3D modelled character: Cereal Package Prototype

I was not pleased with the back of the cereal design from my last session, it just did not seem right to me that I changed the whole design. I added on trees in a purple full colour block which took over most of the space and also a back poem the taste and excitement of crunchy cereals by Marvin Brandwin, 2009. I thought this poem would get the audience excited about the cereal. 

After generating my print ready artwork of my cereal package in Illustrator, I rechecked that that my the colour mode was in CMYK because I did not want the colours of my cereal box printing out in a different colour I had anticipated. My work was exported and saved in a high quality print, Adobe PDF file and then it was moved into my USB so it could be moved into another system ready to print out in card paper. 

Once my prototype was printed out, I grabbed scissors and a cutting mat to put below my print because I will be needing them to put my box together. My cereal outline was cut of with scissors because I think that using craft knife could bring more cutting mistakes that you can not easily avoid, but with a scissors it is possible to control you every move. I had then proceeded to use cutting mat to rest my cut out print so i could crease the sides for a neat folds and finally I glued the sides together. My cereal prototype was then professionally photographed in different positions and when I look back at this photos I am really happy that I did not change the front design as it looks really appealing when it is printed. I was also worried that information image I masked together with rectangles would look out of place but it ended up being a good contributor to my design. I found process and production sessions interesting, last year I was always wondering when will we experimenting in designing packages and I enjoyed it.

3D modelled character: Cereal Package Design

Lesson 2 - Generating Package Artwork

Package Layout guide

In this session we was introduced to the artwork production pipeline necessary for taking our package design through to print and physically construct. From this lesson we needed to bring the layouts created in the first lesson and also an idea of a colour palette. The outcome from this workshop will be print ready artwork for your cereal package design. 

The smug character I chose and illustrated on Illustrator. I chose this character because he had a funny expression and also had a cute 90's appeal like 'Pokemon' and 'Digimon'. I added in a realistic visual cereal in his bowl which effectively made the character contrast. My character is quirky, so it is unique and it simply reaches to equal gender and from children to young adults. 

Initially I choice a design thumbnail sketch I had produced for our previous lesson on generating layouts for our package. However it may have been altered a bit whilst designing on Illustrator, I tried many different layouts because I tend to like layout when it is visually designed as I do not think that I will ever possibly be able to choose something when it is just in phase one and not fully done. It is something I can not go through with it all the way to the end unless I have the finished piece.  On the other hand, I still managed to keep the idea of big bowl of cereal, character and heading in the composition planned. 

I used the pen and shapes such as the rectangle to copy an outline of the cereal package of image we was received from Jay.  I was happy with my heading "Crunches", made it spiky so it can reference teeth because our teeth makes the crunch grinding sound. From then I placed my scan imaged I had previously edited on photoshop to remove pencil smudges and such, onto the cereal outline front area.  I decided to keep some parts from the cereal package image like the package information detail to add a little bit more realist.  As you can see an image I found on google of a bowl of cereal and spoon has also been added, initially the plan was the illustrate the bowl but that was before I designed my character with realistic cereal sustenance. I thought it would look extremely out of place if the it does not match with my character and I did not like the thought of changing him. I once again used the pen tool the outline the bowl and spoon and selected both the outline and image to image mask the two. I did this for all the images I had used. 

I was really taken by the second design idea, the dark pink background and honey dripping really made the front more interesting than bland like the first design. I could say the only problem is the fact that dark pink may attract more women than men however whilst gathering some opinion many told me that the character can simply also attract boys. I do not know if I will change the colour of my cereal package as I am fund of it but it never hurts for me to try different colours because in the real world I would not be selling it to myself. 

3D modelled character: Character Development

Lesson 1 - Character Development

Today in process and production lesson we were introduced to production techniques creative process to create a character for our cereal package which we will also eventually design and produce prototypes. We were told before hand to bring the basic essentials for drawing like sketchbook and drawing equipments. The outcome i received from this lesson was three papers of character sketches and productions layouts for a new brand of breakfast cereal.

Whilst sketching out my characters i considered the form of the character and making them dynamic so they are interesting to look at. I designed them in different face expressions and positions while also aiming for eager look. I wanted them to look eager being around the cereal. The age group i aimed for was from 4 to 10.

Character design sketches

Generate layouts for your package