The better part of my working year in 2016 was dedicated to making illustrations for the Christmas campaign of the venerable Paris department store Printemps.

The artwork in this post is the Key Visual used across a variety of media for the promotional campaign, as well as on collateral and merchandise in-store.

Art Direction by Catherine Ginier-Gillet

Heavy revisions to the more fantastical sketch stripped the design down to the essential elements of the dome and tree -both vastly oversized- and the children, who had been moved off to the side behind a curtain.

I play fast and loose with perspective whenever I can be reasonably assured of getting away with it. But here the perspective was mission-critical.

The above 3D environment was built for me by my good friend and colleague Brian Main in Blender, and was invaluable in constructing the final drawing with confidence. The bear, downloaded from Thingiverse, proved redundant, as did the freakish doll I built to stand in for the little girl.

The quickest way to improve your drawing is often to use the right reference. In this case I knew I would need it for the worm's-eye perspective on the tree. A leisurely stroll through the neighbourhood provided plenty of good reference.

Drawing the stained glass patterns on a separate sheet facilitated colouring them separately in the digital stage.

The image went through a great many revisions on its way to approval, and as stressful as that process can be I do feel we arrived at a more balanced and effective image because of it. The above are just a few of the variations the image went through, and they make clear that the primary challenge was finding the right balance in the colours.

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Brian Main, who built me the Blender model, was also brought in to turn the key visual  into a short animated spot for the campaign. Unfortunately, this meant I needed to slice up the now-flat raster image into distinct fields and layers. It was at this stage that I rued my largely-analog approach, as this part would potentially have been much easier with a digitally-constructed image.

Brian introduced some of the characters used elsewhere in the campaign, designed by Printemps in collaboration with the campaign sponsors Jimmy Choo, Bonpoint and David Yurman.

The Key Visual was used all across the campaign, on everything from billboards to stickers. I was able to bring home a bag of samples from Paris, and they are a nice reminder of how much mileage was made of all our hard work.

The press kit was a quite luxurious book in A3 format with a folding cover stamped in gold foil, opening to show the Key Visual to best advantage. 

We also produced a gift-wrap, used in the store. The design was based on the stained-glass dome.