Gala Bingo Calendar - Bingo Call Character Illustrations

Eyes down for a brilliant bingo based Project

I've recently worked on a great project for Gala Bingo. working together with a fab design company from Leicester called Work Design. We produced a fun promotional calendar to hang on peoples walls and help promote Gala Bingo for the whole year.

I was asked to create the 12 illustrations used on the calendar, and they are all based on the most popular bingo calls. Any bingo officionados out there will know the common and quirky calls used in bingo halls all over the world, but if you need reminding of the full list you can check out this extensive Wikipedia page.

The final twelve we chose needed to be fairly family friendly as they have to appeal to a broad audience of Gala Bingo regulars. The final twelve bingo calls chosen are:

Legs 11, Knock on the door 44, Lucky7, Kelly's eye 1, David's den 10, Droopy drawers 44, Unlucky for some 13, Clickety click 66, Two fat ladies 88, Key to the door 21, Doctors orders 9, Two little ducks 22.

You can see the final calendar design in the gallery above. Work Design have done a great job with the graphics and the colours and background details really make the illustrations pop! You can see the early sketches and all the character illustrations below with plain backgrounds (lucky 7 above).

Let me know what you think if you fancy leaving a comment, or feel free to contact me about this project or any other. Enjoy :)

Suave & sophisticated fox character and logo design for Selection Fox

Sweet character and logo design project

*Selection Fox - Dapper fox in his stripy socks!*

I recently had the pleasure to work on a great new character and logo design for a fantastic new company named 'Selection Fox'.

The business is an online sweet / candy ordering service. You choose your favourite tasty treats and they'll pick, pack and post the parcel of perfection direct to you - Awesome!

The name is obviously a play on the traditional 'selection box'. Therefore with a small leap of creative genius 'Selection Fox' was born.

Our new character needed to be (a) a fox and (b) a suave, sophisticated and cool as candy old school dandy :)

The top hat and tails seemed an obvious choice, with the candy cane, sweet bow tie and liquorice pipe finishing off his sophisticated demeanour.

Purple was an obvious choice of colour next to the foxy orange hues, and all that was left was to add a giant liquorice allsort in his other hand. And lastly what dapper fox would be seen without his super, stripy socks?!

Check out the initial character sketches below, and some of the alternative poses and character styles we tried.

Lip-smackingly lovely logo

The 'Selection Fox' logo came next (which is unusual but not unheard of). The logo needed to have obvious design links with the character, but be a standalone identity in it's own rights.

We found a font that conveyed the right 'feel' for the brand, and added the top hat and fox tail to add the unique elements from the character.

A purple and orange colour scheme was used to continue the theme set by the character design. The 'classic' British sweets were added as a background with some liquorice allsorts, cola bottle and shrimp taking pride of place. The drop shadow effect was used to make the logo jump off the page a little.

A couple of variations of the logo were also created for possible alternative usage.

As usual I'd love to know what you think. Leave a comment or send me a message. Enjoy :)

Scientist Character Design - Empiribox Logo and Illustrated Cartoon Scientist

Mad Scientist - character design

If I asked you to picture a cartoon scientist you would undoubtedly imagine the white coat, big glasses/goggles and some crazy hair of some kind. Add in some bubbling, smoky liquid in a test tube and you've got your typical scientist (mad scientist) character.

This is exactly what the client needed, so who am I to argue with tradition?! I did create a choice of other scientist sketches following the similar theme, and a favourite was chosen and vectored up to final artwork. Let me know what you think or if you'd have preferred a different scientist from my sketches.

Empiribox Logo - design, animate and icon amends

Following the scientist character design, I also helped work on the company logo a little by developing the icons used amongst the text. As you can see the logo incorporates a rocket ship, a test tube and a bug. I designed a few variations of each icon and tried several colour schemes.

We also tried to get a bit of extra fun into the logo and decided to have a little play with animating the logo for the website. You can see the simple animated logo below.

If you have any thoughts, comments, suggestions or questions then please feel free to comment below or contact me in whatever way is best for you. Enjoy :)

Caveboy - Caveman Character Design and Illustration

A client needed a caveman, or to be more specific a caveboy character created. The character needed to appeal to kids and was to be used for learning and informational purposes in an environment that specifically deals with heritage and historical education.

Things to consider were that the character looked fun and friendly but not too cartoony. Also needed to be considered was that the character could have the potential to be dressed in different period costume to show the same boy in different outfits and therefore periods of time.

You can see my first stage of sketches, and following feedback from the client the final vector artwork for the caveboy is shown with and without a background. Any feedback is appreciated as always. Cheers and enjoy!

Leicester Tigers - Welford character design - He's Grrreat!

If any of you good people are Leicester Tigers fans you might recognise this grrreat guy. It's Welford the official mascot for Leicester Tigers - the English rugby union team based in Leicester (obviously).

I've been illustrating the Tigers Family (#Tigersfamily) cartoon strip for the past two seasons, and you can see every single cartoon strip as well as sketches and even video on their very own blog.

This project however is all about Welford. Welford has been the offical Leicester Tigers mascot for some time now, but until recently he has only been seen in his physical form. He can usaully be seen on the pitch and in and around the Welford Road ground, meeting the fans and interacting with the kids. Now however he is also famous in his 2D, fully illustrated version!

He appears in many forms of promotional and marketing material both online and in print. You can see him in several places around the ground, on matchday promotional and fun (JTC - Junior Tigers Club) items and across the Tigers external marketing range.

Below you can see Welford in his claws out 'Thriller' pose :) You can also see him in several other classic poses as well as some early sketches of Welford before he was created in his final glorious full colour vector version.

Let me know if you're a fan of Welford and be sure to take a pic and send it to me if you see him around. Feel free to leave some comments below, but please keep them clean if you're not a Tigers fan ;) Cheers and enjoy!

If you'd like to see more of my character creations then click here and give your eyes a treat :)

Sergeant SME reporting for duty

Attention! This is Sergeant SME or Sgt Sme (SME is an industry acronym for “subject matter expert”). He's a character I've created working with We Are Epic, the design, PR and marketing communications company based in Leicester. Nexus Defence was the client and they provide specialist security equipment and consultancy within the counter terrorist arena. Quite a serious topic!

The brief was to create a character that was 'quite anonymous'. This made the project a little trickier than normal as the brief totally goes against the usual reason for creating a character. When a character design project lands on my desk it usually requires a special, unique and stand-out character, quite the opposite to anonymous I think you'll agree :)

The service Sgt SME is promoting is a fairly serious one, so after some initial sketches (see below) it was decided to steer clear of anything too cartoony. We quickly decided to advance one of the sketches and create a simplistic vector version (see below) of the soldier in full kit holding a detector. We tried a few variations on the uniform and also tried adding some background colour, but finally decided on the colours you see on the big Sarge below.

As usual let me know what you think. Anonymous enough do you think? Cheers and enjoy!

Same Day Sam Character Design

Say hello to Sam. Same Day Sam is a character newly created to promote a plumbing company based in Pennsylvania in the US. He's going to be used to sell the fast, reliable and simply 'super' service that the company provide, and therefore the superhero theme seemed to fit the bill. I've added a few early sketches in the portfolio section so be sure to check them out if you get the chance. Enjoy!

Italian frog for Warning Zone party at Firenze

Yes, I know it's been absolutely ages since I last posted some work. I've actually been on holiday for a couple of weeks and therefore was too busy beforehand to update my blog (plus I forgot!). Anyway here is a frog I've created recently for Warning Zone. It is the latest adaptation of the frog character I created for Warning Zone. You can see some of the other examples in my portfolio and in previous blog posts 01, 02, 03. This particular frog is being used on an invitation for a 'Supper at Firenze' Italian restaurant in Kibworth. Check out the frog below and how the front of the invitation looks below again. Would love to know what you think. Enjoy!

NED Frog character design

I've just finished a new frog character design for a great client River City Studio based in Kansas City. A frog character was required to help promote environmental issues for Control Service Company (CSC) and the NviroED campaign (hence the name NED). He will eventually appear on the website and in print to help promote various environmental campaigns and general clean, green living! Here's NED wearing his NviroED logo tshirt. As usual would love to know what you think. Thanks and enjoy!

If you would like to see more illustration and character design examples (which also contains several other frog characters) then please visit my characters and illustration pages. Cheers!

Warning Zone - New Frog characters created!

I have recently created a couple of new frog character designs on behalf of Warning Zone who are based on Frog Island in Leicester. A detective type frog was needed and also a version of the original frog (see this post for details) for use on a Christmas invitation.

I created a couple of sketches for the detective and then several slight variations during the vector stage of artwork. The frog above is the final version and the images below show the sketches and the vector varieties.

Below is the final version of the frog in a Christmas scene looking festive and jolly!

Let me know what you think and please feel free to get in touch if you would like to discuss any artwork you may need creating. Call me on 01858 462779 or email me at nathan@antcreations.co.uk