Thank you letters

A short while ago I was excited to be working on a set of illustrations for the LCH's 2013 Annual Report; unfortunately a decision was made to go with a different look for this years report. So I thought what should I do with all these illustrations I worked on? Why yap about them on the Nafftastic blog of course!

Originally, the Annual Report had the theme of a Thank You letter, and my illustrations were to sit alongside this theme. As you can see, these illustrations are really heavily influenced by Janet Ahlberg. Janet Ahlberg had a lovely, innocent style which she used to convey equally innocent and sweet characters. I particularly love The Jolly Christmas Postman, I used to love opening up all the letters when I was a kid, my favourite was Little Red Riding Hood's letter to the Wolf - I think because it was so colourful!


I experimented for a while with doing hand drawn illustrations and then recreating the same illustrations in vector, trying to see which looked more effective. Whilst I love watercolour paint and the texture/quality that can be achieved, I was leaning more towards vector illustration just due to the ease this would mean when designing the report - being able to resize without losing any quality is a pretty handy thing!
So heres a few examples of hand drawn vs vector!



(In this last one I attempted to draw the line work in Illustrator and add textures scavenged from Google to recreate the watercolour effect).

It was also suggested that I look into drawing some sequential imagery such as a flying paper plane, or a teddy bear using crutches - as it was planned to have a little flipbook element on the corners of the pages of the report.
First I just looked at how a bear could walk...



Walking Teddy from Nafftastic on Vimeo.

I then tried a more polished version of the bear using crutches.



Bear on some crutches from Nafftastic on Vimeo.
(I really enjoyed making these - I haven't animated anything in while so it was good fun)!

Finally, I mocked up some possible front covers for the report. These were a pleasure to think up as well; I was given the freedom to go as busy as I liked - I love illustrations with lots of things going on!


So there we go! I'm disappointed not to be working on this project any more, but despite this I really enjoyed the development stages and being able to tinker with some animation again.