Tag Archive for 'Illustration'

From sketch to bottle

Published on May 20, 2010 in Graphic Design and Illustration. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

A while ago I was asked by the food producer ÖNOS (a brand under Procordia Food) to make one of their labels. They are a producer of delicate syrups and jam. There were allready several products in the product line so the illustration had to resemble the others. The new taste of rhubarb syrup was produced in the middle of the cold winter and there were no rhubarbs in sight in the store. I had to by some stockphotos to be able to remember how a rhubarb actually is constructed.

After some different mockups and sketches I found a nice disposition suitable for text and design of the label. I put one of the rhubarb  stems so it followed the “V-form” in the bottom of the label.
It´s nice to see a lot of them in the supermarket and of course I had to buy one of them .-)

The illustration was sketched and scanned into photoshop to be colorized.

And finally the label in use:

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Sketching an original for a sketchbook cover

Published on May 12, 2010 in Illustration. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Its a bit difficult to make an original that have to look lika a sketch. But a cover for a sketchpad should of course look like a sketch.

This one is made for a series of drawing pads for the paper manufacturer Colores.  Its simply made with graphit pencil and scanned in with 1200 dpi to catch all the details in the grain of the paper and lead pencil strokes.

Some other product I did for Colores:

(Drawn with pencil and inked with Higgins Black Magic and Windsor Newton brushes. Then scanned in 600 dpi and colorized in Photoshop. The layout was put together in InDesign)

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Airbrush tool without an undo button.

Published on April 12, 2010 in Graphic Design and Illustration. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Finally I decided to get rid of this old friend. It´s almost all of my airbush equipment. Compared to Photoshops airbrush tool this guy is big! Stopped using it long time ago. Kept it because I thought it looked cool.

But it also took up quite a lot of space –  more space than it was cool, in the end.  And it didn´t have an “undo button”.

So eventually, I got rid of the compressor, the filter, most of the brushes and some other small paraphernalia. Making up some space for a new softbox or something…

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Kids cartoon activity pages

Published on March 25, 2010 in Graphic Design and Illustration. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Activity puzzle pages for Hemmets Journal

Time to sum up this week. Today I delivered a batch of kids activity pages for the weekly magazine Hemmets Journal. Its a nice ongoing assignment I´m lucky to have . To keep the production price low, and to be time effective  I often buy complementary illustrations from my collegues on iStockphoto.

The work on this batch have been going on now and then for a couple of weeks. As usual I had great fun making it. Hope the kids will like it…

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Illustration to photo

Published on March 19, 2010 in Photography. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Its so hard to describe an idea of a picture with just words. I try it occasionally. And it often shows up that I gave the wrong explanation, or simply the client visualized it another way. Then its nice to have some kind of visual idea of what a picture would look like. To be in sync with the client, even a loose sketch on a napkin can make the two of us think the same way. And I am not depending on the clients ability to interpret me.

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Photo to illustration

Published on March 19, 2010 in Graphic Design and Illustration. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

This is a project I did a couple of years ago. It became actual again since the client needed it with a slightly new layout to use on an exhibition on Gothenburg Motorshow. (April 22-25, 2010). This is an example on how to use the camera as a sketchup tool:

Some time ago one of our customers needed an instruction to show customers how to mount one of their products. Since the instruction needed to be visual, clear and should be printed on paper and board, an should be easy to view on their website, we chose to illustrate it.

Traditionally. Black and white with outlines. To reduce time effort I sketched up the layout with the camera. That way I got the form and perspective right without too much effort. The pictures are really ugly but they fulfill their purpose.

Hands mounting on car glass

After choosing and printing the photos I threw them into my absolutly fabulous, lifesaving, drawing machine, the Liesegang (more on this in an upcoming post), and sketched.

After some proofing with the client it was time to draw the original with black pencils, scan it and put some grey fields in it to increase the contrast and visibility.

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A picture? What is that anyway?

Published on March 18, 2010 in Thoughts. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Well, according to  common knowledge it may be a photo, an illustration or some kind of reproduction or this or that and so on. In communication we don´t analyze this much, do we? We see pictures and images everywhere in our everyday life. A photography can be digitally altered or not, it can be black and white, it can be lightened with virtually thousands of lighning modifiers including available light. What we see is a picture. An illustration can be made in thousands of ways on thousands of materials, and we still recognizes it as an illustration – or simply – a picture. That´s nice! (A Google search of the word “picture” gave 532,000,000 results. Thats a lot!)

In a small design studio we have to deal more with what kind of expression we want to give the product than should it be a photo or an illustration. It is often no borders between brush and ink, illustrator/photoshop or photos taken on location or in studio. Its about to choose wich manner that suits the project.

Since this is the first post on this blog, this is an explanation of the mix of photos, pictures, images, layouts, logos and designs that will show up on the theme “what is going on in the studio. I try to erase the borders between illustrator/photographer. I make pictures. Hope it will be inspiring!

Torbjorn

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