Sketch Sunday 13

A couple of weeks ago, Engadget posted a design contest. The winners would get their design laser-etched on the back of a Kindle. The contest closed on Friday, and I decided on Wednesday night to give it a shot...

Thursday morning rolled around and I went to work with a vague idea of what I wanted to do. I printed out an image of the kindle back and drew these layouts.

The first sketch.
The second sketch.
When I got home Thursday night, I traced the first sketch in order to scan the lineart. Since it was drawn on top of a very dark print-out, it would have been very difficult to manipulate.

Trace of first sketch.
The face of the trace superimposed on the tree from the second sketch.
By the end of the evening on Thursday, I had the image scanned onto my computer, and I had began inking it using Flash CS4. One of the rules for the submissions was that the final image must be in vector format. I had the choice between using Adobe Illustrator or Flash, and chose Flash because it's pretty hard to sketch in Illustrator and someone suggested that I try it out.

The image manipulated in Flash.
During the course of the day on Friday, I realized that the image was due at 11:59PM ET, not PST where I'm at. I got home at 6 and saw that I had a little over 2 hours to work on the image, not the full 5 I was banking on. Our resident programmer helped out by writing a small piece of code to generate the random texts in the tree. The image below is the final design and what it would look like on the back of a Kindle 2, should it be selected as one of the winning pieces!

Click to enlargenize!
The tree was inspired by the designs on the back of the original Kindle. I think the flow came out really well, but I wish I had those extra 3 hours to smooth out some details.

The winners of the contest will be chosen by voters, so please check back in the near future for a link to the voting page. I hope my design is selected! I would really love to see this picture laser-etched onto a Kindle.