Anne Fontaine Holiday Postcard!

Before spring swings into full bloom, I wanted to share another postcard I created for french fashion designer Anne Fontaine! I had a great time working with them on a Bastille Day postcard and was happy to try my hand at it again for a holiday-season themed mailer!

I was provided with photos of one of their new winter coats & bags, gloves, belt, a neck ruff, and a pair of cute booties. They wanted a Karlie Kloss sort of look for the model, and the backdrop this time was to be another iconic french location like the Arc de Triomphe or the Pont Alexandre III bridge!

For my sketches, I actually spent a pretty long time looking for reference images of these locations that weren't your typical straight-on tourist views--I wanted to show a little more depth of space. (in the process I ended up looking through a lot of flickr accounts and french blogs!)

The Arc de Triomphe background was chosen, and we ended up changing the pose and the hair a bit. (it became sort of an inverse-pose of the previous Bastille Day postcard!)

When I was creating my color sketch, I couldn't decide between a purpley daytime background or a cool blue nighttime background (with or without snow!) so I left it up to the client. Before I finalize an image, I like to get the colors juuuust right, so I don't have to worry about changing them later! In the end, the snowy daytime background was chosen and I'm happy with the result! (but I still like the nighttime setting too!)

Thanks again to my contact Christina Ramirez-Madisson and Anne Fontaine for the lovely job!

The Secret of 50 Berkeley Square!

A fun one for MentalFloss magazine's Jan/Feb issue! No nuns this time, but there IS a haunted house! 50 Berkeley square is a townhouse believed to be haunted as far back as the mid 1800's--the reclusive owner at the time let the place fall apart, and there are tales of ghosts there that have actually frightened visitors to death!

The article is about whether the mysterious owner, Mr. Myers, was actually the inspiration for Dickens' Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. My AD wanted an image of a modern person exploring a decayed & spooky Georgian style townhouse, preferably with some nice blue/yellow colors. I thought it'd be nice to use a flashlight as the image's light source, and an interesting graphic element.

Sketches

Despite its dark past, if you visit 50 Berkeley Square today, you will find the Maggs Bros. Antiquarian Booksellers housed inside! It looks pretty cute to me.

Thanks again to my AD Winslow Taft for the fun & spooky assignment!

Searching for Secrets

As part of my MAKE 2013 workshop, I led a project with all my participants for Light Grey Art Lab's Message in a Bottle show. It's a little show within a show--ours is called Searching For Secrets, and each person created a piece with a letter hidden inside. The pieces are arranged in order, so once you find the letter in each image, they spell out a message together! I couldn't be happier with all my participants' work, it's a great range of styles and subjects with plenty of mystery to go around (and letters hidden in different ways!) Take a look and figure out the message for yourself!

The theme I gave everyone was Searching for (or discovering!) a secret.
Here's mine, 'Relic'

Can you find my letter??

Part of the project was challenging everyone to use informal subdivision to help come up with sketches. I felt that the working method itself is appropriately secrets-themed--you're looking at a bunch of lines and trying to figure out an image hidden within them.
Here's my informal subdivision lines and the sketch I settled on:

 I actually had a million other sketches, but lost the file with all of them in it. D'oh!
I thought that something sci-fi themed would be fun to draw--I've been reading a lot of cyberpunk recently (Snowcrash, The Diamond Age, Neuromancer) and visions of dirty dystopian futures have been floating around in my mind.

I ended up moving the whole image down a bit for better compositional value, which means my final image doesn't line up with my informal subdivision quite as well. However, I think the main value of informal subdivision is to suggest composition and generate ideas. If you decide to work with informal subdivision and think that something doesn't look right, change it!

Thanks again to all my participants for their fantastic work! You guys did great.

MAKE 2013 Workshop Thoughts

Starting things off!

First off: Whoa! What an amazing experience! Its already been 2 weeks since my MAKE 2013 illustration workshop that I led at Light Grey Art Lab, but I still get the warm-and-fuzzies when I think of all my awesome participants and and the LGAL crew!

For a blow-by-blow breakdown of everything we did that weekend, be sure to read Light Grey Art Lab's lovely writeup of the workshop! You can also take a look at alllll the photos from the weekend here! (which is where I got almost all my photos for this post. Thanks Chris!)

Freelance illustration can often be an isolating pursuit, so it was a real treat to be reminded of all the fun that happens when you get a group of artists talking and sharing together in one room. All of my participants came from different walks of life and various career paths--students, designers, animators, freelancers, company artists--and it was really eye-opening for me to hear about all of their goals and experiences. As a bonus--the chilly temperature in MN has made my Baltimore winter feel positively breezy in comparison. ;)

Our talented panel guests Brad Mcginty, Alyssa Thomas & Allegra Lockstadt were also very generous and informative about their own practices! Good insights all around and great to meet them all!

From the left: Brad, Allegra, me & Alyssa!

Overall, I wanted to write up a few key things that I took away from the workshop:

1. Holy cow, everyone is awesome!!

2. Everyone has a different goal and a different timeline. And that's as it should be! It's easy to sabotage yourself by comparing your path to others (I've definitely been guilty this) but racing against other people isn't healthy, and it's not helpful. There is no One True Road To Success, everyone has different needs and different steps. At the workshop we all analyzed what we really wanted out of life and work and then came up with a doable step-by-step plan for how to achieve our 2013 goals. It was a great exercise, and made me realize that some of things I thought I wanted weren't actually the important goals for me. It's all too easy to set lofty ideals for your work and then become disappointed when you don't reach them. Breaking an overall goal (like working on jobs in a certain field or balancing work/life) into tiny monthly chunks is much more palatable and easy to fulfill. My own biggest goal is to try and separate, equalize, and maximize my social time and my working time!

3. Artists LOVE to make things hard on themselves. I think everyone does this in one way or another--agonizing over the tiniest details, feeling guilty about doing or not doing a particular thing, for being at a particular place in life, for working too hard or not working hard enough. It's easy to feel like you're alone in this situation, but everyone feels unsuccessful sometimes, and sometimes quite often. I certainly do! And actually hearing all the same insecurities from other people at the workshop made me realize that this is a massive delusion--if we all feel like we're insufficient in ways other people aren't, it can't be true. So why torture yourself needlessly? Self-criticism & self-doubt is definitely healthy and needed, but it was a good reminder that giving yourself some love and forgiveness should be just as important. Feel pride in what you have accomplished as a creative person and don't give up!

4. Share! In my experience, when you are generous with other people, they are more likely to be generous with you. It sounds so cliché, but you can learn a lot from others by giving away your own resources. You can also learn a lot about yourself! Most of my illustration decisions/processes were internalized or just intuition when I graduated school. However, in the process of teaching/blogging/workshopping, I started to analyze the differerent aspects of image creation, how I do it, and how I'd present it to other people. That got me thinking about the decisions I make, why I make them, and how other people approach the same things. Working consciously and sharing with others has been so helpful to me in generating new insights about myself and illustration in general.

You guys are the best!

This was my first workshop and I REALLY HOPE it isn't my last! My time in Minneapolis was the perfect experience I needed to get reinvigorated for the new year, and I can't wait to see where my participants go from here! Big thanks to everyone who came to the workshop--I can't believe we had people from all across the US (and Canada!) and every single person was so friendly, generous, and talented.

From the left, thanks to Lindsay, Chris, Jenny, Jared & Francesca! And if you THINK that I added Jenny to this image through the magic of photoshop...you are clearly mistaken.

I certainly wouldn't have been able to do this without the Light Grey Art Lab crew. Huge thanks to Lindsay Nohl, Chris Hajny, Francesca Butchko, Jenny Bookler and Jared Tuttle for inviting me to lead the workshop, chauffering me around town like royalty, regaling me with stories and delicious food, and organizing every single thing so it ran without a hitch. Lindsay was my go-to gal in the planning stages and a huge help in figuring out workshop activities and schedule--she is such a pro and it was a real treat to talk shop with her. I was also super inspired by the thoughtfulness, collaboration, and talent that Lindsay, Chris, and Francesca share together as Paper Bicycle. Overall, the effort that Jenny, Lindsay, Francesca, and Chris take to organize LGAL shows and events is amazing. What great people all-around!

Lastly, as part of the workshop, I gave everyone (including myself) a group art project! I'll be putting up my piece a bit later this week and hopefully linking to all my participants' work as well! Everyone's awesome work will be seen in a special section of the Message In A Bottle show at Light Grey Art Lab, opening this friday, so check it out!

Living Our Values

Is a snowy, seasonally-appropriate holiday season too much to ask?? Baltimore seems to think so...it's either been unusually warm, or just sort of rainy over here. At least I got to draw some snow for the Dec/Jan cover of The Progressive!

I was tasked with making a typographical cover about issue's theme, "Living Our Values".
All of the writers' values were wide-ranging, so at first I thought it'd be interesting to put different illustrations inside of the "Living Our Values" letterforms. However, I was disappointed to find that I couldn't get the letters big enough to actually be usable spaces for images!
So, after re-reading all the articles, I thought that the main connecting thread was a hope for a better future and a connection with the land/people/environment. I thought that a snowy, unspoiled new-years landscape, with a person just stepping out of of their cabin to enjoy the vista, might work as a symbol for a new beginning.

My AD thought so too, so I tried out some other variations! One of my ideas was to incorporate the sun as part of the Progressive title, and we ended up using it.

I submitted several color variations for the title--this was one of the other options that I liked, besides the red-lettered version which they ended up choosing.

Hand-lettering the whole thing (title included!) was a little intimidating at first, but I'm pleased with the result. I'd love to do more environment-based (or typography-based!) illustrations in the future. Thanks to my AD Nick Jehlen for the fun assignment--and I get to share the issue with lovely illustrators like Victo Ngai & Yuko Shimizu to boot! Happy Holidays guys!

Lady of the Lake

The Lady of the Lake, for the GIRLS: Fact or Fiction art show at Light Grey Art Lab! She was my first choice—what’s not to love about a mysterious, super-powerful, watery maiden, from the tales of King Arthur? I think the most interesting thing about her, to me, is that her exact identity is so vague (it’s thought that she may be based on celtic water deities or nymphs) and yet she had such a big impact on the events in Arthurian legend.
You can buy a print of my Lady here!
I’m sure you’ve already seen some of the other amazing contributions to the show, if not, take a gander! The collected book and all the other prints are all available for purchase there. Plus, if you spend $100 on ANYTHING in the store before the 7th, LGAL will give you a free GIRLS book!

Footnote: The black swans in the background are a small tip of the hat to NC Wyeth's gorgeous Excalibur piece! What a guy.

Mothers Superior

I recently had the pleasure of illustrating some kickass nuns for Mental Floss magazine's December issue! Thanks to my AD Winslow Taft for the fantastic layout and the idea to have me do the illustrations in illuminated manuscript style. It's always been really fun for me to try and imitate other illustration styles  (japanese woodblock prints, art deco) and it's a good challenge to try and add my own twist while still making the style recognizable.

Sketches!

I had a grab-bag of cool ladies from different centuries & locations to inspire me, including Ani Pachen (tibetan warrior nun), Katharine Drexel (fought against the Ku Klux Klan & segregation), Hildegard of Bingen (a crowd favorite in the 11th century),  Juana Ines de la Cruz (intellectual, writer, early feminist from the 17th century), and Dolores Hart (former hollywood actress).

The final layouts!

There were so many individualized stories so I tried to keep the illustrations general in scope (pursuing knowledge, fighting against the forces of evil, etc.). However, because Ani Pachen was the only tibetan nun, I thought it'd make sense to show her specifically. She led 600 tribesman on horseback to fight against the Chinese army. Pretty cool!
All in all, a really fun assignment.