A UNIQUE MEMORY OF YOUR NEWBORN

The Birth Posters app (Födelsetavlor in Swedish), is a personal ongoing project of mine. Although there already were other companies offering birth posters on the market, I couldn't find anything that was truly unique and personal that showed it was my child and not look the same as others. After some researching I realized that most birth posters don't have a real face on them, some have little strokes for the eyelids and nose but still very vague. So, for me personally, my wish would be a more detailed face which essentially is an accurate portrait of my newborn. So the whole idea was to offer a custom-made and real size birth poster which can be purchased and customized on an app. To find out if this business idea was viable and realistic I went to NyföretagarCentrum, a center who stimulates increased entrepeneurship, for some advice. Their response was very positive. I also received a big interest from friends wanting to make a preorder.

Though I wanted an accurate portrait of a newborn, especially the face, I still wanted the overall feel of the poster to be clean and slightly minimalistic. Not hyper realistic with lots of details and shading etc, but more towards outlined paintbrush strokes. All would be hand-drawn with a wacom pen in Illustrator and Photoshop. After a lot of testing different paint brushes I chose two different ones, one for drawing the body and another for the face. In the end, it became sort of a mixed style where everything was drawn with clean lines, except for the eyes which had some shading giving them a more realistic style. The customer can have different options depending on budget: they can opt for an Illustration of the face only and then choose between ready made templates of bodies, or for a higher cost they can choose a full body illustration.