Basic Gear logo

I am excited to say that I am finished with the Basic Gear (outfitter company) logo! To continue off my previous post, my client chose the bear, which surprised me because he originally wanted a landscape. I was excited that he wanted the bear since I love drawing animals. I told him that the reason I chose a bear out of all the woodland creatures is because it is the most confident, resilient, and powerful out of the forest animals.

The previous bear sketch was too stagnant for my liking and I wanted to reflect that the company was always moving forward so I drew this sketch:

Then I traced it in Illustrator and added the company name and tagline as requested by my client. When I finished I realized how awkward the bear looked like floating on an implied hill, so I rotated him to be on a flat surface.  

I then got to play with color combinations and while I was thinking of color I wanted to keep it earthy  to keep it appropriate for an outdoor supply company. I researched earthy color palates and I found this one particularly helpful.

I took some of these colors and applied them to my logo:

I sent my client these 4 color options and he (and I) liked the chocolate brown bear the best. It is warm and earthy without being dull. From there, I saved multiple options of file types and made a style guide on how to use the logo properly. I quickly learned from my last client that if I skip the style guide my logos and all my hard work goes into the gutter. So learn from my experience, don't forget if you are making a logo to take the extra time to make a style guide or your vision for that logo (might) go to waste!

New Year's Resolution/Alphabet

I have realized I am not the best of art bloggers recently (thanks to Pinterest for letting me know that). I am inconsistent with blog posts and my New Year's resolution is to post something at least every 2 weeks. So something I have been working on is an alphabet for kiddos and basically every letter is formed by an animal that starts with those letters. Here are sketches of the first 3 letters:

lunch color study

Hello friends and family! I am happy to post up my color study of my kitty trying to get a meal. However the colors are slightly desaturated compared to my original in illustrator. I am going to make some more design changes and then print it out. I will then put mat medium on top and paint on top of it. Hopefully the finish will have lots of colors and nice modeling. I can't wait to start the finished product!

mailer sketches

So here is my first sketch of 2 children biking and I showed it Greg Newbold and he gave me excellent advice. He said it might be better is the children were animals like a penguin and a polar bear so that more people can relate to the piece. I sketched a lot more figuring out what animals to use and what they look like.


Here is what I came up with, but I wanted to push it some more in making the characters and bike into simple shapes.




Here is the final sketch and now I am going to paint it!