Ballard Art Walk
ENTRY DATE: July 15th, 2010
The Three Little Pigs. Two-sided art. Can you guess what's on the back?
Godzilla Lose Ice Cream
Hanging the show.
Last Saturday I had the pleasure of showing off some art during the Ballard Art Walk. The good folks at Stoke Strategy hosted the event, and have generously provided their presentation wall as a temporary gallery for the next few weeks. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and check it out.
Seattle Restaurant Week Poster
ENTRY DATE: April 9th, 2010
The poster set the look and feel for the 2010 Seattle Restaurant Week marketing materials.
Last week I received a few samples of the poster LookatLao and I designed for Seattle Restaurant Week. My partner-in-design Geoffrey Smith first spied it a few weeks ago posted up in the window of Anchovies & Olives, one of the over 100 restaurants participating the upcoming event.
This poster provided a jumping-off point for the folks at The Seattle Times, who have been busy rolling out the design in all manner of marketing materials and social media outlets. It’s been great to see the concept at work and to hear excitement building for the event. It sounds like it’s going to be a success for restaurants and patrons alike, and will hopefully be the first of many Seattle Restaurant Weeks to come.
Introducing Seattle Restaurant Week
ENTRY DATE: February 24th, 2010
A new logo for a new Seattle restaurant event.
In lieu of repeating such a well-written blog post, I offer a link to LookatLao’s account of our recent team effort in designing the Seattle Restaurant Week logo. A fancy poster is nearing completion, which will hopefully grace every storefront window in Seattle by mid-March. Stay tuned!
Bicycle Girl Illustration
ENTRY DATE: December 4th, 2009
Close-up showing the linework close to actual size.
Full illustration. Click on the image view it large.
Here’s an example of an illustration style I’m trying on. I drew the outlines with one No. 2 pencil and many sheets of tracing and layout paper. To get the detail in the face and bicycle parts I worked large, breaking the drawing into parts. I then scanned the parts in, reassembled them in Photoshop and brought in a few textures from a texture library I’ve been building over time. After I added the color blocks, I spent a good while tweaking the color palette and finessing the layer transparencies.
Color-wise, this could easily have been a springtime or fall scene (or a winter one if not for the flowers and sundress) but I ended going with a warm, golden, end-of-summer look. Which is nice to reminisce about when the frost on our deck is barely melting during the day.
Textural Vector Illustrations
ENTRY DATE: November 10th, 2009
Building on the theme of my last post, I decided to try out a new technique combining textural elements with gradients in Adobe Illustrator. The wood grain element and grainy Popsicle texture are auto-traces of a couple of scanned images, whereas the Popsicle’s shading is achieved with Illustrator’s gradient mesh tool, a powerful way to add a dose of realism to your artwork.
I also incorporated transparency and ink effects to mimic glazing techniques often used in oil and water color paintings. The resulting illustration is somewhat complex and would likely need to be converted to a different file format for printing. But I think the visual effect is interesting, and I plan to explore simplified combinations of textures and gradients in some upcoming illustrations. And as always, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to comment!