Merry Pigmas!

This year I finally did what I put off last year: I designed my own holiday cards! I got them printed through Overnight Prints. The company did a very nice job with the printing and got them to me fairly quickly. The only complaint I have in dealing with them is that they didn't put the cards or envelopes in any kind of wrapping within the shipment box (a bit of condensation got in during shipping, ruining some of the envelopes).


I want to take the time to wish you all (and by "all" I mean my whole 4 readers) a very happy holidays. No matter what you celebrate, or if you really celebrate at all, this is a very special time of year, and I hope you take a moment to spend some time with your loved ones. After all, it's not about getting gifts, it's about spending time with the ones you love!

Pug Power!

This is a card I made for one of my friends that's been up in New York doing an internship. He's a fan of pugs...in case you couldn't figure that out.

They mostly come out at night. Mostly...

Here is my final project for my Advertising class (I can't believe we're done with another quarter already! Graduation looms ever nearer...). We were required to design a postage stamp with horror movies being the theme (we also had to do the piece in black and white). I decided to take a break from my mixed media watercolor technique and go back to one of my other favorite media...acrylics!


(And yes, I am aware that the subject line quote actually comes from the sequel.)

Oatland Island Wildlife Center poster

For Advertising our class designed a poster for a local (and wonderful!) wildlife center. Here's the finished art, alone as well as put in the center's poster template.

I'm gettin' published!

So I'm in a course called "Getting Published" this quarter where I, gasp!, try and get my work published in magazines. Our glorious professor has gets different articles requiring illustrations from various magazines, and everyone in the class (there are only 10 of us) submit a sketch to the art director. The art director decides which visual idea would best fit the article in question and then that student finishes the art and sends it along. Sometimes the AD likes a couple of sketches and wants finishes of of the various ones, either deciding which of the finished art works best, or publishing all of the finished works.

We've had plenty of different assigned articles in the class so far, and I was getting a bit antsy as I hadn't been picked for any of them yet. That was until last week. I had done a sketch for an article for What's Up, Annapolis? magazine called "The Changing Scene of Mapping Our Genes", and the AD liked it. So...I'm gettin' published! Above is the sketch of the proposed art and below is the finished artwork for comparison.

Art on the Can

Here's the finished hotels.com art on the paint can.


In retrospect I wish the top label of the can had printed darker. The globe's ocean looks more creamy rather than "coffee-y". If I had a redo I'd make it the same color as the background on the can art.

It's been a while since my last post...and it's because I'm keeping busy! Here is my latest work from my Advertising Illustration class...


The assignment was to do a wrap around label for a paint canister for Hotels.com, meant to be given to frequent travelers (the can would supposedly hold amenities...travel shampoo, mouthwash, etc.). You needed to incorporate countries that were travel destinations. I decided to incorporate animals native to the different countries wearing costumes associated with the cultures of those countries. You have a Chinese ribbon-dancing koi, a South African Zulu elephant, a belly dancing Indian peacock, and a German lederhosen-clad pig. Now, pigs aren't native to Germany, per se, but I read that they were considered symbols of good luck there. And honestly, in my world any excuse to draw a pig is a good one!

Pig prints

So a perk of working in the kids' area of an art museum is getting to partake in the arts and crafts activities they have going on every first Saturday of the month. Yesterday they had printmaking, so...


...I made some pig prints. And yes, that's pink newspaper.

New year, new art, new blog!

I suppose there's nothing like starting your senior year of college off like a new blog...right? Right?! I'm hoping it is, anyway. I decided to make the grand switch from LiveJournal to Blogger in hopes of starting my move from illustration student to illustration professional. I don't know how that will work out, but we'll keep our fingers crossed, eh? In the meantime, I should probably post some new work...


This is the first project I've completed for my Advertising Illustration class. We were supposed to pick a wine label (ANY label) and redesign it. I chose Thierry & Guy's Fat Bastard because, really, how many times can you legitimately use a curse word in an assignment? There were also hippos involved. How can you say no to that? Anyway, I'm not particularly fond of the lower text placement, but I couldn't really think of any better alternatives. The art I'm pleased with, though. It's a combination of pen & ink, watercolor, coffee, charcoal pencil, and aging varnish. I'll be placing the label on an actual wine bottle. If I can get a decent picture I'll be posting that, as well.