Year ago I've received illustration commission order to decorate a camper van. This is a wheel house as we call it in Russia. Big car where you can live and travel. It has few beds, fridge, toilet and even sort of a bathroom.
One of my old'n'good clients asked if I can do something about it for his friend. He even created few mockups using real van photo combined with some of my illustrations just to have an idea how it may look like.
It was interesting for me to experiment with that and I agreed of course. Never decorated any car before...
It's good when you know exactly what you need but if you're not then at least you have something what you like, right? You can prepare everything you feel is appealing to your theme in one folder or canvas which is called a mood board. This will be a huge help and will make understanding between me and you much faster!
Here my client said he likes Hippie vans, Beatles Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds period, Yellow Submarine and since he had his rock band with pepper and sculls he asked me to add those symbols as well.
This was my initial sketch, just a warm up.
Then I've quickly build a car out of reference photos and corrected the sketch accordingly to show to my client.
Now I had to create a canvas with all the exact proportions to make sure everything will match the car after printing.
It took me around 3 days of mathematics exercises in Adobe Illustrator to create simple vector car mockup which I usually can draw in Adobe Photoshop in 5 minutes. Last time I've used Illustrator years ago that's why I've slowed down here.
Okay, client approved the sketches and I've started to color it. First color iteration was done all in warm color gamma only.
And then he asked me to add more blue, white and to change main character look because he suddenly told me he wanted hippy theme but not a hippie. Okay, no problem. Here is the second iteration.
He looked and said:
- Looking great, but why John Lennon?.
- I didn't meant to draw him there actually.
- Okay, what character do you prefer there?
- Can you draw myself?
- Sure!
He sent me some photos and I've done my best to depict him.
Then small corrections to his clothes came back.
After one side has been approved I've made others in same theme and style trying to make the whole picture united.
Finally we've checked everything again and realized that we can not stick bottom part because of some measurements. So we had to cut it and throw out.
After everything being printed my client sent me a video asking if I think we should add one more detail on top of can in a front view? I've agreed we should. Here the few iterations of it are.
After almost a year finally I've made an effort to prepare this work for my portfolio. Had to redraw the van and background to make it fit my style + added some more details to the whole canvas.
Spent more than an hour to write all this and prepare all the images. Hope it was worth sharing. Thank you for your attention!
Visit my illustrators portfolio at dunsky.ru
