My First Paid Commission

The Brief

I was very fortunate to be approached by a local charity, Kidney Care UK to complete a commission for them. Every year they support and attend the World Transplant Games, an event celebrating the amazing ability of those who have had organ transplants.

This year they wanted to have something to draw in crowds and give children something to participate in. So they asked me to create an illustration that could be used on a large canvas to be coloured in.

This was my first time working with a client, so I was understandably anxious. I drew on my experience in Key Steps in Illustration, and also research I have undertaken about legal aspects of illustration work [1]. With this, I was able to negotiate a specific brief that we were both happy with, and I used a commission agreement from my student membership of the Association of Illustrators to get all of our agreements and terms onto paper.

This included deliverables, timescale and payment terms. I was fortunate to have been given a great brief, full of background and reference. The theme of the brief was "living life to the full" to emphasise the way people with kidney disease can still embrace life fully. The charity had some essential things to include, and ideas on others.

Roughs

I started by sketching out a mind map and some thumbnails in my sketchbook. I refined and iterated my ideas and ended up with two briefs to deliver to the client:

Being local to me, I was able to present these roughs in person, as well as send them digitally. I found the conversation around the roughs really useful to discuss the aspects that they liked and ay things that I might need to tweak or avoid. My personal favourite was the isometric illustration, but the client liked the movement in the other rough more and chose that to move forward with.

Developing the Illustration

As the illustration was going to be on a specific-sized canvas, I needed to make sure that the actual illustration was the correct aspect ratio. I was doing the illustration as a black and white vector line illustration, so that would allow it to scale to multiple sizes. I used the rough as a starting point and started to build out the illustration digitally (but not using final vectors)

This let me present a 'digital rough', to explore things in more detail at the correct ratio and incorporating ideas that we discussed during the client meeting. From there, I could get more feedback from my client and then make changes in the vector illustration. I did this so that I didn't invest a lot of time during a time-consuming phase and could make changes for my client 'cheaply'. Once I had the feedback, I went on and made the vector version of the illustration, incorporating their feedback.

One of the biggest challenges I faced was appreciating that the illustration was going to be large, and trying to colour in a huge space would be time-consuming and ultimately boring. Especially for kids! So I included lots of ways to break up the large spaces, and used detail elements and their layouts strategically so that they created smaller pockets of colour.

I found making smaller changes after this phase much more frustrating, especially as the people were quite time-consuming. To combat this I took a stylistic choice to make my people quite simple, and this allowed me to modularise some aspects. I would have liked to have used more texture to the piece, but I had quite a tight time limit, and so had to make some personal compromises.

I made suggestions to the client about what pens they could use, and how they could use a more limited palette of colours to keep everything cohesive. They didn't take all of those suggestions on board, so over the weekend the coloured canvas took on a psychedelic aspect, but I really love it and the creativity that the kids put into the piece!