Kolbjørn Wallpaper: Hand Lettering.

One of my few (possibly only now that I think of it) purely design based pieces. In my Hand Lettering class junior year we had to make a wallpaper layout using the same letter/word/text to create the patterning. The word is Kolbjørn, meaning 'black bear,' and has origins as a boys name in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. I didn't have any particular reason for choosing it other than I thought it was interesting name and it's on the list of potentials if I ever have a son. Or at least a shaggy black dog. 

Galápagos Island Post Card

This projected was completed in Junior Illustration In the summer of 2011. The assignment was to design the front and back of a post card as well as a postage stamp for an exotic place and I chose the Galápagos Islands of the coast of Ecuador. Sea turtles are a favorite animal of mine and the Green Sea turtles native to the Galápagos Islands are sadly on the endangered list. 

Transposition: Open Heart Project

The most recent of my open heart projects, this booklet was for a school assignment that I finished over the summer. It's part educational, part personal story, and done in digital collage. 

There are most likely some spelling and grammar mistakes as there is no spelling and grammar check on Photoshop. I do apologize. 

Update: I have since corrected said spelling and grammar mistakes. 

Concept Art Sketches: Medieval Times

And here be some sketches from class! 

I'm taking Concept Art this semester with the same teacher I took Character Design with last year. We had to create an environment and props and then make the kind of characters who would live there. The story takes place in medieval times and is based loosely on every European folk song where a girl is in love with a man of a lower social status but is being forced to marry a wealthy lord by her father. Usually they end with the young lovers either dying of grief or committing some form of ritual suicide, but I think I'll have mine do the next logical thing and run away. It's the dark ages, they didn't have BOLO's or DNA testing, totally doable. 

There was a lot of references involved and I'm still working on it. 

Some Character Design.

These pieces are from Junior year. 

The first is from my Advanced Character Design class, which really pushed me to explore different illustration styles and character types. My personal style still leans towards the  realistic side but I did find it extremely helpful and have been continuing to experiment since then with proportions and figures. The two characters are from a 'revamped' version of Little Red Riding Hood where a girl from an American Indian tribe must rescue her Grandmother from a skin walker. With the help of a boy from a group of Norse sailors, who has witnessed the creature lurking around their encampment, the two embark on a journey to defeat the skin walker and save their respective families. 

The costumes are inspired by a combination of Iroquois/Maori for the girl and Scandinavian/Scottish for the boy. Despite there being a huge language barrier between characters to overcome should this story to pan out in the long run, I will probably continue researching to develop it's basis in the historical drama of two distant cultures that had a short lived but interesting time together. 

The next two are character design pieces from Advanced Book Illustration. I won't get into as much detail on this one, suffice to say it's a very muddled story, but I will say that it was part of my branching out process in style. The original sketches of the little guy with a fish on his head were also from Advanced Concept Art and I liked him so much, I decided to build my project around him in Advanced Book Illustration. Even though I never worked through the plot entirely, I did enjoy fleshing out the characters. The frog-like woman in the final image is a Swamp Witch inspired by the character Aughra from Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal. 

NAMI Calendar Images

First post on my first blog. And so it begins. 

I'll be posting a mixture of old and new work here so be forewarned my technical drawing and composition skills may seem a bit all over the place. Any questions, comments, inquiries about freelance work, ext. are welcome!

This particular project is from a class two summers ago. The assignment was to create calendar images for a non-profit organization. I chose NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. You can view their website here. http://www.nami.org/

My apologies for the images not being in order. I couldn't quite figure that one out.