Vintage NY Christmas for Heinz

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Vintage New York
Isometric illustration for Heinz & America Graffitti

I was commissioned by Ogilvy Milano to draw a promotional illustration for
Christmas' campaign from Heinz Sauces/America Graffiti restaurants.

The illustration was the restaurant's official art for the placemats, during 2017 Christmas' time.
The idea: Let's recreate a classic atmosphere of a big american city in the 50's, like New York, in a funny seek-and-find game that people can play while eating their delicious hamburgers!

The art highlights the importance of Heinz sauces for the american burger culture, showing many creative situations where the sauces could be involved: in a lunch during a Drive-in date, in a classic Advertising Agency conference, etc. Also, the googie feel is totally integrated to the America Graffiti's architecture and interior decoration.

An extra marketing action associated to the illustration made everything even funnier: the seek-and-find game could be played by costumers using their own smartphones to take pictures of all classic topdown Heinz sauces hidden through the landscape. After completing the missions, they would win a special christmas prize!

For this job, I've made a huge immersion in googie culture, searching for specific architecture, classic buildings, vintage cars and typical outfits from the 50's. There are many references spread through the drawing, like the classic Movie "Dial M for Murder" , that you can see below.

I've dedicated a good amount of research and design work to create diverse googie signs through all the scenario, like the fictional La Torre Hotel & Restaurant and Smooth Row Bowling signs.

Here's an example of a reference panel I've created in sketching stage. I've organized the city in different districts, which one with it's own characteristics, to achieve a good portrait of people's lives in that time. Some lists, also, detail possible characters, curiosities and funny situations.

A bit of my sketching and finalization process can be seen below. First, I started making a colorful digital sketch using Photoshop. The raw linework you see below is not used in the final file: I prefer to achieve, first, a good atmosphere in sketching stage, with a nice composition and color scheme.

After composition is defined, I start building each site in full detail. I like to keep a transparent copy of the sketch during all the project to keep a good track of my progress.

Then, after all the city is drawn, I start drawing people and objects interacting with the buildings to make the total scene very vivid and funny. This is what the city looks like without inhabitants:

Drawing people is one of my favorite parts: many funny ideas appear while in drawing this part, and I like to share them with the creative staff to see if they'd like to add them or suggest anything else. Also, I like to draw them in free-hand style using a wacom stylus in Photoshop, which gives me more expressive and charming results then using vector lines.

After all people is drawn in separated layers, I finish with some color balancing, light and shading, etc... and here you can see the finished illustration, below. Zoom-in to get the image in full detail!