Being social is hard

This past week I've been working on promotional material for Bala.  This quarter, we really need to step up our social media game and advertise the game like heck, so I've been creating business card thumbnails, sticker sketches, and scouting the internet for a good hosting service for the website.  I've also been doing thumbnails for posters and promotional banners, and coming up with battle plans for sites like twitter, facebook, and tumblr.  At the bottom, I'll provide links for all of those things!  We've had URLs and pages since the very beginning of the project, but are just now revving up to use these outlets.

Here's a collection of the different business cards I've come up with so far.  Fonts and colors are tentative; this first set of thumbnails is to pinpoint composition and ideas.

Feedback has been all over the place, as different people like different designs, so I think I'm going to print up 2 different designs using the beautiful rounded corner business cards at Moo.  The designs I'm fairly certain I am going with are the vertical compositions, so the thumbnails in the bottom row.  The next step is to do tighter thumbnails, and then the final art.  Hope to show that off next week!

As a relatively close tie-in to the business cards, I've been working on a banner that features similar artwork as the business cards.

I've also come up with a couple different sticker designs, and only like one so far, but here they all are!

This is supposed to be Life Witch resting on a book titled Bala, with many more stacked books around her.  The magenta outline is where the sticker would be cut.

A rounded sticker idea.

Life Witch with project website outlining her arm.  I tried playing around with the logo on her poncho thing, but it didn't look like it would work out.  I'll have to play around more in the final illustration.  But so far, this is my favorite sticker idea, because it seems like a design that people would actually want to stick onto something.  Heck, I would! And I'm super picky about stickers, so I probably wouldn't want to use the first two designs I came up with.  That said, I hope to do a couple more ideas before actually deciding.

For posters/promotional art, I thought it'd be fun to do a series of portraits for the witches of Bala.  

First up is Life Witch about to eat a fairy in a throne chair in the middle of the woods.  Her throne chair is flanked by bloodied roses, and a suspended cage with more fairy snacks.  In this portrait, she will not be wearing her iconic mask and scarf; instead, they will be sloppily hanging from her chair.

Pictured above is Time Witch sitting alone atop her clock tower.  Her eyes are averted from the painter/camera and she looks pretty uncomfortable with the whole thing.

Cake Witch is standing reminiscent to a queen despite her tattered clothes.  She is surrounded by her cake monsters, who share similar eyes to her own.

The compositions of these portraits need a little work and refinement, but that's the general idea.

For funsies, I also started setting up a scene for Life Witch to look like a creepy lifeless doll.  In the end, I hope to have some of the objects animated, so that there are levitating books, and the dangling stars twirl a bit.

The original plan was to write 'BALA' on the face of the book like this:

BUT! It might be more interesting (and much more readable) to do something like this:

So just having 3D letters in the environment.  I'll have to mess around with the environment a little bit to make it even more beautiful.

And what will this be used for?  Who knows.  Maybe a Title Screen where you press Start, which will then take you to the interactive menu, or for the back of my personal business cards.  Maybe a banner!  The possibilities are endless (within reason).

Bonus!  I've started doing a promo art piece for Prisma as well.  If it comes out nicely, I might print it as a sticker along with the Bala one.

Here's the sketch, and here's a bit of refinement below:

That's all for now!  If I manage my time well, I hope to have a couple of these things completed by next week.  Stay tuned!

Oh!  And here are all those links I talked about at the top:

Bala facebook page
Tumblr blog
Twitter

Website coming soon!