As part of my aims for 2021 and the UK’s third national lockdown, I decided to try and learn some new ways to contextualise my illustrations, one of the main goals being to create packaging. I thought I’d start with luxury chocolate packaging, as I adore chocolate and luxury branding gives me the option to go above and beyond as price point isn’t the main concern!
Over the last 2 weeks I’ve been gaining inspiration, watching tutorials, making plans and putting some ideas into practice. My initial inspiration was from ‘CO-OP Irresistible’ dark chocolate packaging, which features some gorgeous surrounding illustrations. I then went to Instagram and of-course Pinterest to see what else excited me.
Then almost overwhelmed with options and inspiration, I decided the best thing to do was simply to start! However I quickly came across many obstacles, including whats size to create the canvas, how to make a net and what text is essential to food packaging. I found a few helpful tutorials on Skillshare, but my biggest obstacle was getting use to Adobe Illustrator again. Despite Adobe Illustrator being the first Creative cloud platform I learnt to use, I have predominately used Photoshop for my illustrations for the last 4 years, so I’ve become scarily unfamiliar with the programme and have acknowledged I have to relearn almost everything, adding an extra challenge to the tasks I’ve set for myself! Although I acknowledge better understanding of all Adobe programmes will make more employable and adaptable to different briefs, it’s still a real pain, especially amidst a pandemic as I find it very difficult to learn from videos rather than trail and error with a real human at hand to answer any questions!
Despite this I still cracked on, learnt a few things, made my first draft and even mocked it up onto a 3D visualiser! To do this, I took apart an existing chocolate box to make a similar net, and then created a design for the front and sides experimenting for type and layout using both Photoshop and Illustrator. I’ve left the back for now as it mostly consists of the ‘boring bits’. I’ll come back to it once I’ve got more of a consistent collection together and when I’m a little more confident with Illustrator.
I’m not completely thrilled with the design, but I acknowledge it’s still the early stages of the project, and it’s all a learning curve. So instead of obsessing over this one design, I think I’ll move on to the next and come back to this one when necessary.