Rosehaven Cottage: One hen has now become a flock (of sorts)

A while back I designed an egg carton label to put on a carton I was returning to a friend that generously gave us some eggs from her backyard hens (click here to see the post where I wrote about it).

My original hen illustration on the labels looked like this

Well, last week a very nice lady emailed me to ask if I did bulk quantities of personalized egg carton labels. She wanted to keep the cost low so she could sell the eggs from her own backyard hens for a reasonable price and not have to fold in the cost of an expensive label. Since my online printer only does a more expensive label, I told her that a great option would be for me to design and lay out the labels to print 3 on an 8.5"x11" sheet and make a ready-to-print pdf file available for her to purchase and download (at www.RosehavenCottageDownloads.com). Once she purchased and downloaded the file, she could take it and have the labels printed at her local copying center onto non-scored adhesive-backed label stock and then cut the labels herself. She found out she was able to get the label stock inexpensively by ordering online and only pay for the printing. She loved the idea.

Once she sent me a photo of her hens that are a variety of colors, I wanted to make the labels even more special . My original hen looked a lot like one of her hens, but her other hens looked so beautifully different. So I went about creating two more hens using the photo as inspiration for coloring. That way each sheet of labels will have 3 labels on it, each with a different colored hen.

Here's the first color variation I did

The photo of my client's hen flock was so good I could see all the nuances of colors in their feathers. I set about trying to capture it while keeping the renderings illustrative and simple at the same time. I think I pulled it off pretty well.