However, Camille ended up asking if I had time to illustrate a simple card for the wedding itself after all, since it would be nice to give it to family members, as well as to have as a keepsake. I whipped this up for her last week, and she found a printer in her area who could do a small run of cards for her:

I'm also working on a simple wedding website for them: it's still very much under construction, but the last-minute invitation design has turned out to be an influence on the site's design now, too.
I'll post an updated shot and the site's URL once it's more complete.

Since Lindsay's a designer herself, I came up with a line-based illustration that she could adapt to suit her purposes: she added the fantastic watercolor quality, as well as the text, in the end result below:

Johanna's former site was good in that it was functional and very comprehensive, but... a bit dated. It was also built in such a way that updating it was cumbersome, and she had no ability to edit it herself. She's also an extremely accomplished artist with a long history in the arts, and so the idea of rebuilding a site with a prodigious amount of content, on her own, was daunting. 

Over a number of months, she and I slowly edited and redesigned her site, and I trained her on how to use WordPress so that she could now maintain it on her own. In a lot of ways, once she was trained, Johanna really did the bulk of the work on it, but it was an absolute treat getting to do the redesign, and to collaborate with her on the process.

Click through on the image below to visit Johanna's site: 

Just a few updates, some of which have already made it onto my portfolio pages. One recent development is that in the past 6 months, I've been doing occasional illustrations for a pretty cool San Francisco online magazine called The Bold Italic. Periodically, the editors email me about a story that someone has written, and they ask if I want to illustrate it. Below are links to these stories:

In The Line of Duty:

We Are The Champions:

Hot Sax:

Entering The Nest:

Singin' On The Dock Of The Bay:

Thirty Year Itch:

The poster had to address some pretty shocking statistics about California's financial priorities, in particular, the tremendous disparity between what the state invests in its school system versus what it invests in its prison system:

Oyy! Sooo frustrating!

Hopefully, the use of the posters at the Fall Forum, as well as in California classrooms, will generate some conversations that will lead to change. After the event is over, I'll see about making the poster available as a free, larger, PDF on this site. 

It was a little heart-breaking making this portrait, but also really comforting, getting to create a picture that had so much love in it. It was clear from all of the reference images that my client provided that their dog was dearly loved and missed, and I feel grateful to have been able to make a tender image for them. 

Anyway, their latest e-blast got me thinking maybe it's time for some of you to pre-empt the holiday mayhem, and get your christmas/hanukkah/new years/kwanzaa/festivus cards taken care of early, as they're having a 60% off sale on greeting cards through October 31.

And just to jump on that bandwagon, I'm happy to offer a
20% discount on any custom greeting card order
you contract with Stroopwoffle by October 20.

Naturally, you'd want to hustle on this to get the card ready for PSPrint by October 31, so drop me a line here ASAP! (Of course, you don't have to use PSPrint. You just have to use these sales as an excuse to get your cards done early...)

Below, a fun New Year's "Quiz"-style card I designed last year for a family: the parents had a great sense of humor, and wanted to come up with a card that acknowledged that their own school pictures looked eerily like those of their kids.

We came up with the idea to make the card into a guessing game, where you had to match the pictures to the "Most Likely To" descriptions. The answers were on the inside of the card (upside-down, naturally). The family is French and American, hence the bilingual sentiments.  


20% discount until October 20 at Stroopwoffle!
Easy to remember: 20 x 20.

Drop me a line!

Here's a detail of the way the meat is sliced off, directly onto a tortilla:

Yum!

The challenge was to make a building/street rendering that was clean, open, and a little unreal/mysterious without being too dry, or digital-slick. I might bang these up a bit more for a bit more grittiness, but for the time being, they're at a good place.

It's a new style of working for me, and painstakingly slow. Both files were built with an inordinate number of layers, to make the files easy to manipulate and change (say, for time of day, or shadow movement). Still, good fun, and another great learning exercise for me in making illustrations that are less line-based, and more architectural in nature.

I researched some fantastic looking old vintage playbills, and came up with a modern adaptation:

The 8-page booklet mimicked the style of the poster, and included a preface and bios of all ten playwrights. It was designed to be mailed as-is, no envelope, so the back cover included space for address labels.

front/back:

pages 1 and 2:

pages 3 and 4:

Incidentally, for those who are interested, "Playwright" and "Playwriting" are the preferred spellings. You'd think they'd match, right? More on that matter here.