product!
We started the design on our iPads using procreate but eventually used Adobe Illustrator to lay out all the components which we flattened to lower the file size. She was still a big old file though!
The Arena Print Design 2020
Here’s a more worked out sketch (no idea where the original is, our apologies) we created when designing a 1000 followers celebration print for our friends at The Arena. Here we have started to add a bit of depth using filled in blocks to understand where the dark and light parts can draw the eye around the design. This is the maximum level of detail you could expect to see on a first round of sketches sent to a client. The design didn’t change that much after this point in terms of content and composition, but there's plenty of room for changes in colour which is often what takes the most time to get right towards the end of an illustration.
Trouva ‘Shop Small’ Illustration 2020
It was so much fun playing around and illustrating items from the Trouva online shop to create an abstract energetic scene. There were too many options! However we both knew using a teapot as a shop front HAD to feature, because duh. Again not too much has changed here and there were definitely a few different iterations before this sketch was finalised.
From a sketch we usually pop it into procreate (or your digital colouring software of choice) lower the opacity and then draw and add the colour on top so we can see what we are doing!
‘The Women Who Clothed the World’ Rocket Round Leicester 2021
Here’s an early sketch of our ‘The Women Who Clothed the World’ inspired Rocket Round Leicester design. We blocked in the two larger figures first with their sewing machinery and then explored how the other figures could interact around them. Knowing how the back and front would join is an entirely other problem we explored more in our project spotlight here. As sketches go, it compositionally didn't change too much but luckily for the characters they ended up with better haircuts in the final version!
Fosse Park West Management Suite Mural 2021
Another example of a sketch we were happy to show a client (you can tell those lines look too clean to be a first draft). Here we wanted to create a flow between all the elements so it required a lot of the shapes intersecting and running off each other (hand into foxes tail as an example). From here we had a lot of problems with that cheeky top right hand corner. Deciding to ditch the buildings as they didn't fit in with the boldness of the rest of the design, we added in more references to Fosse Park as a place rather than the surrounding city.
And voila! There's a quick peek into what we see at the start of the project as it's only fair you see some behind the scenes, imperfect bits and pieces too. For more behind the scenes process illustrations we break down a lot of our projects when you look at them through the ‘work’ section of the website.