All posts in Illustration

In Design Competitions this quarter, each student was asked to respond to briefs for the One Show Young Ones and D&AD Student Awards. For the unfamiliar, these are huge worldwide competitions that celebrate the very best work in advertising and design. The One Club was founded in New York City and D&AD (Design & Art Direction) in London.

One of the One Show briefs challenged us to promote the horrors of the thoroughbred horse racing industry for Peta. To be honest, I didn’t know much about horse racing before working on this and I felt like it might be hard to dive in and get excited about this project. I’m not really a huge fan of horses; I think they are beautiful and I like looking at them, but having being thrown from one as a little girl, I’m kind of scared of their power. But this brief was a game changer for me. It ignited my interest in learning about mass meat production, research that has since dissolved any personal desire to eat meat ever again.

Peta expertly describes the horse racing industry in the brief:

Behind the romanticized façade of thoroughbred horse racing is a world of injuries, drug abuse, gruesome breakdowns and slaughter. Racehorses weigh more than 1,000 pounds and are supported by ankles the size of a human’s. They are whipped and forced to run on tracks that are often made of hard packed dirt at speeds of more than 30 miles per hour while carrying people on their backs. They are pumped full of drugs intended to mask pain, so that they keep running long after their stressed or injured bodies would tell them to stop. When they stop winning races or become injured, usually when they’re still very young—often not even physically mature yet—few racehorses are retired to pastures, because owners don’t want to pay for a horse that doesn’t bring in any money. Since the last horse slaughterhouse in the U.S. closed several years ago, tens of thousands of horses are now shipped to slaughterhouses in Canada, Mexico, or Japan, where they are turned into dog food and glue. Their flesh is then exported to countries such as France and Japan, where it is considered a delicacy.

Another image I remember is that of a racehorse being shot between the eyes with a bolt gun. It often takes several shots through the brain to kill the animal. This is a disgusting way to end a life.

Haley Gardner (you’re familiar by now?) and I worked on an ambient advertising campaign to publicize such horrors. Horse racing uses horses for entertainment, making the animals a spectacle for excited onlookers. Art has historically done the same thing, showcasing the strength of these animals through painting and sculpture. The streets of the world are dotted with sculptures of strong animals, usually with their heroic human counterpart, and paintings of horses are hung in private and public galleries alike. This kind of art is so prevalent that it is no longer surprising or unusual.

We wanted to leverage art as a medium in which to show the duplicity of the horse racing industry. In Haley’s words, “these ambient art installations mirror the way horse racing operates; from afar, it’s an enjoyable and pleasant scene, much like sculptures and paintings. But upon further inspection, what is thought to be a beautiful display is actually a disturbing example of the brutality the horse racing industry works hard to hide.”

Life-sized sculptures will be placed in public areas where passersby will be able to see exactly how two-faced the horse racing industry is. On one side, a beautiful, strong and healthy horse. On the other, its raw flesh and battered body exposes the brutal nature of a racehorse’s career.

Painted portraits of mutilated horses will be placed at bus stops and subway areas around cities. The injuries, like this gash in an otherwise healthy horse, are aimed to grab attention and provoke the viewer to learn more about the cruelty of the racing industry.

I illustrated the horse using colored pencils and scanned a hunk of ribeye for the meat. And the blood is real! (No it’s not. But that would’ve been cool.)

Haley smartly connected our campaign to Oscar Wilde’s comment that “life imitates art far more than art imitating life.” In this case, the opposite is true.

This was such a fun project.

The final project in my packaging class was to design interesting packaging for a boring product. Each student was assigned an everyday, boring or cheap product, a country of inspiration and a target age and gender. I was assigned pink foam hair rollers, India and 6-8 year old girls. This was actually a pretty fantastic combination of things. India is rich with inspiration, colors, stories, patterns and shapes. Having already designed two packaging projects for men (Gallus Reserve and another I haven’t posted yet), I was so grateful for my assigned target and the opportunity to use feminine colors, an excess of pattern and glitter! With my niece and two young cousins on my mind, I started my research.

When I was reading about Hinduism, I came across a story of Durga, a goddess created to destroy a ferocious monster. She is depicted as having anything from 8 to 18 arms, each wielding a different weapon to fight evil. I liked this story and thought it’d be interesting to reshape it for this project. I also wanted to design something more interesting than a standard box. Curlers are almost always stacked on top of one another and packaged in a box and I thought something more playful would appeal to young girls.

Combat hair demons like frizz, tangles or stringy hair with Kumari Kurls! Kumari’s weapons of beauty are sure to turn your tangles into beautiful curls!

I illustrated Kumari for the front so that her many arms would be holding her weapons, the curlers, that show through the front’s acetate window. On the back, Kumari is riding her sidekick, Eshani the elephant! I created a paisley pattern for the grass, a swirly pattern for the sky background and a scalloped pattern for the side of the box. The shape of the box is inspired by Indian architecture and I installed a zipper so that the box can be opened and repurposed as a bag for art or school supplies or sleepover materials!

Haley came through with another fantastic story for the back of the package and instructions for the insert panel that explains how the bag can be reused.

Legend has it that Kumari, Goddess of Curl, once lived in a land known for its tangled tresses and unmanageable frizz. At the cries of her tousled townspeople, she decided to take matters into her many hands! With Eshani the elephant by her side, Kumari took to battle, using her special tools to conquer the hair demons that were destroying her people! Bad hair was defeated and all was right in the village again.

Kumari’s legacy lives on through Kumari Kurls, a special collection of beauty tools designed to curl any type of hair. Use this set of rollers to give your hair bouncy curls, too!

I learned a lot during the construction of this bag. Creating a scalloped top is maddening. Installing a zipper in a bag made of chipboard and paper is challenging. Attempting to create a seamless paisley pattern when it is unnecessary is silly. And I have a serious contact allergy to superglue. Lessons learned.

Another thanks to Tiffany Hudgins for shooting this for me!

Oh man. I do love John Mayer.

People are very hot or cold about John Mayer, and I understand. He’s got a quite a mouth on him and is known for some bizarre behavior, tendencies and preferences. Weirdness aside, I love his music and always have. “No Such Thing,” the song that put Mr. Mayer on the map, became popular during my freshman year of high school. This is going to sound ridiculous, but it’s true: I remember the first time I heard this song. I was in the shower, just grooving to my shower radio, when the radio fella said the upcoming song was by newbie John Mayer. One of my lifelong friends is named John Meyer, so my ears opened! I’m telling you. It was love at first listen.

In the eleven years since, I’ve been to countless concerts, made the baby John logo into screen printed t-shirts for my friends, been gifted a life size cut out of the guy, etc. When Heavier Things was released in 2003, Andrew snuck over to my high school in the middle of the school day and put it under the driver’s side tire. Love in more ways than one.

This is serious.

So, when I read that a project for my illustration class was to design a concert poster, my subject matter was hardly a question. Our instructor is an incredibly talented illustrator who operates Methane Studios, the studio behind the design posters for Dave Matthews Band and some for Phish, Ray LaMontagne, St. Vincent and others. All of their posters are screen printed and have this wonderful texture and richness. He asked us to design a 3-color poster that could, if desired, be screen printed. Colors can be layered with screen printing, so there was some opportunity for a fourth color.

I listened to John’s albums on repeat for several days and kept a list of inspiring lyrics to start generating some concepts for my poster. Lyrics like “say what you need to say,” “rock candy’s melting only diamonds now remain,” “where someone’s last goodbye blends in with someone’s sigh,” “too many corners in my mind.” The list was extensive. In the end, the concept I decided to execute was inspired by “Neon,” a song from John’s first (and second, actually) album and one he wrote about Atlanta. I think he’s played this song at every show I’ve attended. I’ve always interpreted the song to be about female independence, like a wild girl exploring in her younger years. I was especially inspired by the lines “she’s slipping through my hands,” and “a trail of ruby red and diamond white.”

The handful of gemstones slipping through the hands and morphing into fish is a metaphor for this wild woman. A lot of band posters have the type set at the bottom or somewhere easy to read, which makes complete sense for legibility. I played around with the text in a lot of places, but it felt so separate when it was floating on its own or put at the bottom of the illustration. I decided to incorporate it into the fins and did some hand drawn typography that feels a bit like fin texture or an extension of the big fish itself. This was originally orange, but my panel thought that the type didn’t stand out enough, so I’ve changed it to yellow.

I used the information from a special concert I went to a week after I moved to Atlanta. The day before his scheduled concert at a large venue in Atlanta, John Mayer tweeted at 10:30pm that he would be playing an unannounced show at Eddie’s Attic, the small local venue where he got his start, WITHIN THE HOUR! Andrew and I were in the car within five minutes and were two of the fortunate ~100 people to attend that show. It was amazing. I was speechless. Anyway, the tour that he was playing at that time was one to showcase his latest album, Battle Studies, so I used the Battle Studies logo on the locket in the fish’s mouth. I also left the line a bit rough so the poster still has a handmade and personal feel.

This was such a fun project. I love illustration. I love John Mayer. I love diamonds and marine life! There we go.

The final project for my type class last quarter was to use copy from Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style to experiment with page and text layout. The subject matter was entirely flexible, so I decided to illustrate and design a book about extinct animals. Fake ones. Fun stuff.

I wanted the illustrations to feel like animals, not monsters, and the sketching process was quite long. My friend Christopher has this incredible ability to manipulate animals and morph them into these crazy, fantastical creatures. It was hard for me though, and as I completed them, I hung the sheets around our living room so I could always be looking at and considering how to improve them. At one point, the A/C repairman came by, looked at the drawings and said, “Huh, I’ve never seen animals like that before.” And I smiled.

I initially had plans to do cut paper and diecuts galore for this project, but that idea got overruled pretty quickly in favor of something simpler, yet hopefully still interesting. I took each animal from pencil to pen, pen to vector, vector to color, color to texture.

This little fella is a Sniggari. I named all of the animals and came up with some basic information about each one: date of extinction, scientific name, approximate length, height and weight, when and where the bones were discovered. I used Bringhurst’s copy for the body, but generated captions for each of the animals. Here are a couple of my favs.

So I have a bit of a thing for muted colors, but I tried to do something a little different here since the subject matter is playful and imagined. I called the book Creatures Lost. I wanted the cover to be pretty fun to match the bright content, so I chose a lime alligator skin textured paper and inlaid yellow acetate for the type. The type on the title page is blue, so when the book is closed, the yellow acetate and blue title page type create the same lime of the cover stock. It’s a little nod to discovery that was a bit of a headache to craft!

You can check out the other animals and flip through the entire book here. Issuu makes showcasing publications online such a pleasure.

P.S. I’m still going to create cut paper versions of a few of these at some point. And possibly write real copy. Or get a copywriter to write real copy. TBD. I’m also making the penned illustrations into a coloring book for my niece and nephews. Will post a .pdf when I work that out.

Fonts Used: Franklin Gothic (Miss White, I’m lookin’ at you), Bucky