Galapagos Stamp

Did another piece for LRB yesterday. This one is a Galapagos Stamp

I'm pretty happy with this piece for a couple of reasons. 1. I think it looks great for a single color print, and 2. It took me 5 hours to make.

I've been dedicated to learning more about Illustrator and while I haven't learned how to achieve certain looks that I was incapable of achieving before, I have become smarter and faster in my workflow, using pathfinder options and clipping masks to reduce hand editing and, what I used to do, moving the work into Photoshop to apply textures. So, using compound shapes and global colors, the execution phase of my design work has sped up dramatically. Yay me.

The color is based on Didi's colorway, which itself is based on the color in this picture she took last year in the Galapagos:

It's a beautiful but unusual considering the things I think of when I think of the Galapagos. I think of reds, blacks, and whites for the bones of animals, the magma rock, and the spots on the Marine Iguanas. I think of Blue-Footed Boobies, and Galapagos Tortoises.

Anyway, it worked out well!

Yarn-Bombing Fairy

A recent commission asked for a piece of fairy tale art involving yarn. My idea was to have this fairy do some yarn-bombing in an enchanted forest and this painting is the result.

First of all, this piece is heavily indebted to the incredible illustrator Virginia Frances Sterrett. She did 3 books in the early 20th century before she died and they're all masterpieces. Since I don't typically do this type of art, I looked to her paintings for inspiration and stylistic cues. I also turned to more familiar fairy tale art from Disney cartoons like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. I combined watercolor backgrounds with opaque color-pencil characters and foreground elements to approximate the cel-based animation Disney used to use. Cel-animation is the style in which moving parts of the animation are painted on transparencies which are placed on top of static backgrounds. Time constraints and the opaque medium used on the transparencies create an effect whereby the backgrounds are much more detailed while the moving elements are done more simply and more quickly.

My favorite part.

Lessons Learned & Relearned

Overall I think that the piece is successful, but I consider it an experiment; I am definitely happy with the execution but I think there are a couple of changes I would make to the original layout and overall harmony of the individual elements if I were to do future, similar, pieces. I think the issue was that I was so concerned with executing the project correctly that I took less time designing it.

Doing this project refocused my attention on the importance of color schemes as the unifying aspects of a lot of art. Because the style I chose necessitates two mediums -- watercolor and colored pencil -- that don't really mix together I relied on a rigorous color scheme to bond it all together. My main colors where Naples Yellow, Cobalt Green, and French Ultramarine.

Finally, this project took much longer than I had anticipated. While extra time spent learning new techniques is invaluable rather than problematic, I spent a lot of time on details that won't really show up in the smaller printing size of the piece. Sadly, these are my favorite parts of the painting. The problem arose when I chose to paint at triple the required size, I think. I did this partially for portfolio reasons and partially because I didn't want to end up with any image resolution problems, and also because my recently upgraded computer is capable of handling that size. I should rethink scale next time to improve my efficiency.

Detail