What do you do when you’re on holiday and McDonald’s asks you to work on 3 illustrations for them to celebrate their 10th anniversary in Trinidad & Tobago?
You say yes and thank your lucky stars that you cleared your week in advance.
The brief for the job was simple, to create 3 custom illustrations which are patriotic, family-friendly, and feature local landscapes/ topics. Sounds easy enough…but how do you capture the essence of a place like Trinidad & Tobago in just 3 illustrations, there are literally hundreds of things that you can do to represent T&T.
As with all jobs, the first thing I did was to start brainstorming ideas. I also decided to ask my Instagram followers for some help by asking them what they think of when they think of Trinidad & Tobago. I definitely got some good answers that helped me get a gauge on what were the most frequent answers (example: Carnival.) I’ve included below a selection of the answers that I receieved.
Once I narrowed down some of the ideas, the next step was to start sketching. At this point I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do so the sketches would be super rough just to try to figure out the actual composition of the concept. If you look at the sketches below, you can see how the final designs originated in these thumbnails.
The sketches above aren’t shared with the client during the process, however what I typically do is send across refined pencil sketches for the client’s approval before I move on to adding any colour. This way, the layout can be approved and there are no surprises for the client at the end; and of course if there are any changes to the layout, all I have to do is change a pencil sketch and not redo an entire section of a fully formed illustration.
The concepts that I chose covered a lot of bases of T&T culture and life.
Design 1 showed a hummingbird in the hills; the original Amerindian name for Trinidad is Ieri or the Land of the Hummingbirds so I felt it a fitting tribute to have a hummingbird as the focal point in the illustration.
Design 2 was of course an ode to Carnival. I tried to capture the energy of Carnival showcasing masqueraders at the Queen’s Park Savannah in full revelry.
Design 3 was meant to showcase the melting pot that is Trinidad & Tobago using many elements of what makes us who we are in one design.
Once the sketches are approved, I usually work on a colour-study which is a more refined sketch that includes some colour so that the client can get an idea as to what the palette will be.
This job however, had a pretty tight deadline, so I included a small segment of colour in the initial sketch presentation so that the client can both see the layout and palette in one shot. There were a few minor changes after this stage of the process but nothing major.
Next up was to create the final illustration!
For the final pieces, I had a pretty good idea of the style and vibe I was going for. The three designs were done on the iPad Pro using the Procreate app. Procreate is an extremely versatile program that I really enjoy using. If you want to know more about my Procreate work flow, click here to check out a video I made. Once I wrapped up the finished illustrations, I worked on some mockups so that the client can best see what the final product would look like.
Overall this was a really fun project to work on and I am extremely happy with the final result. If you scroll down you will see the promo video as well as the television interview for the launch of the illustrations. I hope you enjoyed this insight into the process, and if you have any questions make sure to leave them as a comment.
Nick