I LOVE HAWAII

Let me show you guys this illustration I did to represent the idea of "cool gadgets" such as might have been shown in 90's animated series and certain live action films which followed in their wake.

The client wanted to express the variety, exoticism and potential of different zany cartoon inventions, so I went through a few thumbnails trying to come up with the concepts and I was not happy with the composition, because it kept coming out very jumbled. The client really wanted to include an insert which would show the technical details of the gadget's design and that cluttered the composition even more. I liked the idea of the subaquatic vehicle because it made a cleaner picture, but it was not exotic enough and I had not accounted for that insert schematic.

Consequently, I was pretty happy when I came up with this idea. First of all, I love Hawaii and this idea gave me a chance to draw upon my memories of that wonderful place to se the feel. Secondly, cutting the picture in half and setting the directions of everything more or less horizontally kind of "ordered" the elements allowing all of them to exist without getting in each other's way: criss-crossing and pointing at each other and meeting at odd angles. Having a relatively small "gadget" which the character has to ride allows the character to be large enoug in the picture to where I can show a little bit of detail and expression without straining the viewer's eye and noodling with brush strokes too fine to match the rest of the picture. Having cleared all this out of the way allowed me to breate and focus on creating the feeling of relaxed swiftness that I wanted. The freedom and agility which technology is supposed to provide...