Wizard Coloring

The Brief

Sensible Sorcerers was one of the first projects that I had done in collaboration with a whole class of people. We were each to create a coloring page with a consistent theme that was selected out of a class brain storm. We settled on the idea of wizards in normal places something to have a little bit of fun with illustrating.

The project had two parts the coloring page itself, and the covers for the book. One of the illustration styles that we had explored in this class was this flat dramatic vector style. Drawing something out at thumbnail size and bringing it into illustrator to give it color and dimension. I chose to take some common wizard objects including there hat, wand and familiar and illustrate them in this style. I gave the image more depth by including a bookshelf in the background which I then added everyone in the classes names too.

The coloring pages themselves were all unique to our own interests, the only thing that had to remain constant was a wizard in a normal place. For mine I chose to show a wizard in a greenhouse as I thought I could create a lot of different colorable elements of end user of this project. Taking it from sketch on paper to get the perspective down and then bringing it into adobe illustrator to vectorize the image and fine tune it.

After several rounds of critique the idea was introduced that something magical should be happening in the closing page. After all this was a wizard in a normal place, so how could we introduce the element of magic? I chose to have the specific plant that the wizard was watering turn into this bigger element; like it was multiplying in size as the wizard started to water it. As well as adding a crystal ball in the background for that extra touch of magic happening in the scene.

Our coloring pages were then put into a 10x16 booklet on newsprint to give it that coloring page feel, and with a type hierarchy of our choosing to display information about each coloring page. I chose to have an emphasis on the name of the person that made the coloring page and keep the title and description to a minimum.