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A Fantasy Adventure With My Niece

Last spring, my niece was given an assignment – to send a flat version of herself to someone who lives in a different place. The person who received it would take photos and journal their adventures together and send them back for presenting to the class.

 

While I certainly took her around Saint Paul and the greater metro area, I also couldn’t let a chance like this go to waste by NOT Photoshopping us somewhere crazy and wild so she could share with the class. I took a photo of her flat drawing/photo that she sent along, took a goofy photo of me, and comped it together in a crazy fantasy illustration I found online. Looks like she beat me up the cliff, but I might have been slowed down by the crazy view!

Trying SkillShare

I’ve wanted to try and expand my horizons and diversify my skills when it comes to design and I knew I couldn’t do it alone. So, I’ve decided to give SkillShare a try. SkillShare is a service where thousands of experts teach you almost anything under the sun – from motion graphics to sewing to, well, probably anything you can think of! So, I’m focusing on graphic design for now.

My first lesson was on fundamentals of design, layout, and using grids to direct the flow of design. Below are a few two page spreads that I assembled using what I learned through those lessons. They aren’t totally refined, but it was good to try something new and just get it out there.

Sticker Design Prompt

For a recent job application, I was asked to design stickers based off of two promts: “Thank you for making my party magical” and “Best Day Ever”. I put together a handful of different ideas using the required copy, some art assets I was given, and the option of making/creating my own assets to express the prompt. I had a lot of fun designing these which was a different experience than my recent works like character illustration and award design.

Design and Sublimation

Here are a couple of new items I worked on today that I thought would be really neat to show.

 

The first image was created for an award order with a quick turnaround time where we couldn’t get in a prefab plaque plate with a similar image and design so I was tasked with recreating the design and making our own plates. Stock photo searching and blending in to the black background for some dynamic lighting made short work of this task and it transferred to the steel plate like a charm.

 

The second is a plaque award where I got to design the piece from scratch. The client didn’t have a solid idea and wanted to see what we could do. Taking inspiration from a couple of items we had in our catalog I went all in and made something fun and on-brand for the team. This was also one of the few times I got to do everything myself – design, printing, sublimating, and mounting.

Zootopia-inspired Doodle

I was looking through a Zootopia art book and seeing all the little 2D sketches the animation team was going through, instructions on how to draw bodies and such and I wanted to give it a go myself. With lots of fun, smooth, curved lines it turned out drawing in this style was almost as entertaining as the movie itself. So, here’s a comic-book fox who can’t put down his phone.

Hijabi Hero

I was itching to do something fun and new in an illustration and, being a white guy, I generally stick to my defaults as an artist. So, I want to start branching out by drawing and designing characters who aren’t that sort of ‘default’ that people expect. And the result was this very neat and heroic Muslim woman sporting a very pretty almost lilac hijab.