Final Project: Farmer’s Market Bugs, Character Cards

After a semester of doing illustration work I loved, I feel that I ended on a strong note. We had artistic freedom to choose whatever we wanted, and I got to combine multiple things that I loved all into one project. I love animals and bugs, character designs, narrative work, and working in gouache (one aspect from this semester I enjoyed very much was discovering what a joy gouache is to work with). The easier part of this assignment was that I already had characters on hand to work with; a couple weeks before I had sketched out some bugs doing things, just for fun.

I ended up using all of these except for the cicada, and replaced it with a rosy maple moth as that’s more intriguing and easily recognizable. I gave the bumblebee a more farmer’s market related stand of produce, rather than something hiking/exercise related from the original sketch. Since I was a kid, I always LOVED Pokemon cards, and I really love the idea of collectible cards with unique characters/details on them, and want to make a full set some day. Tarot cards are something that also interest me quite a bit, and those played in to some of my inspiration for this project. Since it’s a look into each bug’s shop, I called on to shops from RPG style video games. In games like these, you often have a screen which is the typically unique shopkeeper, surrounded by the wares they’re selling.

There wasn’t much more editing to do after these sketches, they’re pretty close to the end designs, plus the other two cards. I knew that I wanted to work with a lighter, pastel color palette, but still have many colors present. In the future, I would love to make a full set of these, or alter them to work more as cards, and maybe add some text and other fun details to make them seem more like typical “trading cards”.