Eight instruments, one brief: make them fun, dynamic, and colorful. It was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever worked on.
Back in 2011, a client asked me to illustrate eight music instruments to place around a music theme park in Florida. The park was never completed, but the illustrations, and everything I learned making them, stayed with me.
The brief
In 2011, I was working at The Imagination House when the agency handed me a dream project: illustrating eight instruments for a client’s music theme park in Florida. Each illustration would be placed around the park, so it had to catch the eye from a distance and feel like part of a celebration.
The direction was simple: fun, dynamic, and colorful. No stiff product drawings. These instruments needed to look like they were mid-performance, bursting with sound.
The park was never completed. But the project gave me some of my favorite work, and a lot of lessons I still use today.
From sketch to vector
Every instrument went through the same three steps:
Sketch the idea. I started on paper, working out the pose, the composition, and how the sound could “burst” out of each instrument.
Illustrate it. I refined the sketch into a full illustration, deciding on shapes, color, and every element around the instrument.
Vectorize it in Illustrator. I rebuilt every shape as clean vector art, path by path, so the illustrations could scale to any size the park needed, from small signs to large displays.
The video shows the trumpet coming together in Illustrator: the swirling shapes, the bursts and stars, and the color filling in layer by layer.
Making it fun, dynamic, and colorful
To turn “fun, dynamic, and colorful” into something you could see, I built a visual language that every instrument shared:
Sound you can see. Swirls, waves, and ribbons pour out of each instrument, like the music itself taking shape.
Bursts of energy. Stars, lightning bolts, and splashes add movement, so every piece feels mid-performance.
A bold, bright palette. Hot pink, teal, yellow, and orange against black-and-white accents keep everything playful and easy to spot from across the park.
Glossy details. Droplets and highlights give the flat vector shapes depth and a little shine.
Using the same elements across all eight instruments made them feel like one family, while each instrument still had its own personality. [Add a line about your favorite of the eight, and why.]
Before AI
This was 2011, long before AI image tools. Every curve was drawn by hand, every color chosen one swatch at a time, and every shape built point by point in Illustrator.
It was slow, and I loved it. Working that way forced me to really understand each instrument: how a trumpet’s valves sit, how the bell flares, where the light hits. That kind of close looking is something I still bring to every project, even now that I use AI in my work.
Each illustration took about 12 to 18 hours, from the first sketch to the final vector file. Across all eight instruments, that’s roughly 100 to 145 hours of drawing, and every one of them was worth it.
What I learned along the way
A system makes a series. Defining shared elements early (the swirls, bursts, and palette) is what made eight separate illustrations feel like one collection.
Sketch first, always. The strongest ideas came from paper, not the screen. Vectorizing was faster because the thinking was already done.
Design for where it lives. Knowing the art would be seen around a theme park pushed me toward bold shapes and bright color that read from far away.
The fun shows. When you enjoy a project, it comes through in the work. These are still some of the most joyful pieces I’ve made.
The theme park never opened, but these eight instruments still make me smile, and they remind me why I fell in love with illustration in the first place.
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