Hi,

Wish you all a very Happy and Prosperous New Year. I wish all your hopes, aspirations and desires come true. Also please keep supporting Green in this new year to keep our planet green and safe.

HNY2012

When you see this card, probably you wonder how come anyone would make a New Year card with kids and world map with some logo graphics on the background that has no connection with New Year! Yes,  it’s kind of different and here goes the story behind the concept or idea of the card and I will also tell you guys how I sketched the different parts of the card and designed it in Illustrator and finally finished the card.

When I first thought of making a New Year card, I started thinking about a theme to make one. Then I put all my ideas on a paper and out of which I selected the  Green  theme. Although we all might have different aspirations and goals this year, we should make a common resolution to keep our planet safe and green.  We can keep our planet green and safe by taking proper measures to save water, recycling our reusable waste and contributing to save our rainforests. So those are my three girls from Despicable Me! movie representing the current green issues. They sound as separate issues but they are interlinked.

I watched Despicable Me! in a event at our apartment and I liked it. The three girls – Margo, Edith and Agnes are orphans. They are not related to each other but as a team they changed the criminal mastermind to be a better person.

Here goes the development part..

1. I watched Despicable Me! couple of times and I sketched the girls on a paper. Then I scanned and saved my sketch to my computer and opened it in Illustrator CS5.

IMG_002

2. Then I created a new Illustrator file of dimensions 1000px X 900px, RGB, 300 PPI and copied the already opened sketch in to my new Illustrator file. Then lock the layer so that when you start creating paths, you won’t move the picture unexpectedly. I drew guides to maintain the proportions. Using Intuos4 Wacom Tablet, I created paths with the pencil tool. Using pencil tool with Wacom tablet makes it easy to create paths of different shapes. I used the below settings for my pencil tool.

pencilpencil-tool-settings

3. The finished vector sketch looks like this.

Sketch-paths

4. Drawing eyebrows was a little tricky part. I created an art brush using a triangle like below to make the edge of the eyebrow path sharp.

EyebrowBrush

5. Now comes the painting part. Selecting colors that matches the theme is difficult but Illustrator already provided us a swatch called ‘Earthtone’ which made my job pretty easy. Then I included customs logos to show which girl is representing which issue. Then I created the backgrounds and finished my Green theme card .

Using Intuos4 Wacom Tablet to draw images like this makes our job pretty easy and saves us a lot of time. Hope you enjoyed my Green story.

As a Designer, I shared my part to encourage others to follow Green for a better future and I hope with you all too. Once again HAPPY NEW YEAR.

Please visit back to find more interesting and inspired design ideas.