Moo.

This was a fun project I completely forgot to post this summer when I did it. It's an ad for a chain of dairy stores in the midwest. The ad was part of their summer give-away. I don't have the finished ad with all the copy (they take care of that at the advertising firm that hired me) but I do have the original illustration free of text. What a lovely day on on the farm: cows picnicking with their active, healthy families, riding bikes, skipping rope, openly drinking each other's milk. Mmmm boy, that's what summer's all about.

Odd inside fact: The cows to the left were approved and then, days later, someone decided they looked too much like pigs. So I made the edits they called for (see the startlingly more cow-like cows below).

Now down here I've posted some work-in-progress steps. You can see the two concepts that were vying for first place. The cow picnic eventually won out over the cows-racing-around-the-local-track concept. I think that was a solid choice.

I also have cow dad and cow son (now with new, approved cow faces) separated from their background. It's standard practice to leave the files in separate layers so the ad agency can reposition the components for different ad setups.

The final work-in-progress image is not, as you might suspect, a hideous eight-legged cow deity wielding his hammer of vengeance. He was part of the online flash game that accompanied this summer giveaway (sorry, the game has been taken down now, so you can't go play it). Other illustrations for the game included a carnival "ring-the-bell" game with movable bell and indicator. The cow has extra parts so the flash animators could create the animation of a cow hitting the ring-the-bell game with a mallet. I'm not sure what the grand prize was, but it had something to do with milk. Though I'm sure many of you would agree that the real prize is learning all these behind-the-scenes secrets of the big-time ad game. Right? Right?? -v