Illustration 1: Key Steps in Illustration- Assignment 2: Point of sale display
To create images which will be used within a campaign for a supermarket, to package and promote a range of seasonal foods.
The supermarket is respected for the quality of food they supply. They want to promote this notion of quality in their design and packaging.
The finished images will be a‘point of sale’ display sited in a store near to the fruit and vegetables. The final reproduction size will be 12 x12 inches. Your artwork can be same size or in scale.
Create an illustration of fruit or vegetables.
One illustration for each of the ranges: Summer Autumn
Your images should be objective and based upon direct observation. For each range you may choose an individual piece, dissected or partly sliced sections, or create a group of several pieces.
Then create separate images for Summer and Autumn that reflect both the produce you previously selected and aspects of the season itself. There are no limitations in terms of content – you can include other objects; a place; patterns; people or a combination of these.
Illustrating food is a challenging area of work. Focus on the food in your image. Remember to create a visual distance between you and the food. Put yourself in the place of the customer and ask, “Does this look edible? Would I like to eat it?” Be especially conscious of the way you use colour to describe tone, shadow and surface marks – poor colour choices can result in food looking mouldy, battered, and ultimately unappetising.
I particularly like the digitisation of her water colour painting style, in particular the roughly coloured fruit bowl at the bottom of the mood board above. This could be a style of illustration to experiment with.
I collated some imagery of artists work that I find particularly inspiring at the moment. These images are more subjective and abstract but are good visuals to reference for texture, interesting layouts etc.
Lucie Levrangi’s style is similar to that of Liana Verger’s but even more expressive. I really like their use of pastel colours and bold lines. This is a style of illustration I would be interested in trying.
Inspired by the older style fonts seen on my earlier mood board I went onto testing with different type faces. I quite like the bottom typeface ‘Scrubby’ and kept this in mind when continuing with experimenting.
I experimented sketching in a loose style with various materials like water colours, thick/thin pens, pencil and pastels. I quite liked some of the outcomes and they had potential to work on.
I began this task by researching illustrators and shop signs. I came across an illustrator called Liana Vegers via Pinterest. Her style of illustration is interesting, the colours she uses are more pastel and despite being more of a ‘rough’ objective style, the illustrations of fruit/vegetables still look appealing and could work on a sign in a store.
I went onto looking at signage in various styles focusing on the layout of type and images. I quite liked the more cursive, older style of type, especially with the chalk board background.
The final illustration needs to be objective and must make the fruit look appealing, so the combination of interesting typography may make the point of sale display look more engaging.
The mood boards include from from Mike Mcquade, Scott Cottrell, Robert Rauschenberg, Isabella Cotier and other found collages.
I came across an artist on twitter from Japan, she is 93 and creates interesting collages from newspaper clippings, focusing a lot on food. Her use of colour/texture allows the foods to still appear appealing but look more interesting than a photograph. I really like the use of type in random areas of the collage too.
I came across some old mono-print throwaways and scanned them into Photoshop to make them black and white. I then used an inkjet printer, printing on Xerox acetate which leaves the layer of ink on top of the acetate leaving it able to print with. I used a roller and pressed with various amounts of hardness giving different interesting textures.
I went onto cutting out different shapes of the textures to represent various fruits. I then scanned in the sketches and shapes and compiled them with colour in Photoshop. I used a digital brush and then added blending layers including paint brush strokes to add texture. I then added them to a square canvas and began to test further with colours and type to see how well they worked together.
I continued to collage using various found materials/textures. I wanted to take the more objective drawings and make them more abstract. I referred back to the assignment question and one part in particular made me feel like the more abstract side would not be best: ‘The supermarket is respected for the quality of food they supply. They want to promote this notion of quality in their design and packaging’. These designs would not promote quality nor be appealing to eat.
I decided to move forwards with a more modern typeface as it would translate better to people walking around a shop. I then went onto cutting/ripping sections of it in order to add texture and make it look visually interesting. Upon doing this the ripped paper looked to me like a mountain, which made me want to try using a yellow circle to represent the sun and summer. I then chose a banana to represent summer which would also match the yellow of the sun.
I continued experimenting with various layouts, more appropriate for a supermarket. I opted for a bold Gothic typeface in a lower case instead of the initial capitals as it looks more enticing and ‘kinder’ as opposed to ‘in your face’. I edited the colours so they would look more appealing but still work well with the background colour and overall feel of the image.
I aimed to represent the seasons with seasonal fruit and through colour. The summer image is slightly brighter with more vibrant and diverse colours.
The autumn image is more muted colours in a more seasonal colour palette of oranges, greens and browns. Looking back at some of the illustrations, the apple and peaches for example, the texture used may come across as ‘dirty’ and unappealing to customers. This would be a problem if looking to promote in a supermarket. Perhaps the same texture could be achieved but not using the black colour. I found this task quite interesting as an image for a supermarket isn’t something I would usually consider to design. I am unsure if I leant too far into the graphic design aspect of this task as opposed to solely illustrating an objective image of fruit/a visual scape including fruit.
