Take a highly qualified pedagogue that overflows intelligence and creativity and that, on top of that, does not make a single move without purpose. Join her to a developer that gives his shots as an illustrator that likes the universe of fantasy and working with images in the computer. The result is Todopano, an exclusive line of handmade pedagogical materials in fabric.
Silvana, the pedagogue, takes care of the entire product concept, with appropriate context, original activities and impeccable coherence and consistency and careful aesthetics. She also chooses the raw materials and puts her hands to work in order to make the products. All theoretical content of the Todopano site is of her authorship, too.
Quindigo, the illustrator, creates the drawings of the embroided elements of the materials and patiently transforms them into embroidery scripts. The implementation and maintenance of the Todopano site are duties of his, too.
This is a happy partnership between complementary talents.
Too bad this venture ended... Because the products were handmade, they demanded a large amount of work and became expensive. The products were excellent, but the return was not worth. There is a copy of the Todopano site contents available, in the case you want to check that the result was actually cool.
Todopano started its activities in march 2009 and interrupted them in november 2010.
1) The target public is the infant one. Complexity and perspective can harm the image reading by the children. The drawings must also be attractive.
2) The drawings are transformed into embroidery and parts made of fabric. This means that certain types of details are not applicable. It is not possible to make too small details with thread and fabric.
So here is plenty of opportunities to exercise the creativity necessary to elaborate drawings apparently simple that, with few traces, convey the desired concepts. It is proposal radically different from the others I embraced until now. There is also plenty of themes for the drawings: animals, utensils, toys, food and many others. Everything in order to compose cohesive and harmonic materials, under the pedagogue rigorous supervision.
The drawings I make for Todopano are only outlines made with mechanical pencil and pen. After being scanned, a specific application generates sketchy vector representations of the drawings. Then follow a detailed step of manual refinement of the vector drawings and another step of embroidery attributes assignment for the outlines and fillings. In that process, it is common for the embroidery to suffer adjustments and to become quite different from the original drawing. The final result, embroided in fabric, is very pleasant!
Attention! The Todopano materials are not composed only of embroidery elements. The pedagogue creativity runs wild with plain and patterned fabrics, varied sewing styles, buttons, velcro and other resources to elaborate materials that stimulate by vision, touch and smell. You really have to hold them in your hands to check their quality and richness!
With the sole purpose of divulging this work as illustrator, I put below a few drawings toghether with the embroidery previews offered by the application.