I was thinking this summer would be quiet but right at the beginning of my summer holidays I was asked to create a series of illustrations that would be used in a children’s interactive game/application for an upcoming exhibition at Scottish Parliament called the Andrew Carnegie International Legacy.

This is the first time (and hopefully not the last) that I had been asked to create illustration for an application or game and I’ve always been a big fan of computer games so I jumped at the change to work on this project.

Suffice to say, there was a lot of work to do for this project. Quite often I’m asked to create 3/10/20 illustrations but in just the two weeks I was effectively given I probably created around 100 illustrations. As you can imagine for an application, there will be different subjects, lots of buttons to press but also a large number of elements like trees, taxis, buildings, landscapes and so forth.

I was originally given a list of 60 illustrations to create but the way I work nowadays is I create individual element files, again for example trees, taxis, etc, and then I use these in the final illustration. This can be a little time consuming but if another project comes along then I can often do a really quick rework on these element files and save a lot of time.

Below there are a decent amount of the illustrations I created. The first illustration is the entire “Andrew Carnegie Town” which users will see when they start the game and you can see how many different elements there are. The game will be played in different stages and for each stage there is a different backdrop which you can do different things with. I’ve also included just a few element files which I really liked. Another example of the amount of work involved is the alphabet picture blocks at the bottom. I had to create a whole alphabet with pictures instead of letters. If you remember I created a spaceman alphabet some time ago which I really enjoyed doing.

All there is to do now is wait for the exhibition to open which as mentioned above will be held at Scottish Parliament from the 15th October to the 24th January 2014. As soon as the exhibition opens I’ll go in and take some photos and videos of the exhibition and the application in use.

A final mention has to go towards the agency I worked with Studioarc. They were an absolute pleasure to work with and as with all of the great agencies I have worked with recently I hope I can work with them again.