District Apothecary Fine Soaps

I'm super excited to share one of my latest illustrations! District Apothecary is a Washington, D.C. based company that makes hand-crafted all-natural castile soaps. Phil Olive is the founder, hand-crafter, and a super nice fellow. 

Phil came to me to design a soap label that incorporated some visual elements (the castle and windmill are tributes to the soap-making process he uses, for example) with some hand-done type and an Art Nouveau angle. Right up my alley! I was thrilled work on this.

I've tried his soap. It is pure, simple, and lovely. This job couldn't have come at a better time; I was struggling though some gross body wash, basically the cheapest on-sale kind I found at the drug store. The worst kind of pearlescent, artificially scented emulsion. District Apothecary saved the day!

Phil also sells these things called soap nets which I'd never even heard of before and are awesome. They're basically mesh drawstring baggies for soap. Soap nets help the soap lather (no detergents are added to the soap to augment its lathering abilities) and act as storage containers that you hang on your shower head hook. They also exfoliate. And are recyclable. 

Here's a pic of the soaps with the labels on! He was testing two colour versions of the label to see what customers thought. 

And here's the variant colour version, which do you prefer?

-- Julia
Portfolio site

Boathouse

Click image to see as intended!

I'm nearly finished all the background art for my game, woo hoo! I've done 42 or so of these things and only  have a few left to go. I haven't been posting them all because I want there to be a few surprises when the game comes out!

It's only when I started doing these backgrounds that I realized there are limitations to this format that need to be addressed. For instance, with this background the characters will be walking behind it to get from the left side to the right, which means they'll be hidden from sight as they move behind the boathouse. I'm going to need to create an alternate view where the boathouse is ghosted out so the player doesn't lose track of their character! And I can't really set the boathouse farther back because the river's got to be right by the boathouse and characters can't walk on water...

Anyway, rest assured I'm still hard at work on this project. Once the backgrounds are done it'll be on to character design! Full steam ahead!

-- Julia
Portfolio site