Recipes and Art
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.
It’s been a solid 2 months of derby-related work for me with the launch of Roller Derby Season. I had the privelege of designing the poster for the Rideau Valley Roller Girls‘ Inner-League Bout, which just took place on May 28th. It was an exciting, no-holds-barred match as the league was mixed up into two teams, white vs. black. The black team took the first half, but in the second half the white team clobbered the competition.
I submitted 3 initial concepts to the league, and when they chose their concept, worked up a cleaner rough. I scanned this and set to inking in Illustrator using the pen tool. The gallery below shows the evolution into the final image. I had initially submitted a final greyscale illustration, using red for the lips and red for the text bars, while my full colour version used a burgundy. The Roller Girls opted to use the red for the bars in the full-colour poster, which I love. I find the little pops of the same red throughout really eye-catching.
This is the Cheeky Monkey. She was created back in August as a corporate mascot for Cheeky Monkey Cosmetics, a 3-Free nail polish line with great colours. You can find them at www.cheekymonkeycosmetics.com as well as on their facebook page. After preliminary sketches, she was drawn up in Illustrator. That’s a tiny tattoo of a bicycle on her bum – she was a lot of fun to do and the client was great to work for.
