New Macleans illo on newsstands this week!

Here's my most recent illustration for Macleans magazine. Because I've worked for this client a number of times, I'm always concerned that my work for them will start to look all the same. So I try to push myself to come up with new ways to approach the same basic compositional problem: Create a frame for a photograph. The sides and top and bottom need to be pretty much symmetrical, with ample room in the centre.

I've mentioned this before, but I LOVE working within strict requirements. It's like writing a poem with a specific meter. It doesn't hinder my creativity, it inspires me!

The subject for this illustration is a boy who died at fifteen years of age. It's always tough to illustrate a child's obituary, because it really is a life cut short. Sometimes there isn't much to work with, particularly (as is often the case) if the child was ill for a long period of time. One of the challenges of doing these obituary illustrations is to make it about the lives of the subjects, not about their deaths. When the subject is a chronically ill child, so much of his life is informed by his health issues.

This particular boy was healthy and active. He loved dirt bikes (worked at a gas station and on a potato farm to buy his own!) and was a Leafs fan. He was born and raised on Prince Edward Island, so I worked the design of the flag into this image. His name has a Gaelic, German, or Danish origin -- all of those cultures have a tradition of illuminated manuscripts so I used that as a design element, which also works with the lion that's on PEI's flag. The roots of the potato plant echo the gas pump tubing, and because he enjoyed motorized vehicles I wanted to put in a suggestion of tire tracks.

My initial idea was just do to use the tire tracks as the over-arching decorative theme, but I found it kind of overwhelming and I wasn't sure if they still read as tire tracks. Here's the sketch:


This first sketch took me a loooong time to do! From coming up with the idea and getting a design that looked like an illuminated manuscript, I was up for hours. My boyfriend assured me they looked like tire tracks, but I wasn't sold. I felt like it was too busy, too dark, and actually reminded me of those robots in the Matrix -- Creepy! Not a good look.

By this time, I'd worked straight through the night and had to hop on the bus to get to my mall job. My shift was 9-3pm, and the illustration was due at 7:30pm. I was in a bit of a tight spot, and a little panicky. Thankfully, my wonderful manager let me go home early. Let me tell you, I needed every minute to get from the creepy-Matrix design to the finished piece!

This was the second time I had to deliver a Macleans illustration with my mall-job somewhat getting in the way. The other time was for a job I haven't blogged yet, but I will soon. It's been tremendously rewarding, proving to myself that I can work under very tight deadlines and get everything done, with style. I live for this feeling!

Dorothy in the Poppy Field

Here's my Work/Life 2 image! I wanted it to look somewhat related to my Alice at the Tea Party illustration in subject manner and execution. My Alice piece has a very early springtime feel, I wanted this one to be more lazy hazy late summer.

Dorothy prints on canvas and more on my Society6 Printshop
Dorothy original silkscreen prints for sale on Etsy

My mom tells me that I should make sure to let people know these illustrations are silkscreen prints. She's a clever lady, so I'm going to do as she says!

Everything on my portfolio site (except for "Umami: The Fifth Taste" ) are silkscreen prints. That's hard to see when stuff is at low-res 72dpi, so I'm going to start posting images of extreme close-ups of my work so all the weird, rough, real, and natural details can be seen.

I once did a (for me) massive silkscreen print for a college assignment for wise and wacky illustrator/illo prof Rick Sealock. If you ever get a chance to have Rick as a teacher, grab it with both hands and wrestle it to the ground! I mean wrestle the chance, not Rick. The silkscreen print was about 20"x10". I don't often work that large because the amount of materials, time, difficulty, and potential for disasters increases exponentially as I increase the size of my prints. But I wanted to explore the possibility of working larger, and that's what school is for!

My point being, I had done this gigantic silkscreen print, dusted off my portfolio so I could drag it all the way to Oakville, and Rick pointed to an area of the illustration the size of a melba toast and announced that that was the bit he liked. I was just relieved that he liked any part of it, but it's true: Sometimes little corners of an illustration can be lovely and work on their own.


(Click the image to enlarge)



(Click the image to enlarge)

I love silkscreen printing. I love having a physical piece of art in my hands that doesn't just exist as Matrix-y strings of zeros and ones. It's worth the struggles, surprises, and little discoveries. Here's to wabi-sabi!

Work/Life 2 is here!

I'm excited to report that Work/Life 2 is finally being released on April 7th! It features the work of 100 professional illustrators from around the world. I was lucky enough to score a spot in it, one of the few illustrators to be included in both the first Work/Life and this new edition. UPPERCASE's Janine Vangool has done a gorgeous job. Check it out!

UPPERCASE has even done an iPhone app, which should be debuting shortly. As a devoted iPhone user, I'm totally psyched about it!

Next week I'll post the piece I did specially for the book -- If you find yourself in Calgary (UPPERCASE #204, 100 - 7th Ave SW Calgary AB Canada T2P0W4) April 7th you can see it even earlier than that! And of course, I'll be putting up original prints of the illustration for sale on my Etsy shop, and my Society6 store will have prints of all sizes available, too.

A Fairy Raised by Wolves

I have another, even more recent Macleans obit illustration out on newsstands right now, I'll share it in a week or two! I did a job for a new client between these two Macleans jobs, so I'll be posting that first :).

Here's another I did for Macleans. It's an obituary illustration for a wild and wonderful woman named Kimberley Ann Blackwell. A real free spirit and tough lady. Born in North Bay, lived in Whitehorse in a cabin she made with her own hands, drove from White Horse to Costa Rica and lived in a tropical paradise after she got sick of the cold. In Costa Rica she started her own organic chocolate business after serendipitously discovering cacao trees on her property. Her friends called her "a feral fairy -- A fairy raised by wolves."

I say this again and again, but I love doing these illustrations. They're often so rich and bursting with content. I love doing research into places and cultures and I try to bring motifs into the image that pay tribute to the subject.

I've always loved Inuit art, so I was excited to have the opportunity to play with some here. The mask on the left is reminiscent of wolf masks that Inuit artists carve, and the fish on the right was inspired by Inuit serigraphs. The wolf calls back to her being "raised by wolves" and the fish refers to her time spent working in mining and fishing camps.

Blackwell had a bit of a mystical side, and visited Stonehenge when she was on holiday. I managed to work that in, too.

The bottom half of the image deals with her time in Costa Rica. She found cacao plants and heliconias, so I put those in there. The fierce cat and the snake are at a stand-off, which refers obliquely to her tense dealings with poachers who would trespass on her land.

A few of Umami Girl's Favourite Things

I love food. I'm starting to check out food blogs for inspiration and information, and Carolyn Cope's "Umami Girl" blog is a really great one. She's been kind enough to share my very own umami-inspired image with her readers. Check the post out here!

Applied Arts Wire >> Portfolio Peek

I've been featured on Applied Arts magazine's Portfolio Peek, check it out!

Applied Arts magazine showcases Canadian advertising, illustration, photography, and graphic design.

The Fifth Taste: Umami

Scientists used to only acknowledge four basic tastes: sour, sweet, bitter, and salty. But in 1985, a fifth taste was officially recognized. It was called umami. My illustration depicts thirty-two umami rich foods ranging from seafood, meat, cheese, and vegetables. It is the savoury taste of glutamates and nucleotides. Mmmmm.

The illustration has an Asian flavour (pun!) to pay tribute to Professors Kikunae Ikeda, Shintaro Kodama, and Akira Kuninaka, some of the major researchers behind the discovery of this new taste. Being Japanese myself, I grew up with lots of dashi, wakame, kombu, soy sauce, and green tea. This subject is near and dear to my heart!

If you like this image, visit my Society6 store to buy prints, stretched canvases, or other fun stuff!

Come to think of it, this piece is reminiscent of my "sweet" Alice piece.