Working with X-Gamer.

As some of you have already seen if you follow me on Twitter, I've recently shared a project that I've been working on which I've had to keep quiet about for the past few weeks. The project I'm talking about is the branding I've done with X-Gamer who create energy drinks for gamers. I did touch on this a little in my latest vlog below, but I thought I'd also properly share my process here too.

Matt, a member of the X-Gamer team first got in touch with me about six weeks ago and explained to me that X-Gamer was already launched, it was already selling and gamers were excited about it but they just wanted that little extra something in the branding to push it that bit further. We exchanged a few phone calls and made a decision on content and deadlines as there was a small urgency behind this one, but I was more than confident we could achieve what was needed before the date. 

This is where one of my previous post comes into play where I talked about how personal projects can be the biggest factor in deciding what type of work you get, I draw a lot of zombies and within this past year I've been contacted about doing work based around zombies multiple times, some of which I haven't shared for confidential reasons but I did recently design a zombie action figure based on the content in my personal work. In this case with X-Gamer, we decided to go with, you guessed it, a zombie! The first flavour in the relaunch is Zomberry (which is out now, you can get it here ), I basically had to design the zombie and then illustrate him in a couple of different poses so that he could be chopped up and flipped around where needed for various promotional materials. My personal projects also helped here too, because it was a fairly tight deadline, but I already had so much of my own source material to go from so the actual character design was super easy to do. So first up were some sketched out ideas for the character itself, the left half of the image are sketches I'd already done a few months before which I could then use again for this project.

We originally decided on 3 poses, but added an extra one in the end for some additional variation when he is being used to create graphics. All of the illustrations were line worked in Manga Studio which is my go to program now for line working, I haven't used it for colour yet but I'm thinking about trying that soon for some personal projects. The initial pose is below.

The team decided to call the zombie Dale (inside joke) and you'll notice that you rarely see his full body when they use him on their social sites. This was the intention as I said previously, because it means he can then be cut and pasted into and around promotional material. I've included an example of this below, I think it works really well because it means that the client (X-Gamer in this case) can get the maximum from a simple image from the artist (me in this case) which is obviously a massive benefit to both sides. Below is an example of how they've been able to crop Dale in certain places to use on their social accounts.

I've also just designed a tshirt for them (photo is attached below, just a warning it might be offensive to some readers) which the X-Gamer family seem pretty excited about. I'm really looking forward to seeing the final physical product of this.

This has definitely been one of the most fun projects I've worked on, I seem to have a schedule full of fun projects right now so I feel really happy right now to be able to be in this situation. The collaboration between X-Gamer and myself is not quite finished, so I'm super happy to continue what has now turned into a friendship.

I can't express how important it is to have a good relationship or at least a good, positive feeling conversation with your client before you even agree to take on a job. I've turned down quite a few commissions at the start of this year that were high paying but the clients weren't a good fit for me personally, it's important to keep yourself happy and money definitely is not the answer.

I'm looking forward to sharing more projects in the coming weeks, I'm also in the process of releasing a new tshirt for Monster Trunk, so keep an eye out on the Monster Trunk Twitter for that!

Thanks for reading!