The New Year brought some good news with it! I woke up on January 1st to find that my painting Jo has been accepted by the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles into this year’s juried show! I’m so grateful that my work has been selected for the Illustration West show, and it’s an honor to be included once again. Thank you, SILA judges, for the great start to 2010!
Happy New Year!
I have just returned from ringing in the beginning of our new decade with family and friends, and I thought this might be the appropriate time to post one of the last pieces of 2009. Fittingly, the subject of this illustration is a party scene.
This illustration was commissioned by Saint Mary’s College of California, and art directed by Bob Ciano, who was a pleasure to work with once again. A couple of months ago Bob contacted me to create a theatre poster for a Word For Word production of three short stories by Virginia Woolf at Saint Mary’s. Each story takes place at a party, and they were presented together on the stage as selected moments from the famous fictional party of Mrs. Dalloway.
Being that I am a literary-minded person with a great interest in theatre, this project was exciting to me on multiple levels. It was my first chance to read any of Virginia Woolf’s work, and I was entranced by her use of language, particularly by her repeated references to water. Each of the three stories center around a different woman’s experience at the party, and each of the women is at some point caught in a struggle, swept away in a social situation that rises out of their control, and left struggling – almost drowning – in a sea of necessary propriety and social expectations.
The entire story created a wonderful opportunity to play with watery colors and an aqueous environment, and I really enjoyed exploring all of the possible concepts in the sketch process. Sometime in the future I may come back and edit this post to share some of the thumbnails. The final piece was well received, and ran as a theatre poster advertising the show’s run during the end of November.
Well well, it’s time for an update! It’s been a while since the last post, but I was working on a few projects that I didn’t want to share until the clients introduced them to the world first. One of these projects went live just the other day, so I can now unleash it on my blog!
The first of these commissions was a logo design project for a new toy shop in Mill Valley, California. The shop is called “Henry’s Toyshop” – Henry being a big friendly bear – and the store has a terrific old-fashioned flavor to it, with wooden and natural toys rather than modern gaming systems – this is my favorite kind of toy store.
This job was exciting on so many levels, and I absolutely loved having the opportunity to be truly playful and childlike when creating Henry. Lastly, this job taught me one new thing about myself: drawing sweet little animals, all dressed up and looking dapper, makes me seriously happy. Meet Henry!
And here are a few early versions of Henry; these are the sketches where I played with facial shape, age, size, and gesture. As you can see, the client and I had a pretty clear idea of what the logo would be (bear + wagon), and so the journey to the final was mostly character design. What fun!
The Grand Opening for Henry’s Toyshop is on November 7th, and I’m so excited to go see Henry up in his natural environment!
A quick little partner piece to “Hoot.”
Some warm up sketches for an upcoming, very exciting assignment! These are my “getting to know you” sketches – at the beginning of a project I usually like to draw anything that I can find relating to what the final subject will be, just for the sake of getting to know the shape, personality, and movement of the final character. It had been a little while since I’d drawn animals (and I don’t think I’ve ever actually focused on bears before), which made the sketch process even more fun.
Bears really are a lot like humans, especially the wee little ones.
