Southport & Formby Brand Guidelines

Last year I was given the chance to create a set of family-orientated characters for the brand guidelines of Southport & Formby's Clinical Commissioning Group. The SFCCG favoured a hand-drawn approach, which was right up my street so I just set to it and churned out a whole bunch of people! At first I had a bit of trouble creating a bold, thick outline for the characters - until I discovered the glory of a charcoal pencil! I didn't realise these types of pencil existed until I stumbled across them in my local art shop. They are very useful for creating a stark sort of line that makes your illustrations much bolder.

My working process was to sketch my characters out, trace them on a lightbox using the charcoal pencil, scan them into the computer, and then clean them up and apply some nice homely textures onto them to promote that nice home-made feel.

I also created a long monochrome background, the monochrome-ness was to help the hand drawn characters stand out on the page.

Here are a couple of pages from the brand guidelines were you can see a couple of the illustrations being used in example company documents and the like. (The guidelines were designed and put together by the magical graphic design talents of SplinterSkip!