Ads by Hand(ycock)

There's something really refreshing about taking the time to actually PLAN an ad rather than just slinging it together out of stuff some else has already done. Such is the nature of the corporate ad world, however. It takes approximately 7.3 minutes to churn out an ad for any of our monthly publications. So we do that. Over and over again. Then, when we decide that that campaign has run its course, we spend a couple days on a new ad campaign and then generally wind up recycling parts of the old campaign and we never come up with a COMPLETELY fresh ad. Since I'm speaking from an in-house perspective only, let me explain to you why doing an ad by hand is like walking down the street with Megan Fox: blissful

We sit down and brainstorm. Ideas are flowing, nothing is off limits. We choose an ad idea that seems to be the best option and we run with it. Pages of notes and sketches are made. "We can do this..." and "Oh, that would be cool..." And then, once everyone's had their idea pooled collectively into one ad, they hand all the notes off to me and say, "Make this." Where do I begin?

Most people tend to jump right into Photoshop or Illustrator and just start churning something out in the digital realm. I'm a much better freehand artist than I am an Illustrator genius. Combine that with the fact that I HATE 2gig Photoshop files, and you can see why my obvious first step is to grab a couple sheets of paper and start drawing. I spend about 15min on two different comps. I look them over and decide they need some more detail. So I jump on iStockPhoto (one of our image providers) and browse the lists for pictures relevant to our ad concept. After finding two that I like, I download lowRes versions and go back to my sketches and change up the sketches to match the photos I found.

This is the end of my sketching stage. At this point, the roughs are finished enough to see (in your mind's eye) what the final ad will look like, so now I head into Photoshop and Illustrator to do some heavy lifting. First, I grab the pen tool and make an exaggerated clipping path. I mean, more points than you can count. Its complex and intricate, but when the final image is masked, it looks good. From there, I take the image I clipped, which happens to be a person, and I put it on a fresh white background that is already sized to the ad that I'm building. Now I head back to iStockPhoto for more images. The ad concept is supposed to be a centralized figure with some different things happening in the background, mosaic-style. The image search is the hardest part for me. Finding the right image to fit the ad (subject wise) is tricky at best. I find several images that appeal to me and begin compositing them in the ad. At this point, its not a copy and paste job. It's a format image, feather the sides, mask the left, apply gradient, re-feather, tighten the mask, apply color filter, apply curves, re-apply curves because I hit cancel instead of "ok" and so on and so forth. Once I get all this done, the image modification for ONE image is finished. Now I gotta do that for 3 other images and the central character (that I clipped, remember?). Once all the images are set and the ad looks viable, I move on to what I call Finishing.

I hit up my personal collection of vector art and peruse iStock again for their's along with a few of my favorite sites. I pull some vector pieces into Illustrator and start making some things up. I look at my drawing, decide that the way I drew things is too complicated for me to make, so I start redrawing. What's a good way to do this? How can I make this look better? I can I do this easier? All of these are viable questions.

Once I've got my layout down and my general design in place, I have to take it to the Big Wigs and let them praise it or tell me to blow it out my butt. Either way, they mostly don't care about the sketches and usually never know that I even do them. But thanks to those little works of art, I'm able to maximize my time and get a lot more done.

And so ends my blog on how to sketch your way to happiness in 11 easy steps. OUT!