Star Sisterz card illustrations

In the LeeAnn Womack post I talked about Star Sisterz so I thought I would show some of them.

Star Sisterz is a collectable charm/card game. Each card describes an activity or task the the player has to complete to receive points or a charm. I’ve worked on three card sets. A total of 54 illustrations targeted for tween-age girls. When I started, the ideal image was Lizzie McGuire.

Illustrators were carefully chosen so their skill set matched up with the card description. I was given some of the more difficult compositions based on the required image. Each card assignment came with a small brief outlining the activity/task to be shown, color scheme, and a general guideline to keep the racial mix balanced, and the clothing not too street. The legal department of Hasbro really did their job on these.

On the first set I did detailed thumbnails, then two increasingly detailed sets of sketches with color notes.
On the second set, after thumbnails, I did one round of sketches and printed them from my computer in a non-repro blue on Bristol board and went right to ink line. The third set was done the same way. All the coloring was done digitally. After getting a nice mix of characters on the first set, I gave all the characters names and reused them for the following two. So all of my card sets feature the same girls. My goal was to have recurring characters that the players would recognize and identify with.

What I enjoyed about this project was that after all the requirements were met for showing the activity , I could concentrate on the details of the characters. Clothes, hair, accessories, posture. I could get into developing the background characters also (mostly boys and adults) to flesh out the scene and ad some real life to the card. All that in a 2inch square space. It doesn’t seem like a big illustrative challenge. But the beauty of being an illustrator is that you can create your own challenge within the assignment. You don’t HAVE to do it, you GET to do it.