Promotional items development

For the development of my other promotional items, I chose items that presented my artwork in a clean, simple way, but could also be distributed efficiently to potential clients. After conducting research into sites that offered custom promotional products, I decided on a different site for the items that were not business cards.

The promotional items I chose were small round stickers and postcard prints. Instantprint was the best site for these smaller items, as it could offer a good balance between quality printing and efficient delivery time.


The stickers present my Rorschach illustration from my portfolio of work, which I believe works well for a promotional item of this size. The bold and sharp detail of the image encourages a stand-out design that does not sacrifice any of the resolution to fit this scale. This is an appropriate image to represent my work as it is easy to see that the illustration matches the style of my other promotional items and website design.

Round stickers

The postcard prints present my Thanos illustration from my portfolio of work, which I believe works well for a promotional item of this size. The bold and sharp detail of the image and the balance of light and dark areas gives a comic-style thickness to the lines, while not having the black overwhelm the printed image. As a postcard print, this illustration creates a natural white border around the image, which further represents the panel of a comic and is appropriate seeing as my Final Major Project is a black-and-white graphic novel.

Glossy laminated postcard prints

Altogether, all three of my promotional items serve as appropriate advertisements that effectively communicate the style of illustration work that I am proficient in, while remaining practical and physical items that can be given out at events or client meetings to promote my practice. By having business cards, stickers, and prints, I have ensured that this promotion can be done through several varied, yet equally professional means. This is important when working to get yourself known as an illustrator within the art industry.

Collaborative Project

The collaborative project was a student-led project in which we decided on what would be made for a shared publication. It was decided that the project would be promotional postcards with our own content and contact details on each. The postcards would be screenprinted with a limited colour palette of Payne's grey, turquoise, and rose.

As each person had to contribute an original art piece to the project, we had several meetings and concluded that the content would be based around a quote from our favourite book or poem. I chose one of my favourite paragraphs from Matthew Stover's novelisation of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.


"The Sith Lord who once had been a Jedi hero called Anakin Skywalker stood, drawing himself up to his full height, but he looked not outward upon his new Master, nor upon the planet-city beyond, nor out into the galaxy that they would soon rule. He instead turned his gaze inward: he unlocked the furnace gate within his heart and stepped forth to regard with new eyes the cold freezing dread of the dead-star dragon that had haunted his life. I am Darth Vader, he said within himself. The dragon tried again to whisper of failure, and weakness, and inevitable death, but with one hand the Sith Lord caught it, crushed away its voice; it tried to rise then, to coil and rear and strike, but the Sith Lord laid his other hand upon it and broke its power with a single effortless twist. I am Darth Vader, he repeated as he ground the dragon's corpse to dust beneath his mental heel, as he watched the dragon's dust and ashes scatter before the blast from his furnace heart, and you— You are nothing at all. He had become, finally, what they all called him. The Hero With No Fear." (1)

My interpretation of this scene was visualised as the dark, shadowy figure of Darth Vader rising up to face the cold dragon that was his fear. The creature comes from Vader's cloak as it was a part of him. This is an important event in the story, as it marks the transformation from Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader, and I felt that I had to treat my depiction of it with reverence to the forms and colours.

[pencil design in A5 pad]

I further developed the details of this design in pencil, including the look of the dead-star dragon. After I was satisfied with the layout and size of each element, I inked the illustration in pen and scanned it into Adobe Illustrator to be refined. I used 'image trace' to create bold outlines and exported the illustration at a high quality.

Through the use of separate colour layers in Adobe Photoshop, I was able to use black to identify which parts of the illustration I wanted to be which colour when my postcard was screen-printed. At this stage, I also added a black border to the image, which not only kept the outer edges crisp and clean, but also added to the effect of this scene being a contained experience within Darth Vader's mind (and within the novelisation of the movie).

The final stages of preparing the promotional postcard for printing was putting my name and illustration site on the image. I was able to place my contact information in the negative space on the bottom-right of the illustration. I believe this makes for a striking composition without the text distracting from the message of the content.

After sending my design to the co-ordinators of this project, I waited for my postcard to be screenprinted and compiled with the other designs, either loose or in a publication of their own. The finished colour image came later, and I am happy with how it represents my style, as well as the gravity of the quote through the detail of the form, use of colour, and compostion of the elements.


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(1) Stover, M. (2005). Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. 1st ed. New York: Ballentine Books.

Business card development

When it came time to develop my own business cards, I wanted to create designs that were not only a small showcase of some of my work, but also projected my personality and style as an illustrator. I started by designing rough thumbnails of some ideas, using images that I knew I would put in my professional portfolio later on. These initial designs experimented with shape, size and layout of the content, and proved to be useful in further developing the designs I decided to progress with.  

The thumbnails were a good starting point for design ideas, however I believe that I could have greatly expanded on the quantity of thumbnails that I did produce at this stage. This would have helped me to more easily decide which designs to develop, as well as which layout to pursue.

Next, I created mock-up business card designs on Adobe Illustrator - this time using all the illustrations that I wanted to consider for the final design. These are an assortment of experimental fronts and backs that are almost interchangeable with each other, which made it easier to choose different designs that weren't in the same design template.

I am pleased with the variety of digital mock-ups I managed to create, with the monochrome designs complimenting my art style the most. These look professional with a good layout and it was at this stage that I decided to go with the standard landscape business card size. Through this decision, I tried to balance artistry with professionalism - with varied results.

Then, I selected three designs to further develop, with some experimentation with orientation and image size. The chosen font reflects my more traditional style, while remaining bold and professional. The text details can be clearly read on each design and are the negative space allows them breathing room alongside the illustrations. I believe these designs show a good amount of development for each of the three chosen designs, which led to interesting results.

Finally, I decided on which designs stood out to me the most and worked well together, resulting in me choosing designs that were not part of my original business card thumbnails. This shows that development is important in expanding options and making new discoveries in producing promotional materials.

These final designs are ones that I am content with as they show the elements of myself as an artist that I wanted to show. My business card will retain its professionalism by being digitally printed with a low card weight and matte finish. This will further emphasis my more direct, detailed and subtle style.  

By designing and developing my own business cards, I have learnt about experimentation with designs and how to communicate my personality and style through a business card. This is important in promoting myself as a professional illustrator, as it shows potential clients that I am confident in who I am and what I do.