A good two months ago I attended 'sketch club', which is something a friend has organised for the last few years and is simply a monthly gathering of people who enjoy drawing and like the idea of hanging out in a pub together while they do it.

I've attended many 'sketch club' nights over the years and often use the time to think up new illustration ideas, which are then developed further by me (redrawn in vector) and applied to a range of products in the Taylor Two gift shop.

In this most recent session I drew my idea for a 'rural Russia' vintage inspired design, you can see my rough sketch of that below.

Product Development

Now coming from a graphic designer / illustrator background I'd never fully complete a sketch neatly, colour it in, scan it and then print it out that way  ... I prefer the perfect clean lines and bold colours that only vector (computerised) art can produce, and I like how incredibly scalable they are without risking any loss of print quality.

Vector art is the most practical way of drawing things for print, and is the method used by big brands worldwide. Therefore I simply sketched out the layout and idea of graphics I wanted to see in the scene and then took that home to my work desk to turn into a vector drawing.

Well that's not entirely true. What I actually did is, I took it home and placed it beneath my desk for an entire two months, intermittently taking it out intending to draw it in vector only to put it away again muttering things like 'I haven't got time right now' or 'It's too late in the day now, I'm tired, I'll do it tomorrow'  ... and any other excuse I could come up with to avoid doing it.

Not sure why I procrastinated for so long but finally I DID sit it in front my computer and used it as a guide to draw the illustrated scene below in Adobe Illustrator vector software.

The illustrated scene is shown below printed onto waterproof durable vinyl wrap, which is then cut out and applied to hip flasks so that trendy people can have cool hip flasks to fill with their favourite drink.

And talking about 'drink' ... that's what it says in Russian at the base of the design.