My niece is a pretty awesome kid. I may be biased, but nevertheless I stand firmly by that statement. Once a month for the whole year of 2012, I'm mailing her some dress-up outfits to help build up a tickle trunk of sorts. The outfits are just pieces I've found at Value Villages here in the city, and then put together in a sort of ready-to-wear ensemble.
And, because I'm slightly nuts, I've made these illustrated cards to go with each outfit. My niece is still pretty young, so I know the chances of her actually understanding all of these references are pretty slim, but hopefully her parents (my brother & sister-in-law) get a kick out of them.
Kid Party!
I really like making things for Mi Casa Theatre. They are an open and extremely creative duo who make great theatre out of Ottawa, Ontario. They commissioned me recently to design and illustrate their new logo (above) and header for their website (below). The menu titles were all hand-drawn to keep with their DIY aesthetic.
Here's a logo design I finished before the holidays but plum forgot to post. The two versions are for two different marketing uses - blue for the t-shirts, orange/red for everything else. The Bellows is a volunteer-run theatre community resource-slash-mixer that hopefully gets going soon. This recent weather is keeping us all inside our dens like grumpy, grumpy badgers!
Sketchbook Project has been mailed!
(Just in case you were worried.) Here are a few more pages from it....
Jillian Tamaki's FAQ Page is fantastic
It seems funny to say that. I mean, her illustrations are brilliant, beautiful, evocative. (I just finished and loved reading Skim, a graphic novel of hers that came out in 2008) But her FAQ page - which is aimed at the inquisitive and eager student who is hungry for the "key" to an illustrator's success - is filled with thoughtful, commonsensical support and advice.
Take this, for example:
Jillian Tamaki's website is here. And her blog is here. Both are great, but on her blog you can see her experimenting with things outside of her usual "style," which is fascinating. Plus you can look at her quilts. (Quilts!)
In other news, I just learned about a (relatively) new and ostensibly fun lecture series here in Toronto called Nerd Nite - tonight's topics are (1) microchips and (2) how America's history was influenced by bars. It could be promising...? Anyone here in Toronto want to come with?
Take this, for example:
It is well worth reading.What does it take for a young illustrator to be successful today?
There are 2 main things, I think.The first is my blunt opinion: you have to be good. Don't waste your time if you don't have the talent and/or motivation. No amount of promos, websites, mailers, new items in your portfolio will do you any good if the work is not up to snuff.That said. You don’t need to be the Second Coming of illustration. You just have to be able to make something someone can use. Many people are tripped up by never putting their work out into the world because they are crippled by fear. Which doesn’t make sense because if you thought your chances of success were low before, they are most definitely ZERO now. But I suppose that’s the point. You can’t really “fail” if you never try… that’s a very common attitude.
Jillian Tamaki's website is here. And her blog is here. Both are great, but on her blog you can see her experimenting with things outside of her usual "style," which is fascinating. Plus you can look at her quilts. (Quilts!)
In other news, I just learned about a (relatively) new and ostensibly fun lecture series here in Toronto called Nerd Nite - tonight's topics are (1) microchips and (2) how America's history was influenced by bars. It could be promising...? Anyone here in Toronto want to come with?
Whimsical Illusion
I saw this post on Colossal and just loved it. (Though to be entirely honest it took a few minutes for me to realize exactly what I was looking at.) This is street art meets optical illusion - and I'm heartily for anything that helps adults feel like kids again - even if just for a moment.
This is in Paris (but of course) as part of an exhibition called In_Perceptions at Le 104.
Colossal has a wealth of beautiful images. Go look at them. Go!
Sketchbook Project Mail-by Date Draws Near...
Yep, it's that time of year again, the Sketchbook Project's "you must have your sketchbook postmarked by this date in order for it to be included in our library" date. It's a few days away, and I've only got a few pages left to fill on my theme this year: Travel With Me.
Some may remember my submission last year. I thumbed through my old sketchbook just the other day (online! Because the Brooklyn Art Library is cool like that and every sketchbook has been digitized and uploaded and browseable) and I though, well, huh. It's so....monochromatic. Why oh why did I only draw in pencil?
So, this year, I'm breaking out the watercolours. I'm getting the pages sopping wet with colour. And I'm having a whole paintbox full of fun on these pages. And it is awesome.
(Also, I've already signed up for the 2012 Sketchbook Project Limited Edition - you know, the one where some of your sketchbook will be included in an art book they're creating. No big deal.)
Craft beer + good design = yes, please
This website is great. It's for (if you can't tell already) the Austin Beerworks brewery, from the creative peeps behind the fantastic Helms Workshop and Source. It's clean, it's colourful, and the brewmasters' personalities shine through. You especially should see the "How Beer is Made" info-graphic that references unicorns and narwhals. (Really!).
Dear Austin Beerworks, will you please start delivering to Canada? New website!
I am thrilled to finally launch my new professional website: www.kinnonelliott.com It's been a long time coming - but in a way I don't think I could have done it any earlier. I was still working on finding a coherent, consistent style, and amassing a portfolio of work that I was really proud to showcase. And, slowly, it's coming together. (This quote rings truer and truer each day.)
This website is just the beginning for this new year: I also plan on leaving theatre behind. I've given myself one year after my final contract, which ends in April 2012. And after that...? We'll just have to see....
Happy Holidays
Over the holidays I went to visit family and old friends in Ottawa, and had a really wonderful time. And one afternoon, one of those good, old friends (yes, we're old now) and I took four hours out of our jam-packed holiday schedules to make melted snowman cookies.
Sugar cookie base, royal icing, chocolate chips, microwaved marshmallows, coloured icing noses, faces, arms. Et voila.
Easy as...melted snow? Not quite. Did I mention that it took us four hours?
Mid-stage melted snowmen.
We thought we were really clever to mix the icing for the eyes/arms right in the ziplock bag, but it took us a lot longer than we thought it would.
But, in the end, we were happy with the results. My brother gave the sugar cookie base an "A +" and my 3-year old niece went nuts for the marshmallow head. Actually, that's all she ate off of the cookie. Ah, well.
This is some serious face application.
Happy Holidays!
Custom holiday cards for two very special clients
Making custom cards has got to be one of my favourite things to do, and so it was really fun to work on this commission for the holidays. The clients (full disclosure: my parents) themselves are avid kayak enthusiasts, so it just seemed to fit. (However, when I suggested "Merry Kayakmas" for the inside, apparently my dad made a face. Weird, right? Right?? So, they remain blank.) These were done with the same digital collage technique as most of my illustrations, but since all of the textures have been reduced to a very small size, in some cases I think it looks almost like they've been painted. It's a neat effect, I think.
December Desktop
I know I skipped November (by accident, I promise!) so here's an extra-magical one for December.
New Holiday Cards for sale
I'm working in Winnipeg on a show here at the Manitoba Theatre Centre, and the city just had its first snowfall a few days ago. Okay, perhaps "snowdusting" would be more accurate, but still... I can see several rooftops from my hotel room that are still sporting snow like a layer of icing sugar. Perhaps it was this wintry weather that inspired me, because I just finished working on these new holiday cards and am happy to share them here with you! As with last year's cards, these are available in two sizes (4" x 6" and 5" x 7") and are fully customizable. The cards say "Happy Holidays" on the inside, but you could personalize them even further if you wished. Get them here at my Zazzle store!
Science can be beautiful
Certainly Michael Chrisman's photograph of the Royal Ontario Museum's new powder diffractometer is. Apparently this machine used to see inside the atomic structures of crystals. Yup.
Read the whole Torontoist article about the ROM's Collections and Research Building (not the crystal) here.
Michael Chrisman's website has more beautiful images of empty rooms and places, if you're into that sort of thing. (I am).
Stacy & Tim's Wedding Invitations
Hungry Hungry Header!
I am so excited to share this blog header that I just finished designing and illustrating for my friend Hilary. Her blog, Hungry Hungry Hilly, is a really enjoyable collection of new recipes she's tried at home (and most often tweaked - Hilary has been a low-G.I. devotee for a few years now) and restaurants she's tried here in Toronto or on vacation (check out her New York and St. John's, Newfoundland posts). For the header, Hilary wanted it to reflect the fact that she is no self-appointed "amateur gourmet" or food snob, but simply a big fan of cooking and eating FOOD. And also that she has a quirky one-eyed cat named Mr. Leo.
For the caricature, I traced a pencil sketch that I did of Hilary and Mr. Leo with a thin, black marker. I scanned the drawing into Photoshop to clean it and adjusted the contrast so that it would trace much more easily into Illustrator (make those whites whiter and blacks blacker!) Using the Live Trace function, I converted the jpeg into a vector drawing, and I decided to keep the sketchiness quality of the drawing by pushing up the threshold quite high (this meant, though, that I had a lot of cleaning up of jagged edges once the trace was done). I coloured the drawing in Illustrator, and added the scanned decorative paper in the background. The font is Ostrich Sans.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)