Lilla Rogers' Bootcamp... gone cuckoo!!

Month one in Lilla Rogers' Bootcamp has come and gone, along with February, so I thought I'd give you a quick recap! First of all, I wasn't sure at first whether or not to sign up for this course, but somehow I knew that once I started seeing all the beautiful pieces coming in, I knew I would want to get in on the action. I work better with a brief anyway, and bootcamp is a more affordable option to Lilla's classes. If you have been on the fence about taking one of her MATS classes, this is a good opportunity to get your feet wet. The schedule is much more spread out, with a week for the mini assignment and then 2 weeks more to develop the final and upload it on the gallery on her studio site. In MATS, you have less than a week to do the same thing, so time seemed like a luxury.

Being a natural born procrastinator, no surprise I abused the time frame and essentially did it in a week, but somehow, it seemed far less stressful than MATS. I actually really liked the subject matter of cuckoo clocks! Being a collector of all things cute, german and wooden (a.k.a. smokers, wendt & kuhn flower children, angels and various other bavarian kitsch) , it appealed to me. We had a cuckoo clock in my house growing up. Can't imagine having one now with the chiming and cuckooing in the half hour, but you do get used to it. 

here's a little peek at my WIP in illustrator. I did everything in it.

The challenge came in when Lilla defined the end piece as a cell phone case. Cuckoo clocks are loaded with rich details, so it was hard to imagine how it would all translate well down to a such a small format. I played around with some different ideas, like turning it into a skyscraper type condo bird house, not unlike the ones you can buy for purple martins, or possibly making a city scape out of different clocks/houses, but in the end, I decided to focus on the birds. My thinking was that it might be a good way to fill the vertical space of a phone case and besides, birds are cute and fun to draw. As far as style, I went for a symmetrical folkloric look, kind of like the party paper assignment at the end of MATS B. What can I say, I'm a sucker for symmetry ;) It was fun to try to give some of them a little personality. 

The gallery of over 400 cuckoo cell phone cases is amazing. A ton of great pieces, so if you have the time, check it out here.  Enjoy!!

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!!