Mistie and Jennifer of Beyond the Words Inc. came to me with an interesting verture.They wanted to creat ASL (American Sign Language) themed wrapping papers. So instead of text it would have hands spelling out the letters in ASL. A significant reason they were drawn to me was they really liked the way I drew hands. I’ve been a professional illustrator since 1984 and have over twelve years experince with professional political cartooning. It was this blend of realism and cartoon style that they felt was the perfect match.
First step was to create the entire alphabet. I sketched them with pencil and inked them with a Kurtake brush pen. The inked drawings were then scanned, cleaned up in Photoshop, and then converted to vector images using Illustrator CS2′s incredible new feature “Live Trace“. A bit of gradient was added as well as some soft shadowing effects and then the corresponding letter was added in the palm area to help those who can’t read ASL. In a sence these hands are bilingual.
After that I just had to create the cake, candles and serving plate and go nuts and have fun with it.
Here’s what Mistie and Jennifer had to say:
“Working with Clay has been a wonderful experience for us. This is a new venture for our company and Clay was very informative about the design and layout of our product. He gave us such excellent direction and the samples he created for us to choose from really hit the mark as far as what we had in mind for our customers. He has a gift of taking the vague, simplified idea of what the client is looking for and turning it into a vibrant, unique and professional work of art. We couldn’t be more pleased with his work and we look forward to a long and successful partnership with him.”
Mistie Glass & Jennifer Lazarev, Co-Founders, Beyond the Words, Inc.