A Menu Card

When searching for fishy inspiration, I caught sight of my car key ring. Its a metal skeletal fish on a chain. I believe I got it as the novelty from some posh Christmas crackers a few years ago. In fact as you can probably see, it is a bottle opener.



Having trawled through, pun intended, google images; skeletal fish images are a bit of a foody cliché. But I feel my subject is just different enough to persevere with, chain and all.
Here are a few early roughs.. very rough!

The top piece was some idle thoughts before I decided on the key ring idea.
I then did a sketch of the keyring on a larger scale, I intended to try a two tone colour scheme.

In two minds as to the best way to apply colour. I decided that if I scanned the sketch and imported it in to the iPad, I could use some of the layering techniques I had discovered in the Procreate app to try out some colour combinations. I favoured a light and dark blue.

Feeling that I had focused too much on the one idea, it had started to niggle me that the skeletal fish was such an obvious idea, I had also started to doubt whether there was enough of an illustration about it. I was starting to considered some possible alternatives. More of which shortly.

colouring the fish logo.. not bad and I like the unfinished look

Trying something different... it looked better in my head.

My first alternative idea.
The idea of a crabs claw came to me after exploring the possibility of enclosing the skeletal fish in a square. I saw that the jaws were reminiscent of a crabs claws so tried out the idea with an ink pen and coloured with watercolour.

But does it say fish restaurant or shellfish restaurant? And does that matter?
I sketched out another idea...

Essentially sardines on a skewer, flames to be represented by vertical bars in flame colours and above the fish grey to represent the smoke.

Originally this was a larger image but looked better cropped. I feel that the bars are too easily confused with seaside accessories to be convincing representation of flames. However I still like the idea behind the design, perhaps try another way to depict the flames...

I also decided to use pastels. My feeling is that it kind of works as a large piece but I am not so certain that it will work scaled down. Looking at the image as a logo I think losing some of the background would make it stronger.

And at the logo size...

And with the addition of a border with the restaurant name..

Does it say posh? Well It can. I tried a couple of different fonts for the menu list and this made a huge difference to how the logo was perceived. The classic 'fancy' fonts tended to indicate bistro. I then looked at the site of a very classy restaurant in London, Le Gavroche. Their sample menus page gave me what, I believe, I was looking for. I also borrowed from the fish part of their Menu Exceptionelle.
Go here to view my exclusive menu.