Wintery Goodness

We are on Snow Day #2 here in Abilene going on #3 and I'm loving these wintery illustrations. You can find them here.

I hope you stay warm and avoid cabin fever!

The Holidays Are Here!

Hello friends!

I'm back! After a totally wonderful break, I'm really having a hard time getting back into the swing of things. Enjoying the delight of friends, family, food and relaxation makes school not sound so fun at all. The woes of a college student eh? Today, I'm going to share with you a fun illustration I did for a friend's Christmas party! She came up with the concept and I just love it! It came out as a pretty fun stache.

Christmas has been on my mind all day! I hope your holiday season started off right.

Hand Drawn Type

Today while looking for some project inspiration, I stumbled over the work of Kristofer Delaney. He is a designer/illustrator and on his portfolio he has a whole section for his hand drawn type. This is an ability that I have recently been envying in my own work and practicing on sticky notes when I'm bored. Enough talk, let's look at some of his stuff!

This last one is my favorite. All the detail is just great and communicates the message so well! Have a happy Monday readers!

Let's Talk Color: 1st Edition

I love this color combination by artist Blake Suárez. It's bright and happy, but not over the top. What a fun take on a lion as well. I also love that it's Bruno Mars. I mean really who doesn't love his songs?

I found this here.

A Room Full of Texture

I stumbled over these fun illustrations of textured colorful rooms by Ann Toebbe. They are just fun and so detailed. Enjoy!

I found this here.

How to Make a Pie!

I recently finished a fun (but a bit tedious) How To project in one of my classes! It was fun to explore a simpler and solely computer based style of illustration. Learning what worked and what didn't was a challenge, but I feel like it came out pretty good! Have a look, let me know what you think! Do you see something that you love or even hate? I would love to hear some feedback from my readers.

Here is the full poster, it's full size is 18" x 24" If you click on it you can see the full size with more detail:

 Here are a few detail photos:

 

If you try out the recipe, let me know how it comes out!

Jessica Hische

Thanks to Friends of Type, I think I found one of my favorite designers! Jessica Hische does beautiful design, illustration and typography. I just clicked and clicked through her site and want to click more but I feel that I should probably do some of my own design homework (eek)! Anyways, here are a few of my favorite things that I just pulled from her site.

 I just love the detail in this piece:

 The colors in this sticker set are basically awesome:

If I could get my aunt's hair salon logo to look this awesome, life would be good:

Here is a beautifully detailed typeface she designed:

And here is a very pretty holiday themed poster, I'm excited for Christmas already:

The Exquisite Book

This has been floating around the blog world quite a bit. It took me seeing it on about 3 different blogs to actually investigate what it is and I'm glad I did! It's a book based on a Surrealist game (I'm just shocked to even hear myself talking about the Surrealists) called the Exquisite Corpse. Basically they asked 100 artists to participate in the making of this book. They gave the first artist a prompt and they drew, the next artist only looked at the page right before his/hers and drew the next scene, each scene shares a horizon line and that's what ties each chapter together! I want this on my book shelf one day. Here are some images and a video promoting it!

 

The Exquisite Book from ALSO on Vimeo.

Muddy

For my Digital Illustration class, we were asked to respond to whatever prompt a website called "Illustration Friday" sent us. We were free to do whatever we wanted as long as it responded to the prompt which was "muddy." Well, I struggled a lot at first to become really committed to any idea, nothing was really exciting me, until this one! Here it is a Photoshop illustration of something muddy! I guess I will call it "The Sty"

Let me know what you think!

Forgive the size, this is "large" and it's actually kind of small, and "Extra Large" is waaay to big. I need a happy medium here.

Alternate Headers

Another Digital Illustration assignment.

Dan asked us to make a blog (which I had done already) and make a custom header (which I also did). Soooo here are some alternates he asked us to do!

  

Unbordered Uncolored.

  

Unbordered but colored. 

  

Border, with no color.

  

Hmm now that I post this, I'm not wild for it, but oh well. Border with color, the choices are endless here though.

I probably won't use any of these for a while, but hey now I've got them for the future!

Modern Saint

This was an assignment in my Digital Illustration class. We were asked to pick a saint from the Roman Catholic church and create a modern portrait of our saint using monoprint techniques, which we then scanned and colored digitally.

I chose St. Anthony of Padua. He is the patron saint of lost articles. I chose him because my sweet grandmother always brags on this saint when she finds something she's lost. I'm not sure how she would feel about this portrayal though!

 

Good old St. Anthony. Just for kicks, here's the prayer you would pray to St. Anthony had you lost something you desperately need to find.

"Saint Anthony, perfect imitator of Jesus, who received from God the special power of restoring lost things, grant that I may find {mention your petition} which has been lost. As least restore to me peace and tranquility of mind, the loss of which has afflicted me even more than my material loss. To this favor I ask another of you: that I may always remain in possession of the true good that is God.Let me rather lose all things than lose God, my supreme good. Let me never suffer the loss of my greatest treasure, eternal life with God. Amen. "

Until next time!