Making colouring-in come to life

Edding are a leading and innovative pen brand, who like to find new ways to showcase their products' capabilities. They had an idea, and came to me and my team to help them realise that idea...

With a trade show upcoming and wanting to promote their colour pens to parents, teachers and kids, Edding pitched their concept of an interactive colouring-in stand. Users would colour-in templates, have them scanned, and then be able to see their colouring in come to life on screen. And that's as far as they had got. They wanted to know how they could achieve this, and how they could make it appeal to their core audience.

This was an unknown for me and my team. We hadn't done anything like this before, but it was exciting. The first task we undertook to achieve was to prove that it was even possible, and could be delivered on time and on budget. So, I worked with two developers to create an initial, very rough prototype, one that proved that the process we envisaged of colouring-in, scanning and animating would work.

Happy that we could indeed realise the project, I started work developing the visual style, and exploring what could appeal to the users. With such a wide scope, I worked on some moodboards showing different concepts for theme and illustration style. These were presented to the client to get feedback, who had a clear idea of the route they wanted to take. It was time to start drawing some monsters.

The concept that the client wanted to develop was one that we termed Monsters Ink. An obviously hand-illustrated cityscape wth monsters rampaging through, causing havoc. The monsters would form the colouring-in templates, which would come to life on screen. So, I spent some happy days doing what all designers really want to do. I drew and drew and drew. Buildings, billboards, buses and of course, monsters.

With lots of different drawings in my sketchbook, I refined it down and ended up producing three types of monster that would be used in our animation - the flying monster, the angry monster and the rude monster. We wanted it to be irreverent, a little bit cheeky, to appeal to kids. I also developed a rolling cityscape that would seamlessly move through the city, giving my monsters and environment to destroy.

To draw everything together, I also illustrated and designed the stand surrounding the installation.