what I've been working on this evening...

the past few weeks have been surprisingly freelance free (I imagine it's mostly because of the Christmas season). Two of my clients had projects this week so I've gone back to being a slave to the machine. That's a good thing though because I need to catch up on my taxes and after that we need to throw the money at getting out of debt. Man, adulthood is so exciting. heh. 

Anyway, in lieu of an in-depth post, I thought I'd post some of what I was working on tonight. It's an identity piece for an Austin chili cook-off. My original thought was to have the cowboy riding a kidney bean... but then I realized that that would be sacrilege in Texas. Digging around chili cook off websites I noticed that a lot of them used chili pepper iconography instead of a bowl of chili. New thoughts went through my head and I thought for the "Boots and Hats Chili Cook Off" I might throw a cowboy on top of a big chili pepper.

Round one had the initial combining of the pieces. It was determined that it was probably a good idea but that the chili pepper looked way too placid... it needed to be bucking like some kind of chili pepper rodeo... 

I went back and did some editing and threw in the fire... suddenly we had "El Rodeo de Chili Diablo"... kind of cool, but pretty busy. 

Round three introduced a spoon into our Chili Cowboy's hand. What's better for rustling chilis than a wooden spoon? This round also introduced the text. Since the warp tools in photoshop are better than the text warping tools in Illustrator, I layed my text out there and then went to LAYER --> TYPE --> CONVERT TO SHAPE and then copied the newly outlined text and pasted it into Illustrator. Suddenly, quite easily, I had text in Illustrator that I could mess around with. I spent some time trying to figure out how to separate the red shadow on the text from the main lettering (it was part of the same font) and made some letter spacing and sizing changes. 

Version 4 (officially version 3) 

Some of the people I showed it to thought that the cowboy looked to be a little too hunchbacked. I dug up some other cowboy illustrations and experimented with a slightly different pose. I think this one is actually a little bit stronger. The spoon has moved into this cowboys other hand and is partially hiding behind his head. I think it's kind of a cool, subtle effect. 

Finally, this is a guess as to how the final ad will be put together. It's just a draft at the moment and a lot of the other text that will eventually be there isn't... but for a few hours work, I think this is kind of cool. I think my favorite part is that it's pretty different from all my other work. 

I'd love to know your thoughts. I'm going to be making final changes in the morning. If you have any feedback, I'd welcome it. 

More later.