Chocolate Milk Bottle Design

I have a penchant for consuming and enjoying chocolate and anything else you can make with it.

For Vector Illustration, we had to create a package design for a product of our choice, the most common example being a beer bottle and I said screw that, I want a milk chocolate bottle, a CUTE milk chocolate bottle... with a cute animal on it.

So I decided to use a bear! That was after many suggestions to use a rabbit (Nesquik, anyone?) Funny how all these products are so deeply ingrained in our minds yet we don't realize it until this happens, just like when I made the drawing for the mural and gave the crocodile a thumbs-up (there's a CR product with a crocodile mascot that gives you a thumbs-up.)

This was the original, brainstorming sketch:

My professor liked the idea, so he suggested I take advantage of the cuteness of the bear by turning it into a character (basically turn it into something personable that can sell the product, put a soul behind those eyes), so this is the revised sketch:

There was no need to sketch the body since I planned to make it by using basic geometric shapes on Illustrator to keep the edges clean for a label. 

So after making use of the magic of Adobe Illustrator, I created my ideal chocolate milk label:

I also went on the FDA's website to find out the regulations for Nutrition Facts labels (very interesting from a typographic sense!) though I didn't follow them 100%.

Then I made a mock-up by digitally placing it on the actual container. I used a Starbucks frapuccino bottle because they are very cute and I've always wished they contained chocolate milk too:

A couple weeks ago I mentioned how a wood grain texture can very easily look VERY "Photoshoppy" but this time around I made it work.

I also had fun designing the logo for it. I originally wanted something simple and elegant but from a commercial stand point, even though there's a bear on the bottle and that's reason enough to initiate that spark of "Hmmm, what is this? Should I buy this?," the brand still has to stand out on its own. It became tricky at one point since the syllables "oco" and "oso" were right on top of each other and affected legibility by being so similar.

Also, name is a pun in Spanish. "Chocolatoso" means "chocolate-y" and "oso" means "bear," so there you go. I usually don't use Spanish in my projects but this time I made an exception because: 1) I love puns, 2) the name is easy enough that any English speaker can pronounce it without too much trouble (since I'm in the U.S.) 3) the basic understanding of CHOCOLATE is there for many other languages as well.

"it's bear-y delicious!" 

50/100 Sketches from Life

Been pretty busy this weekend but finally I'm able to post! This week I will share some snippets from my sketchbook "100 Sketches from Life." Also, if you've seen my website then you probably have seen a lot of these before.

It's been an enlightening and very fun experience so far, and it's great practice, too!

I chose a toned sketchbook for a few reasons. First, it's always been very hard for me to keep a sketchbook. The reason? It's hard for me to enjoy drawing on plain, stark white paper; it's very uninspiring to have this blinding sheet of paper staring at you. (For some reason I don't have this problem with loose sheets of paper.)

I realized this when I noticed I'd be more inclined to sketch on paper that already had something in it, like lined paper or a handout or something. Toned paper technically has something on it since it's coloured and it has these tiny little grains on it.

The other reason is I can use white charcoal on the toned paper, for highlights. This quickly and effectively gives the drawing a sense of volume and dimensionality. This can still be done on white paper but it is not instantaneous as on the toned paper.

For the most part, I've also been careful to choose objects which I find geometrically interesting. It makes the drawing much more fun when you can start off with basic geometric shapes and build it up into a more complex shape from that simple starting point.

There's lots of fruits and veggies too, they're quite fun to draw because of the textures and colour nuances in them. 

So here is a selection sketches from the first half of the sketchbook. You can also find some of these on my website. Enjoy!

Bird Greeting Cards

Greeting Cards! Three of them! Birds!

"Under the weather"

"Home Sweet Cone"

"You make my heart flutter"

graphite and digital, 7" x 5"

Don't you love the titles?

I'm sorry for the watermarks, but you can check my website (which by the way has brand new colours too!) to see versions without them. This doesn't mean I'll put watermarks on everything from now on but I made an exception for these.

I went light on the graphite and heavy with the texture since I felt like this sort of style doesn't call much for the graphite value drawing. Plus I've been steadily building up my texture library and felt like experimenting with textures. My findings have revealed that ironically, a wood grain texture can look VERY "Photoshopy" when digitally treated like textures usually are. Hence, I didn't use it!

Charles Bukowski - Vector Illustration

So I decided to re-do an old piece for Vector illustration (with professor John Foerster) and here it is.

Here's the story behind it. Exactly two years ago in the Winter quarter of 2009, I took my very first illustration class, Drawing and Design for Illustrators with Professor Daniel Powers. We had to pick a Charles Bukowski poem to illustrate, I picked:

coupons, by Charles Bukowski

cigarettes wetted with beer from
the night before
you light one
gag
open the door for air
and on your doorstep
is a dead sparrow
his head and breast
chewed away.

hanging from the doorknob
is an ad from the All American
Burger
consisting of several coupons
which
say
that with the purchase
of a burger
from Feb. 12 thru Feb. 15
you can get a free
regular size bag of french
fries and one
10 oz. cup of coca cola.

I take the ad
wrap the sparrow
carry him to the trash bin
and dump him
in.

look:
forsaking fries and coke
to help keep
my city
clean.

We were limited to one coloured paper, one different colour of pastel, and black and white pastel.

And this is what I did:

Ehhhhh.... Loved the idea and the colours but awful execution.
....
But that was two years ago!

  

In doing this I discovered that re-doing or revisiting an illustration is not as simple as it may sound (it certainly doesn't sound like it to me anymore.) There is so much that lead up to the execution of this piece that I don't even know where to begin. One thing I will say is I do miss the old colours but I think those were effective because of the pastels, which gave them a nauseating, grungy quality even though they were such bright, happy colours.  It is somewhat frustrating to do this twice and still not feel 100% pleased with it, but I definitely learned a lot from this whole process. I almost want to re-do it again in my usual graphite technique, which would definitely give it that grungy feeling but it's probably best to move on to new pieces for now.