Cadbury - Share the Joy

So.... it's been a while, hasn't it? I swear I was feeling bad about it! But I was kind of busy on Tintin up until quite recently, and, then busy taking my first holiday in three years, and now busy finishing making a baby, while working on the Hobbit, Prometheus and other stuff... So I dug up some old stuff that I had never posted (because I was busy).

Anyway, last year, I was contacted by some super awesome folks, Andy and Dave from DDB Auckland, to enter a concept, along with other artists, for a Cadbury campaign. I somehow ended up being the selected artist and got to develop some more the concept and roughs... before the whole job fell through. I think we were all a little very sad about it, but this is how things go in advertising.

This would have been part of the Share the Joy campaign and would have been a series of 4 limited edition chocolate block packs. The trick was, we wanted a fresco when you put all the packs side by side, but because we couldn't control in which order they were going to be put up on shelves, the fresco had to work in all the possible combinations. The illustration had to flow regardless of the order the packs were in. HA!
So, we went up to a solid final concept, and didn't get to hit final rendering of anything, but you can still get a pretty good idea of what it could have been.


But enough talk, let's look at images instead!
First up, the concept that got me the job. A single pack as proof of concept for feel, render, colors and grade:

Then a little later, the full linework and flow. You can already swap the packs, the illustration will still flow.

The linework itself, with all the characters (couldn't resist posting this, I love them displayed like this!):

Then we realised that maybe it was a little too busy in there, so we made adjustments, shrunk some of them, discarded others, and ended up with the final concepts for the first pack and the full layout of the series:

All of this is copyright Cadbury, ok?
Ok, gotta go back being busy!