To give you a small insight into the illustration process, here’s a very brief look at a project we’re working on. This is an old fuel can given a retro look.

I started with some sketches — I used a petrol tin just like this when I was a boy. They don’t make them like this now. The way the cap screwed on — it was made to last. Anyway, enough navel-gazing, here’s the sketch which inspired the final illustration.

This was scanned into Adobe Illustrator and traced – a lot of the detail was worked out in Illustrator. This drawing could have been a lot more detailed, making the Illustrator work easier, but I felt I had the main angles and shapes – I was ready to get into the vector work.

Once ‘drawn’ I experimented with colours – the brief asked for reds, greys, black. This worked well as the red gave a nice emphasis on the tin.

The final file was inserted into Photoshop to do some final touches which included scratch marks and an aged metal background.

Here’s the final illustration.