Recipes and Art
I recently had the opportunity to work up a poster for an upcoming Ottawa Fringe show. The show is called “Don’t Make Me Zealous” and is written and directed by Matt Minter. For fear of any spoilers, I won’t say much about the plot save for the show is a comedy that examines our relationship to faith and religion. Erudite Theatre asked for a clean layout with a simple image. After a few rounds of revisions, this is the final poster:
The black lamb began a little differently. One of my very first drafts of the poster had a rough line sketch of a lamb, but the lamb looked a little too innocent and not unimpressed enough. I submitted some more refined roughs of the lamb, with more exaggerated facial expressions. The client chose the first sketch below, and I worked it up in a South Park-inspired style, using Erudite’s colours. Something about the second lamb reminds me of Samuel L. Jackson.
I’m very happy with the sketch the client chose and how it integrates into the poster. Don’t Make Me Zealous will be playing at various times during the Fringe festival; it sounds like a fascinating show and I know I will be going. Comments and critiques regarding my designs are always welcome!
Cara
Lately, I’ve been on a pattern-designing kick. I’m helped along by Spoonflower’s addictive weekly contests, which motivate me to add designs to my Spoonflower shop. For any who don’t know, Spoonflower is a site that creates custom fabric from your own designs that you can sell if you order a test swatch. I love it, as I can never really find the print I imagine in a fabric store, an their fabrics are of very high quality. Most recently, I participated in the art deco contest. The fabric entries were limited to a 4-colour palette. I opted for a simple geometric sunburst-inspired design in 4 shades of grey, and was lucky enough to come in at #22 of 279 entries. Prior to that, I entered my blue onomatopoeia ditsy in the Ditsy Prints contest. This year, I’d like to participate in at least one contest per month. The deadlines for February have flown by, so I’m getting my ideas together to participate in 2 contests in March.
I have added all of the above designs to my Spoonflower shop. Some designs have multiple entries to accomodate different scale sizes. If you’re thinking about designing on Spoonflower, I highly recommend it. But it’s tough to stop once you start!
Last year I got a dream commission from the Rideau Valley Roller Girls. They were working on ideas for their press kit, and came up with roller derby paper dolls. Paper dolls are a form of illustration near and dear to me, as any characters I came up with when I was little were swiftly turned into paper dolls. Combine it with roller derby, and I’m all over it!
I created some sketches of dolls in various poses and submitted those. I then worked up some sketches to ink in illustrator. I finalized the dolls as they were, then printed them out to flip and draw fitted uniforms. Each doll has 3 uniforms, one to correspond to each of the RVRG teams – Riot Squad, Vixens, and Slaughter Daughters. I inked each uniform and added the tabs to it, and colour filled the whole thing.
This was perhaps my favourite commissioned work last year; and it really got me enthused to go back to some of my old personal characters and give them full-fledged outfit treatment.
This drawing is some work I did that wound up on the cutting room floor. As I researched my reference, I came to the conclusion that raptors are SCARY. The piercing eyes and the alligator-like jaw, and the weird retractable claw on each of its hind legs…no wonder Spielberg played them to such great effect in Jurassic Park. Though it’s understood now that raptors have feathers, the client wanted the scalier look that I was more familiar with growing up.
I did this drawing first in Col-erase light blue, then in pencil. I scanned it in pieces and set it to grayscale in Photoshop. The reference I used is here.
For the second year running, I helped Pukeko Design decorate Aberdeen Pavilion for the Mayor’s Christmas Celebration on December 10th. Last year, I made several signs for the event – some entrances and exits as well as signs for balloon animals, Mrs. Claus, BeaverTails, and the Snack pavilion. This year, I created several more entrance and exit signs and transformed the balloon animal sign into a train for the new train ride. On the day prior, I helped set up the trees, snow on the pavilions and craft stations to create a magical winter wonderland.
I was thrilled to create more of the signs, as I really enjoy working with traditional media. The signs were 8 feet by 2 feet plywood that I prepped by priming them. For the entrance and exit signs, I then taped off a border and painted a coat of dark green acrylic over the surface. When that was dry, I re-taped the sign leaving the border free, and painted 2 coats of gold around the border. I printed out the letters I needed using Harrington in a large point size, cut them out and traced them onto the sign. I first painted the letters with a mixture of light blue and white, then painted over that with a coat of silver. I used foam and wooden snowflakes as stamps and pressed them randomly over the surface of each sign.
For the train sign, I painted over the balloon dog and sketched in a train with charcoal. I then painted it using a variety of reds, greens, black and gold.
The smoke on the train was added at the last minute at the venue, where I also did touch-ups on last year’s signs. It’s always fun to work on city events; I’m thrilled I got the chance to do so again.
