McGrill: takeway cup illustration commission

I would like to apologize in advance for the pain of your thumb while reading this post because you will have to scroll down a lot.

This summer I've got an order to create an illustration for a cup. I've finished this job in about 2 weeks in total but only now I've received the payment and able to show it in my portfolio and blog about it.

Sketches

I've blogged about few of these sketches before but here is the full stack in historical order. This is a series of road cafes across the Russia where drivers and travelers could catch a meal and take away some hot drinks for the road. That's why first I was thinking that drawing a car with people traveling across the Russia will be banal idea. I've tried metaphor with bears flying on the baloons. Russia, you know?

If you are in US you probably still thinking that we have bears walking on the streets here and we are all wearing lapti and playing on balalaika eating borsch only. At least I've heard that many times from people who never been in Russia :)

This bear was my favorite but client said they don't really get an idea here so it was rejected. Later I was painted it anyway just for my pleasure.

Okay, moving on... We've discussed a bit more and they asked me to draw the thing I was afraid of. That banal idea: road, traveling family, their cafes...

Iteration above which I like a lot was rejected as well. So I had to try again. Not a problem, my work is to make my client happy...

I've started to try sketching another special idea where the driver was so hungry that he ate his steering wheel but stopped because felt my client will not understand it anyway.