happy thanksgiving!

Just a quickie for day 23 of my lettering project, but more importantly, I'd like to thank anyone who takes the time to visit my little corner of the cybersphere! Thanks for your interest and support and have a great and happy thanksgiving day! 

40 days of lettering... day 22!

This weeks's creative interviews feature was with Jim Haven, chief creative officer and founder of the ad agency, Creature, based out of Seattle. This quote was a little longer than I realized at first glance. Although I really like the message, it was not something that leant itself to an obvious image, like some that I have done in the past.  It took a little more thought on my part, to try to adapt the lettering somehow to the overall theme. How do you represent failure as a form of success in contrast to compromise? The word failure itself, brought to mind the fact that it starts with the letter "F," which definitely has a negative school connotation, so I decided to highlight the first letter in regards to a report card. This opened up the possibility of adding a report card image somewhere, in this case, it ended up as a background element. I thought that placing the words as part of steps with failure at the top might reflect a general sense of progression, as a good thing, with failure making it all the way to the top. I squished part of "compromise" to connote its meaning. I would have liked to work in a figure but overall, I'm happy with how it turned out. I think I will try to incorporate more ephemera into these pieces, where I can. I think it adds a nice element to contrast with all the vector.

merry christmas!

Over the weekend, I decided at the last minute to throw together a few entries to the UK Tigerprint "Christmas icons" competition. Tigerprint is actually a UK division of Hallmark. I knew I had some material already on hand to revise slightly and submit. Reduce reuse and recycle, right? ;) Maybe I am just a slow worker, but I was surprised how long it took me to revise and reformat these pieces. Each entry was part of a larger piece from Lilla's class. The format was either 500 x 500 pixels or 500 x 700 pixels. I preferred using the square layout. I had to play around with the girl and boy elves, to make the lettering fit around and/or between those pointy little hats. I liked including pics of my gramma's 1960's plastic snowflakes as a background element. And yes, they actually are pink in real life! I decided to use the cuckoo clock icon I had since one of the suggestions was to use "non-traditional" icons. Maybe it's my German heritage, but I've always liked these and had one in my house growing up. Lastly, the little reindeer riding, lone ranger elf, seemed like a good stand alone piece. Even if you don't get the connection of "Hi Ho," hopefully it is cute enough on its own. 

This is the first time I have ever entered one of these contests and am unsure how it actually works. You can facebook "like" any individual piece, so if you are so inclined, I'd appreciate the click! You have to scroll down the entries to find them and mine are towards the bottom. Thanks!!

40 days of lettering...day 21

Today's piece is a quote from Dan Shepelavy, Executive Creative Director of the Brownstein Group, from a feature over at creative interviews. This quote was a little more lengthy than what I am used to, but I took it as a personal challenge to figure out how to make it mesh! My first thought was to make it fit within the overall shape of a curvacious beer can. That actually might have worked, if it wasn't for the fact that "Kardashian" kept falling right where I was putting the beer can's "waistline," i.e. the narrowest part! Anyway, I had more success once I worked the lettering within the context of a standard can. It's an interesting quote, nonetheless and worth the read to get his take on today's advertising world.

Now on MOYO!

All of the participants in Lilla Rogers MATS course, received a lovely last gift... a six month membership in the online design directory, MOYO! It is a relatively new site, but is quickly gaining popularity in the surface design world as a great resource to find designer/illustrators. If you have a second (and it literally takes just that, I would so appreciate it if you could pop on over there to my page and click on the heart. No account signup necessary, or annoying emails will follow, but the act of liking my profile will give me more visibility on searches. Thanks so much for your time and interest!

40 days of lettering... day 20!

I'm at the halfway point! Ok, so maybe it's been a little over 20 days to get to this point and no doubt, more than another 20 to finish up, but who's counting? ummm, I guess I am, but anyway, it feels good to have gotten this far. 

This was another piece I did for creative interviews from an interview with Daniel Bonner, Global Chief Creative Officer at Razorfish. This was a cool quote to work with in that it instantly conjured up some visuals relating to superheroes and their powers. Initially, I tried to work a cape in here, coming off "super powers," but it just got too big, complicated and generally awkward that I decided to just bag it. I messed around with the line breaks until I got an arrangement that seemed to fit well together and allowed a spot for the fist to come in. Overall, this was a quickie for me in that I finished up in under 2 hours. I was glad I kept it from being too refined and complex. One of my reasons for doing this 40 day project, was to sharpen my skills and speed up my process, so I felt that time-wise at least, this piece was a success.

Lilla Rogers Make Art that Sells... party ware!!

Well, it was the fifth and final week of MATS, that focused on party goods. I never gave this market much thought...who really thinks about disposable paper goods? But I can see the potential for fun design in this area, with all the coordinating table products that are needed, not to mention, gift wrap. 

Our assignment was to create a design for a paper plate and napkin with a Bavarian/Ukranian folkloric theme. When you look at this type of art, there are a lot of florals, which initially, made the brief kind of intimidating to me. There are many artists that specialize in floral/botanicals, but I am surely not one of them. Instead, I tried to take a more figural approach which really ended up looking a bit more storybook. I thought it might be fun to do a cottage and the animals sprang from that. I started out by using some symmetry with the squirrels and trees, but then I remembered how a lot of the little wooden german figurines that I love to collect, often are playing instruments, so I threw in the violins and mandolin. Birds are also a predominant part of this type of art, so I decided to feature a couple of woodpeckers to add some interest to the trees. The girl was a must, of course. Initially, I thought I was going to go with bright colors... kelly green, bright blue, warm red and pink, etc. much like the German pieces I was speaking of earlier, but once I made the grass pink, there was no going back and I ended up with a somewhat limited palette...always good practice for me. And hey, what's wrong with a little pink grass, right?

I must say, I really enjoyed this course. The tight deadlines, great themes and inspiration topped off with being part of a wonderful community of super artists all contribute to the creation of so much incredible artwork by my fellow classmates. I highly recommend it!

40 days of lettering, days 18 and 19!

Almost halfway done!! This past week, I fit in 2 more quotes for creative interviews. Andrew McKechnie is the group creative director for DDB NY and Ron Lim is the creative director at ATTIK. The trophy piece was a bit tricky to try to make the type fit in the shape as well as make it look like it wrapped around it somewhat. I enjoyed including a person alongside the lettering. I think that always makes it more interesting. For the other piece, I tried to focus on the "stay the course" portion of the quote. It made me think of a somewhat nautical theme, so I used that as the focus/theme of the piece in terms of the colors and background graphics.