Third week of June

Hello! Welcome to another weekly summary of my work. This week is more graphic design and a little less illustration, but they are all my hard work so I hope you enjoy seeing what I've been up to.

Logo re-design

I had been asked by a small business that makes awesome and quirky kids apparel to help with her logo re-design for her upcoming rebranding event. In the end we came up with multiple images and formats for her to use all over her social media and final products for her brand. Here are a few examples of the finished design.

This is the little boy sheep with her business name. I love the missing tooth!

Here you can see the little girl with the little boy sheep. Aren't they adorable?!

I drew each character in pencil, then scanned them into Illustrator and Photoshop to finish them off. The business name is entirely hand-lettered, scanned and polished in Illustrator as well. You can see some of her products here.


DesignCuts Tutorials

Last week I told you that I had been working on some of the free tutorials that you can find on DesignCuts.com and that I would show you the results this week. Well, here they are. I can't take any credit for the final design or layout of these two pieces as I was following the tutorials, but there are some changes like the fonts and some of the word choices are mine.

A beach festival poster. This was a lot of fun because
you had to adjust the white frame to fit within the paint strokes. This was
done in Photoshop.

Oh this was so much fun. There were so many elements that had to be added,
adjusted, layered on, masks were used, etc. A true stretching of my abilities in Illustrator :)

Teacher Gifts

Like for many children, this is the last week of school for my girls and I thought it might be nice to do up one of the lovely monogramed wreaths I've been doing for each teacher. That's when I doubled my workload because each girl has two teachers for which I am both grateful for (who doesn't think classrooms need more teachers?) and non-plussed about because it meant two more wreaths than I had intended. But I accepted the challenge non-the-less :)

I did run into a few problems like a head cold the likes of which I haven't seen in quite some time that completely took me out of commission for a few days, and my lovely 0.25 mm micron pen tip broke halfway through the project. When I had recovered from my cold I thought I'd see how bad the broken tip would work but it was just awful. I really didn't like the result so I went out and bought myself a new one (yay art supply shopping!!).

These are the finished wreaths. I am going to frame them in an inexpensive frame as well.

Someone mentioned that it would be a good idea to include a business card with these so now I have an excuse to do up my own business cards as well! I also want to write up a little blurb about what these are and what makes them special, as well as the thank you card for all the work they've done over the year. I know my family really appreciates the effort they put in :)

That about covers this week. Next week I'd like to show off some of what I did in November when I took MATS A as that course really changed everything I do and I'd love to talk about it to someone, so why not you?

Until next time :)

Mandy

If you're interested in commissioning me click the Contact Me button up at the top to send an email, I'd be happy to answer any questions!

Mid-June

I have to say that considering how horrible the weather was this past week, and how miserable I have felt with allergy season in full swing, I didn't realize how productive I was until I started compiling the images for this week's summary :) This is most definitely a lesson in keeping up momentum, even when you feel like being a bump on a log.

My lettering practice continues on a semi-regular basis and I thought
I'd try branching out a bit with these to add design elements with a little layout practice :)

I've always wanted to paint feathers and this font was so much fun to do - it's my new favourite :)

Aside from lettering practice, I chose to spend the morning at one of our many parks to get out of my usual space and do some painting and sketching while enjoying the outdoors. It was so much more fun that I expected it to be. The park was pretty quiet that time of day, though I did get to meet the most adorable puppy :) My intention was to get out some inspirations that had been itching in my brain. I wanted to do some light painting and work on some line drawing work to help with future designs and patterns. I also really wanted to sketch out some of the waterfowl.

This was a fun exercise in creating a pattern. I laid down some watercolour paint blobs first
and when that was dry I drew over them with a micron pen.
Then for extra fun, I added splatter and drop marks in watercolour.

Some line work with lilies, ivy, milkweed and ground cover.

Ducks are so much harder to sketch than
 I thought, they keep moving!!

Rose flowers from a bush near home that
I had taken a picture of. I really like the
way these turned out :)

And of course, this weekend was Father's Day and I thought I'd surprise my husband with a card made by yours truly. To keep it manly enough I thought I'd go with more feathers for the wreath. I hand lettered the text and even did a little lettering on the inside to let him know what a wonderful dad I think he is to our two girls. I think he really liked it :)

I've also been working on my digital design skills with Photoshop and Illustrator by following along on tutorials with DesignCuts.com. The site is cool because they give you the elements you need to follow along with the design and you learn for free. I haven't saved my two posters as pics yet but I will show you my progress on that next week.

That's it for last week. Next time I hope to have a few more wreaths to show you for teacher gifts for my girls, they have 2 teachers each - that's a lot of wreaths!!

Until next time :)

Mandy

If you're interested in commissioning me click the Contact Me button up at the top to send an email, I'd be happy to answer any questions!

Line work practice...

Hello again!

I hope that your week was wonderful and relaxing, or maybe you were particularly productive, or perhaps you switched it up and just kicked back for once. My week wasn't particularly productive. The weather here was unseasonably warm and it made working more challenging than usual. However, I do have a few things to share with you :)

I've always been envious of artists that can draw simplistically. I don't know why it doesn't come more easily for me but it doesn't, so I jumped at the chance to learn from Lisa Congdon through CreativeBug.com. She's an amazing textile designer and artist and she does fabulous line art. She also has several books if you're interested in looking her up on Amazon or your local library. I first heard of her in my MATS A class. Anyway, this week I spent a lot of time learning and practicing and here are my results:

I "borrowed" a blue sheet of construction paper from my girls
craft bin for this one so I could practice with my white gel pen.

I'm still very nervous doing line art and I'm not altogether sure how to use it effectively, but I see a lot of designers and artists use it as part of a larger picture or with hand lettering. I'm going to try to practice with it more because it is very relaxing and very beautiful.

I did also find some time to work in a bit of brush calligraphy as well. I do really enjoy practicing these. I think I might try to incorporate some line drawing with these as well, just as soon as I figure out how :)

Thought I'd try combining what I learned from
Lisa Congdon with some brush calligraphy and colour :)

That's all from me for this week. I hope your week turns out exactly as you hope it will. Until next time,

Mandy

June is starting off very well!

Hello! If you've made it to this blog from my previous blog Art by Amanda Wiklund, welcome! If you're new to my work and have no idea what's going on or what to expect, welcome! I'm happy you could make and I hope you will enjoy reading about my work and my journey as an Illustrator :)

It's been quite awhile since I wrote anything and I have had a very busy 18 months. In September of 2014 I started a certificate in Graphic Design which I have only just finished this past December. I also enrolled in MATS A (Make Art That Sells) with Lilla Rogers, which completely changed how I work and how I think about my art. I was so inspired by MATS A that I signed up for MATS B as well.

I have also discovered some amazing Illustrators like Holly Exley from the UK and Frannerd. Unbeknownst to either of them, they have been teaching me a lot about what it is to be an Illustrator and how to go about doing it!

I have not been keeping idle amongst all this learning either. I have been working on my style and trying to loosen it up a little. I'm also learning how to do brush calligraphy. Dawn Nicole has an awesome site that shows most of what you need to know and she has a monthly lettering/doodle challenge on her Facebook page that I've been enjoying.

This past week I've been making wreaths :) Oh these were so much fun to do!! I've been wanting to start painting loose flowers and more doodle-y shapes for quite awhile now and this little project helped me to get started with it. Here's the result:

I pinned the tutorials I learned these from, so if you're interested in seeing them just let me know and I will update the post to include them.

And the biggest news yet is that my art was featured in the 11th issue of an online art magazine called MAEZA!! I am so excited about it. Click here to read it for yourself (note that you will need flash to view it and it doesn't view well on a mobile)!

Two illustrations were included from my work amongst so many other very talented artists! I am very proud and pleased to have been a part of it. I hope I will be able to do so again :)

I think that's all my big news for now. I am also working on a webpage portfolio of some more of my work with a leaning towards illustration. You can check it out here.

I know this was a long post but I don't expect future posts to be so wordy. Please be sure to check out the links, maybe visit my Facebook page, or even leave a comment below. 

Click the Contact Me button up at the top to send an email if you're interested in commissioning me, I'd be happy to answer any questions!

SaveSave