Primal Space banner
Ewan, the creator of Primal Space, reached out in need of a fresh banner for his YouTube channel. His videos explore fascinating tales of engineering, science, and history through the art of animation.
I don’t take commissions anymore, but after seeing his awesome videos I couldn’t resist. This is exactly the type of gorgeous nerd stuff I’m into. I was additionally sold by the fact that Ewan already had a really good idea of what he wanted and even provided his own sketch to get me started. Dream client!
The banner was to incorporate a selection of scenes from his videos. My first step was to define the aesthetic, gather screenshots of the chosen scenes, and shop them together into a rough composition:
The tricky part of creating a YouTube banner is it needs to work in several different aspect ratios. All the important meat needed to fit in the area viewable on all devices, but the expanded views also needed to be visually interesting. As the channel has such a wealth of videos, I was able to add extra scenes to fill the empty spaces.
With the hard part over, now comes the fun part: inking! I printed my sketch out at a low opacity, inked the linework, and scanned it in.
I matched the color palette of the videos, but it was a little dull so we decided to brighten it up! We are both pleased with how it turned out.
