Kids Illustration EURO 2012 stickers

I have a German publishing client for whom I have created children’s illustrations for several ranges of stickers that appear on the front of their weekly magazines. Theses stickers are normally seasonally themed and take the form of digital 2D illustrations with a strong key line, colour in fill and some shading to give the characters form.

The most recent set of stickers however, have been executed in digital 3D, focusing on the EURO 2012 football Cup. The brief was to create friendly generic characters based on the official tournament football. They had to appeal to children, even thought the TV listings magazine was aimed at adults. The publishers were trying to increase sales using ‘pester-power’ from the kids shopping with their parents.

Using colours/costumes and icons that personified particular countries, these kid’s illustrations represented the individual nations competing within the tournament. The client was quite prescriptive with what they considered epitomized each country. Spain had to be a bullfighter, Denmark a Viking and England a Policeman. So our red and white flag waving football character ended up with a policeman’s helmet on! Naturally, being a German magazine, the client wanted the German football character holding up the trophy as the tournament winner! They also wanted him to be scoring a goal against Portugal, with Ronaldo taking on the role of the unfortunate goalkeeper.

These were fun to do – my kids are especially excited about receiving the sample stickers…which will probably more exciting than England’s performance!