Each year around December or January, I get a phone call or email that it is time to start working on the Commonground Baptist Camp artwork. You can see the camp website here to get a feel for the ministry. Generally this is a very fun side project that distracts me from the monotony of my regular pharmacy work. One of the newest components to the art package each year is a themed banner that will hang behind the pulpit for the duration of the five weeks of camp. Today I would like to take you along with me as I discuss my drafting process and design work.

#1 The Draft

The draft is probably the most important part of the design process. The way I approach drafting is that the goal is determine the composition, possibly the lighting or color scheme, and to experiment with different design elements.

Here you can see that we’ve established how the piece will be lit, and the composition and color scheme. Another idea that I struck on while making this mock up is that the heroes of the faith should read left to right in chronological order. This way the image seems to be telling some kind of story as you look at it. The common theme of the banner is that these people wouldn’t be heroes if it wasn’t for the work of Christ on the cross, so we have a backdrop that ties all these different people from different time periods together.

Now it’s time to find some source images and hopefully tie this whole thing together.

#2 Blocking

This design is not going to be only original artwork. Had I more time, that probably would have been my goal, but it takes a lot of work to render artwork at the resolution needed for a banner. The next step of this process is to find some nice high resolution source images that we can use to block out the main design elements of the image.

Here is where things begin to come together. We have good starting images for all the major scenes with the exception of Paul on the Damascus road who will have to be drawn in manually. Now we have to sharpen these images up and create a common lighting scheme and color balance for each one.

#3 Tie-In’s

Now that we have all of our elements blocked in, it is time to tie all the pictures together. This requires a little luck, patience, and skill. Watch the next three steps and see these unconnected images begin to mesh.

#4 Finishing Touches

The last stage of the picture is to finalize the three elements that need to be more detailed like Paul, Isaac, and Moses. All of these three characters need to be lighted and detailed so they can look like they “belong” with all the other photorealistic elements. Also some of the lighting doesn’t quite work. For example, the Damascus road looks too bright compared to the other scenes. Also the Isaac altar scene doesn’t blend so well with moses and the ark. Let’s fix these last couple of elements:

Related posts:

  1. Designing a Camp Flyer
  2. The Design Process: Drafting