Hi and Happy Christmas everyone!
Now that Christmas has come, I can finally share all the juicy details of the Advent Box I illustrated for Bad Sheep Yarn earlier this year. This was a dream project – I loved it from the get-go! The idea was so fun and the folks at Bad Sheep Yarn were such a pleasure to work with.
The box turned out so much better than I anticipated. The print quality and construction is really good, which makes it a nice keepsake for next Advent. It has small ribbon tabs to open the doors and a tight magnetic closure.
Inside it has sturdy little drawers that were stuffed with pretty Advent goodies!
The box was filled mostly with different shades of Bad Sheep’s beautiful hand-dyed yarn in each drawer (and a pattern to make a shawl with the yarn provided). Some of the drawers contained stickers and the most gorgeous little metal stitch savers made from elements of my illustrations, including a metal brooch/pin of the squirrel making off with a ball of yarn!
The cover art was also made into a mini puzzle which came in a tube in one of the drawers and has the tiniest little puzzle pieces the size of half a fingernail. Other surprises in the drawers were a scented candle, a wool soap, a mug with hot chocolate, and some other cute bits and bobs. I expect the drawers of yarn would delight many of the buyers, but for me the biggest thrill was seeing my art on puzzle pieces, and building the puzzle!
I love the puzzle so much I have framed it – even though I somehow managed to lose one piece. Why does that always happen?! Anyhow, it adds to it’s charm and the gap is in a good spot – where the dog is sniffing for the missing piece…
The project brief and process sketches – for illustration enthusiasts.
The project brief was to make an illustration of a warm and cozy yarn shop shopfront on Christmas eve. As well as to illustrate the inside flaps and numbers for the Advent drawers inside. The brief was quite broad, allowing for my own interpretation, but they wanted a busy scene with lots of little details and the shopfront building to be reminiscent of an old British or New York store, with a part of the street showing, and of course, Christmas décor.
My initial sketches were around developing the style of the shopfront as a jumping off point for the rest of the illustrations. I sketched a couple of ideas inspired by shopfronts I found online and they picked the one with the shapes they liked most.
Then I worked on the rough for the front of the box. I did quite a bit of online research for inspiration and chatted with the Bad Sheep Yarn crew about what kinds of things one would find inside. We discussed the idea of a shopkeeper closing up and last minute shoppers heading out the door. A cat in the window from outside, and curled up inside. I visited a sewing shop in a mall near me, which is the closes thing we have here to the cosy yarn shops they described to me, but is actually nothing like it.
I was about to send this off for final approval when I had the idea of drawing the shoppers as sheep. This made me chuckle, so I tried it and sent both versions off to the team.
They loved the sheep too, but were a little unsure of an anthropomorphic sheep walking a regular dog. Which was a fair point. Do these belong in the same imaginary world? Or is it too weird?
If you were ever a Richard Scarry fan, you may remember his anthropomorphic pig who is a butcher selling bacon!
We decided the sheep/dog situation was much less weird than that. Richard Scarry also did anthropomorphic animals going to the zoo where “normal animals” are in the cages, and I never once thought that was strange as a kid! We liked the humour in it, so the sketch was approved.
I then worked on the sketches for the inside flaps with the sheep characters, too. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do for the drawers in the main section, but I was thinking along the lines of shelves of yarn like I had seen in the sewing shop near me. I didn’t know if or how it would work but I would leave that until last to figure out. In the end, I didn’t stray too far from this rough.
After these were approved, the team sent me a colour palette that would complement the colours of the yarn that would be inside the box. I painted the final art with acryla gouache, referencing their colour swatches. I like to work at the actual size.
Yes, my desk really is this messy.
After scanning and editing, the illustrations for the front and the inside flaps were completed.
I reused the “shelves” square I painted, in various permutations to make them fit in the drawer sections. I did the numbers for the drawers last. I sketched out these frames and label shapes, and scanned the pencil sketches, then coloured them digitally, turning them into gift tags and labels. One for every drawer.
The last step was to design the back of the box and to extract some of the elements to create the stickers and pins.
And that’s all folks!
Liz
