I took the first Make Art That Sells - A course five years ago. One of the assignments was to make the cover art for Hans Christian Anderson's tale, 'The Snail and the Rose Tree'. Children's book illustration had been my focus since college so I figured I had this one in the bag. However, I was terribly frustrated and didn't even hand in an image that week. I was so disappointed in myself. I think I was doing a lot of comparing myself to the other student's work back then. Many were using Photoshop or Illustrator or both to make beautiful, flat, graphically stunning work and I had no idea how to use the Adobe products ... yet! Now I have embraced my style, learned Ps and Ai although I don't exclusively use them, and found my own voice. So, I went back to that assignment and redid it. I'm not sure this works as cover art but I had much more fun this time!
On my desk
Updates from my desk
New Traditions
This past Christmas as I watched my three adult children and their partners take in traditional items that mean ALOT to me didn’t seem to hit them in the same way. It got me thinking, what will their traditions be? What sorts of things will they collect to refelct this season? Their partners have different traditions of course as well as religious traditions. What imagery will they want to surround themselves with (if any)?
I asked them some questions about this - even asked about the traditional red and green color palette and if that was important to them. Their answers were informative and inspiring to me.
I’ve been developing ideas for Christmas tree toppers for the 25 - 35 audience. They are shaking up our ideas of the old world order and their future trditions and imagery/color palette choices will reflect this.
Here are some of my ideas I’ve been creating with paper maches and acrylic gouache. They are prototypes but the bug will go to my son Parker and the owl to my son Simon. I made my daughter and her husband a felt Santa developed from an illustration I did as part of my 50 figures series.
Dung Beetle - to roll away the crap from the year before and clear the energy for the new year.
Owl - gazing over the family to bring greater connectedness and wisdom
Santa flying over a village to bless the communities around the world - this one is the most in process of the three paper mache tree toppers.
Felt Santa created from my illustration:
Word Daily
An ode to ignored emails…
Does anyone else get emails on a daily that they do not unsubscribe to because they think they’ll get to them at some point but actually rarely do?
For me, one of these is Word Daily. I want to have better vocabulary. I thought I would play with some lettering and spot illustrations/doodles from my sketchbooks for a bit. The lettering is not fussy, just helps me learn the word.
