AD33 - Okido spot the difference brief

I chose to take this brief on because Okido is a very popular children's magazine and it would be great to have some of my work published by them as it would give me a lot of exposure. Also I am wanting to go into children's publishing so this seemed like an appropriate brief for me to take on. Unfortunately the deadline for the 'dinosaur' theme had already passed but I still had time to go for the 'seasons' theme though the deadline was around 10 days from when I caught wind of the competition, the pressure was on.

For some strange reason I must have misread the brief and I thought that it was just Autumn that we had to illustrate so I started basing all of my designs around that season. This wasn't a problem as I would have imagined that they would want us to select one season and then go for it but I would not have felt so restricted had I known that I could have done any season.

Lesson learned, read things through properly, I knew what the brief expected of me but it was tunnel vision that gave me a slight disadvantage as I limited myself.

In my sketch folder you can see the process and character development and below I will show the digital pathway that my design went through.

I played around a lot with the idea of a pumpkin character, I eventually refined him enough so that he would be cute and acceptable for the target audience. I was going to have three floating pumpkin characters but I thought that it would work better if I included a boy and girl instead so that the characters can work together, it also added a little bit of realistic context which didn't hurt.

So here is my first digital layout, as I previously mentioned I tried setting out three pumpkin characters but that quickly changed.

So now the pumpkin characters was refined and digitally reworked to give him a slightly geometric body type. I also changed his eyes as I thought they looked a little more cute and they sort of matched the existing characters from the Okido magazine so I thought it would flow much better this way.
I also added a mound for the bottom of the image as I needed somewhere to put the text and it this seemed like the best place for it to be without obstructing the rest of the image.

After drawing some boy/girl characters (see sketch folder) I added the scanned line work into my image and started rendering them digitally to match the main pumpkin character.
Prior to starting my design I wanted to find an appropriate colour palette so I looked through a couple of pictures on Google to get some inspiration. I thought Autumn colours would consist mainly of oranges and browns but I was wrong.

There is a lovely mix of greens, yellows and even purples which was a nice surprise as it gave me even more to work with. From this point I made my own colour palette that was inspired by these images and used it to continue on with the brief.

Just some more progressive shots of the boy and girl characters, the image on a whole is nearly complete at this point and just some final tweaks were needed before I add the text.

The image is pretty much finished now and it just needs the text, I am really happy with how it looks and I like how I managed to add in some of my signature decorative motives such as the dots, arrows and a stitched line. This is pretty much how it would work on a page, the top image would say 'spot the difference' and the bottom would say 'find all seven'

At first I did try some digital text on the image but I decided against it because Okido has a lot of hand drawn elements so thought it best to try my hand at hand lettering. Time for some light box action!

I printed off a copy of my image and started playing around with different fonts and styles, I tried using thick pencil and brush pens to give me a nice textured line.

After trying a few out I thought it best to scan them in and see them on top of the actual artwork.

Here is the final image, I ended up going with the pencil text as it gave off a really nice grainy texture which stood out from and yet complimented the digital subject matter.
I also added a light patchy texture in and around my characters which gave them a little bit of life. Finally I added a graph paper texture which added a bit of character to the image. I don't think the differences are too hard to find but they are definitely not easy so it's a nice balance. This image is another milestone for me as an artist as I believe that I have found a signature way of illustrating people which has been something I have been trying to figure out for a long time.


This is the first time in about two years that I have tried including texture in my work as I tried it in first year and soon turned away from it due to inexperience and the fear that it ruined my image. After two years of learning who I am as an artist I think I have the skill needed to incorporate texture so that it adds to my image instead of taking something away from it. This opens up some new doors into my illustration style and I am excited to see where it takes me.