Here’s the brief to a fun project I was included in just recently.
“Graphic series featuring a fierce, yet friendly female ninja whose goal it is to educate people on what to do before, during and after an earthquake. If necessary, weapons can be used to enhance the graphics, but the ninja should be perceived as non-violent. The graphics could be combined into a collage within each scenario, as well as broken out into individual scenes.”
A small doodle was included with the brief.
Sounds fun, eh? The project was for the Emergency Management British Columbia’s Social Media Unit. The plan was to support the communications around the Great ShakeOut in October.
Speaking with my manager, Andrew Pratt, we wondered if one of the established and branded cast of British Columbian characters could perhaps act as the ninja. One of the many projects Andrew worked on in the past was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics. Their straightforward character design was a major inspiration to steer the illustrations.
After a couple of quick roughs, it was clear using the Spirit Bears I designed for the launch of B.C.’s “Family Day” holiday was a no-brainer. Mama bear could instruct her kids about earthquake safety. And the family is darn cute, if I do say so!
Thankfully, the EMBC Social Media Unit agreed with our proposal. The list of required illustrations from the unit was clear and allowed me to mock-up each communication quickly. Thankfully (again), the unit loved the mock-ups. The illustration style was already established by previous works, so the task came down to basic production.
The bears required a simple, uniform stroke. Because of this, they were completed in very short order. The other aspects of the illustrations required the good ol’ Wacom tablet. I create my own calligraphic brushes in Adobe Illustrator and always set the width variance to pressure so I can pretend the Wacom stylus is a beautiful brush loaded with the darkest India ink.
Because of the time-frame, I didn’t bother to expand the strokes and fiddle with them too much after drafting. It was more direct to simply draw a decent line. Colour was added on layers beneath the line work. I actually created three layers of line work and accompanying colour fill.
The final communications were well received, and with enough time in advance of the campaign that the EMBC team could pull their communications together in good time.
The EMBC reported it was one of their more successful social media campaigns to date. It's all the baby bears! The United States’ @ReadyGov even picked up and retweeted the communications.
