Orchard Pig: Making Posters

After the brainstorming session we had a discussion of what those advertising posters should be about. We looked up the cider making process and immediatly agreed we'd like to make it in old sepia photos style, where the colours are a bit worn out and it looks like an old picture so it would amplify the old ways of making cider and the deeply rooted cider brand. As we went through the process of making cider we took notes of which stages we'd like to capture:
Collecting apples, pulping apples, the cider being bottled, the cider resting in barrels, and the founders picture. About the last one, we figured every brand that that stands for tradition and autheticity benefits from a founders picture/or story. Like the very successful Twix campaign. All over the world, when given a choice, people will choose what they love and then defend that choice to the end.
This creative work uses silly hyperbole and peoples' innate desire for debate to both involve the consumer and amplify the unique benefit of the two bars. It creates a playful world in which people are asked to choose which Twix they prefer, – the genius, however, is that it is impossible to choose between the two bars because, first, they are identical, equally delicious bars and secondly, they are always packaged together.
It is both a composition story, as it demands that consumers think about the make-up of each bar, and a story about the duality of the Twix product.
The next challenge? Delivering this story in a way that gave Twix a personality.

Adverts like these stick in  your head because they are witty and in a way ridiculous, how ever it gives you this sense of an old story the brings out the excited child. All in all advertising is all about triggering that sense of love in your brain. The adverts are supposed to make you fall in love with the product, that's why all the perfume advert models have this sexual gaze straight into the camera. Other products do it in a different way, but ultimately the goal is the same.
So we figured that a founders picture with pigs would play into this witty story telling idea very nicely. The next stage was sketching.
As we discussed that we were going after this old photo look like for example this:

So you can see the texture of the photos and there is barely any colour. We wanted to have colour but bring in the texture, so I remembered this technique of soaking paper into coffee or tea and using that as a texture. I suggested it to Wing and she volunteered to try it. I grabbed a random example of texture paper from Google images and tried working with them on photoshop. So I came with a few sketches-

Wing liked how it looked so she took it upon herself to see what she could come up with for the backgrounds. The next time we met up, Wing had a few background sketches ready for me and I asked her to make a few tweaks and adjustments so the composition would fit the characters. We started off with the founder picture. As soon as the backgrounds were done and ready for me I took the up to do the characters. First I made quick sketch of how to compose the characters-

I then went on looking up how the people of 1850s since that's when Orchard Pig claims on it's site their history roots down to. So as I was looking up the way people used to dress up in the mid 19th century I wanted all sorts of looks to come through- rich, poor, farmers etc.

And then I started to refine the characters and put some clothing on them. I tried to keep the colours in a similar shade of the backgrounds as well as the outline so it doesn't pop out too much.

When I was finished with the characters I sent it back to Wing and she added the final touches (logo, cider bottles) and the general overlay of the texture. So here is the final poster of the founders picture:

We both agreed we were very happy with how it turned out so we went on doing the rest in the same way: Wing would make the backgrounds, layer them if necesary and I would draw in the characters. This demanded some tidy housekeeping in the photoshop files so that the other person would easily understand what can be found where and if change was necessary it would be easily fixable.