After brain storming and looking into other card designs, I began doing some drawings in my sketchbook based on the theme of celebrating weight gain. I created a character to go on the front of the card in an illustrative style.

First drawing for Card Design – creating a character to go with the wording

My inspiration for the character came mainly from Anke Weckman’s style of drawing…

Wedding Card by Anke Weckmann

I wanted the card to be playful and for the character on the front to look happy, healthy so not especially large or thin, I guess trying to represent her being a healthy weight and therefore reinforcing the message about weight gain being positive in this case.

I also considered a card without a character, making using of ‘pies’ as a feature as this is within the wording.

Card based on Illustration of pies

The layout was inspired by a Card by Caroline Gardner, as seen below:

‘Another year older’ by Caroline Gardner

After the initial drawing of the girl with the pie I drew a few different versions, giving a different visual emphasis.

Different version of Card using arrows to highlight pie

Here I was playing with the idea of having the text turn into arrows which pointed to/highlighted the pie in the girls hand. I’m not 100% sure this works well, as it looks a bit odd. So I didn’t pursue that design going forward to working in Illustrator. I did however create one more drawing combining the pie illustration and the girl. Which I think has a certain charm, although could be seen to be overwhelming.

Pie Pattern & Girl Drawing

At this point I traced the illustration of the girl and the pies separately and scanned them onto the PC to begin creating designs within Illustrator.

Girl with pie, scan of drawing

Pies Pattern Scan

In my next post I’ll talk about my progress in Illustrator.