I’ve always said, I can design, but I’m no artist. So when it comes to illustration work of a certain caliber I call in Scott Jackson. Scott is a is a great artist – I first heard of him because of this excellent tutorial over at VectorTuts and promptly hired him to design the WPFixer Project mascot which I also ended up using as my own personal mascot on this site.
My WPFixer/mkjones mascot
WonderThemes Mascot Concepts
The process started a few months ago when Scott came up with some paper-based concepts based on my initial spec:
Initial mascot drawings from June 1st 2010
Right away I loved the concepts and rushed Scott to moved onto the colour/shading phase. I really didn’t throw in any extra guidance at this point as I trusted Scott’s judgment. In fact, the only colour theme I could come up with was “opposite of Superman please”.
After a week or so the full colour versions were ready:
Updated digital mascot from June 9st 2010
These versions we great. I loved the hard edge of the outline and the colours worked well. Rather than rushing into sending feedback I sat on these for a couple of weeks before requesting any changes.
Creative feedback
So, after 2 weeks of showing the mascot around, printing it out, inserting it into web mock-ups and general just sitting and looking at the image I decided on some final updates.
The first note was the facial expressions – the character just looked too happy for my liking. In my mind he was supposed to be saving the world from bad theme design, a thankless task by anyone’s measure, so I requested we loose the happy-go-lucky smiles and wide eyes and go for a look that was just a little more intense, like he meant business. I also wanted the eyes to have outlines to give them more definition.
By now I’d also discovered the colours were too a little too dark so I requested that the solid black outlines be replaced by a lighter grey and the whole thing ‘washed out’ a little bit to give it a cooler feel.
Basically, that was it – I was lucky because the initial concept was SO good I didn’t really need to give any detailed feedback.
And here it is, the final version…
Final 'WonderThemes' mascot - July 12th 2010
So, there you have it. From paper sketches to beautiful illustrations in 6 weeks and after only 3 drafts – the WonderThemes mascot was born.
His name? I’ve yet to come up with anything yet. Let me know if you can come up with anything 🙂
