A selection of illustrations featuring a cartoon cow character from a recent book illustration project. Believe it or not, the book is a retirement planning book. The author was looking to create a financial planning guide that wasn’t dry and dull, and thought a cartoon character and cartoon illustrations might liven things up a bit.

This was quite an extensive project, but the client was great to work with and that makes all the difference in the world on extended work like this.

I’d love to get into all the illustrations as well as the sketches behind all the art, but there’s just too much for one post. The included illustrations give you a good feel for the style and range of scenarios we worked up for this project.

In the end we had thirty-plus illustrations for the book, which as of the writing of this post is still in the process of being prepped for publication.

Note that the bull and bear character are obviously metaphors for the stock market. They get to wrestle and battle in a match of tug-of-war.

The “frame busting” approach came to me during the process of creating these sketches as I began to realize I needed a way to frame the artwork, but still keep it open and energetic. I really like the effect and have gone on to use it in other projects as well.

All of the final art you see here was created as vector art in Adobe Illustrator CS5, and the sketches were worked up by hand, scanned into Photoshop CS5 and cleaned up there using my trusty Wacom Intuos4 graphics tablet.