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For months now I’ve been busy drafting ideas, scribbling sketches and painting—painting and painting and painting!—icons for a new project I’m working on with my friend Sonja. We’re still keeping a pretty tight lid on things for now, but we’ll be launching soon, so she gave me the green light to show you these little snippets.
Any guesses??
On Saturday morning the weather was so perfect that I headed down to the waterfront for a little sketching—not to mention a little quality time with one of my Droplets!
I guess you could count this as working over a holiday, but it sure doesn’t feel like that. To me, it feels like the best way to enjoy a summer day.
Workin’ on a new batch of little somethings…can’t wait to show you the finished product!
Well, I’ve eked out just about as much pigment as it’s possible to get from some of these half pans, so I think it’s time to break out a brand-new paintbox. Somehow it feels like I’ve refreshed the whole studio.
I’ve done a lot of lettering commissions in my day, but this was something new for me. When my client approached me about this project, she told me she had spent the past few years working on her personal practice as a writer—as a fellow creative whose work has also been changing lately, I was immediately intrigued. She had come up with a “motto” for each year, which reflected the self-work she had been doing and her thoughts on her writing process.
So she asked me to create a hand-painted lettering design for each year motto,
with a different style of lettering in each one that would reflect how her ideas and process has changed over time.
I’m really happy with how these turned out (and I hope she is, too!)—and even better, it’s got the wheels turning for me. Who knows—maybe I’ll try something like this for myself someday. Hmm… I wonder what my own mottos might be…
I’ve been working on a super-fun lettering commission lately, which has been giving my paintbrush plenty of exercise.
My client gets to see the finished paintings first, but once she does, I’ll post them here.
More soon!
Look! I made an alphabet!
It’s funny—I almost never design an entire alphabet. In general, lettering projects just don’t really work like that. Most of the time, a letterer(erer) designs only the letterforms required for the word or phrase they’re lettering. That’s really the best way to create letter styles (which are not the same as fonts!) that really fit what the text is trying to “say.” You’re not designing an alphabet and then making it work for a bit of text—you’re taking that bit of text and giving it a voice.
But this time, I did things differently. I wanted to create some botanical lettering, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to use it for—so I went whole hog and started with the entire alphabet.
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with a new (to me) medium: acrylic ink. It’s what I used to create the You’ll Like Tacoma and Love Birds series. What I love about acrylic ink is that unlike watercolor, it’s opaque—and infinitely easier to wrangle than the more traditional opaque medium of gouache.
When you work with watercolor alone, you have to start with the lightest colors first, and build up darker ones in layers. Whites are the white of your paper, and once you add pigment to an area, you can never return back to that pristine white. It teaches you to think in a subtractive sense, where you sort of “cordon off” the areas you want to stay white, and carefully build everything else up around them. I love working with watercolor, but it takes years and years of practice to feel proficient at it, and it’s not a medium that’s forgiving of mistakes.
I find opaque media to be far more freeing, and the look more crisp. (I also like to combine acrylic ink with watercolor in the same painting—the best of both worlds!) But what I love best about it is that I don’t have to work from light-to-dark—I can go in reverse! Many of the mid-century illustrators I admire (Mary Blair, Eyvind Earle, Walt Peregoy, Ralph Hulett, etc.) painted with opaque media, so I looked at a lot of landscape paintings done for animation backgrounds for clues on technique. That’s when I figured it out: dark-to-light, not light-to-dark.
For my alphabet, I started with a black hedge silhouette, and added leaves (above) in increasingly lighter greens and blues. I think by the end there were 9 or 10 layers of paint in the finished lettering.
I was so grateful for the epiphanies Earle and Hulett had given me that suddenly, what I wanted to do with the alphabet became clear: thank-you cards!
To hedge my bets (sorry) I’ve packaged them up both individually and in pretty little box sets of 8. You can find yours in the shop!
You already know I have a thing for absurd, elaborate, apocalypse-resistant desserts. I took an afternoon “off” from my normal studio work to play around with various silly things, and this ended up being the theme.
I think it’s sort of an illustrator’s version of happy hour, I suppose…
My acrylic inks and black paper are getting a lot of use these days. This guy is part of a new series that’ll be leaving the nest in the next few days.
More soon…
The holidays are done, and January is here—and that means it’s time to get back to work.
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready.