STAMP IT - bike to work

THE BIKE TO WORK SCHEME

Whilst doing some research for this brief, the most interesting find seemed to be this idea of green transport e.g. walking, biking, green vehicles, car sharing. This appeared to be a good route to go down. 

There are loads of bike to work schemes out there, however, the Government led Halfords Cycle2Work scheme is evidently legitimate.

To begin with, I set about just getting as many ideas down as possible, drawing bikes from found images that could possibly be used. At this stage, it was a case of using a variety of different bikes, from  a mountain bike to a one with streamers coming out it's handles. This unfortunately doesn't properly pin down a selected audience.

I hand drew my own versions of each bike, first using a pencil and then going over the outlines in a thicker black pen so that they were visible once scanned in. Once the drawings were in illustrator, I stupidly used the pen tool to trace around the images.

The results from using the pen tool can be seen below. Originally, a bit of a bright and garish colour scheme was chosen. I'm not sure where I was going with this colour scheme, but the more I used it on other bikes, the worse it got. Although it evidently stands out, it just really doesn't work.

DEVELOPING MY ORIGINAL IDEA....

After a while, it appeared that it just wasn't going right - both the colour scheme and the style of the image. I decided to play around a bit and interestingly expanded my Illustrator knowledge at the same time. 

In order to give my images a more playful and hand rendered appearance, each drawing was live traced and converted to live paint so that they could be filled with colour. Some aspects of the previous colour scheme were kept, but toned down into more muted and pastel shades of the original colours.

I didn't want it to be too busy like the originals, so I used two different shades of grey, and two different shades of the main colour - the black being the pen. This was kept constant throughout.

I was really happy with the above bikes, many people taking a liking to the little pink one at the bottom. Unfortunately however, the realisation soon set in that during my research I found out that the scheme is actually only available to those 16+ earning more than minimum wage. No one above the age of 16 would be riding a pink bike with streamers and stabalisers....