Self initiated menu brief - The inspiration

I have always been a huge fan of Steve Simpson as his art never ceases to amaze me. Lately I have been looking more at his product design and it has always made me want to see if I can do this kind of thing for myself. The question is where would I start?
During the early stages of the project I wanted to design some kind of packaging, I felt like that was a bit vast and decided to home it down. It was then that I came across this image by Steve Simpson.

This menu design is absolutely mind blowing, it has everything i'd want in an image, good character design, excellent colour palettes and a great usage of hand made type. All of those things are skills I'd want to increase and I have always wanted to push myself to the limit and illustrate a busy image to a professional standard. A menu seemed like the best way for me to achieve my goals and explore my art style. The menu above is what set this self initiated project in motion.

After getting mega inspired from Steve Simpson's page I started to look around for other artists who have answered similar briefs. Jack Teagle was one of the first I came across, I remembered that he had illustrated for Daddy Donkey in the past and he had created these awesome wrestling characters using a limited colour palette and a lot of well rendered hand drawn type.

It looks even better in context covering the Daddy Donkey food trailer 

Jack is not only good at hand rendered type but he had also done his fair share of busy images before although his colours are a bit more erratic where as Steve Simpson's are a lot more toned down.