I went to my first non-family weddings this summer. Here’s a card I made for my friends Liz and Travis. (Liz is a superb illustrator – you can check out her wonderful cut paper illustrations here: http://lizabethgoss.com/)
Here’s another little thing I whipped up for Ooligan Press:
I offered a beaver-less option if the press wanted to be a bit more high-brow, but I’m happy to see the little guy made the cut.
Ooligan Press is putting together “Dam Book Bundles” – basically a collection of 3 titles that our press has published. The titles are offered at a discount because you’re buying multiple books. It’s a pretty sweet deal, and you can check it out here if you want to buy some excellent titles from a student-run independent press. Check it out for the puns alone!
For my Book Design class this term, I had to design an entire book (it was awesome!) so here are the cover comps I came up with:
This first one had some nice elements, but it looked a bit old for the target audience of this book (middle-grade level readers).
I really liked this design as well, but it looks like an adult book.
Here’s the final! I made some suggested improvements, like handlettering the text on the cover and adding the dragon’s arms to hold the banner. I obviously redrew the front and back illustrations as well, and added some cracks around the dragon butt to add to the illusion of the dragon breaking through the back of the book cover. My classmates liked where the colors bled outside the lines in the comp, so I replicated that in the final. I moved the ISBN box to a more sensible place as well.
I had some trouble finding reference images for the dragon’s butt, but as multiple people reminded me, dragons aren’t real so I could draw it however I liked.
Continuing the week of cuteness, here are more cats (if you need more cats drawings, just scroll through past blog posts). I was supposed to have a finished spread for the SCBWI-Oregon conference, but grad school got in the way, so I only finished the line art. This summer I need to color it in. Of course, nothing I do is going to compare to Jon Klassen’s work, but a girl can dream.
Initial sketch:
You may have noticed a trend on this blog (not in the last couple posts, but in a bunch of my cat drawings) that I love drawing really obese animals that look more like toys than anything living in the wild. The following is no exception.
I’ve completed my first year of grad school. Crazy! The next few months are going to be relatively light, responsibility-wise, so expect to see new material pop up in your news feeds on a regular basis. Unless I get really lazy this summer…
Anyway, what follows are some blog badges I created for the student-run publisher I work for, Ooligan Press. We’re working on rebranding the Press and changing up the website, and my silly little doodles are part of it all.
First time around I created everything in Adobe Illustrator, which made everything graphic and clean, but these were missing the hand-drawn/human element that is an integral part of the press’ identity.
You may notice I was roped into creating a few more badges. This is not the last you’ll see of the Ooligan-related work I did this term.
Here’s something I did a few months ago for the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) in Portland. They needed a half-sheet sized catalog cover to promote classes and events offered in February and March of this year. To the surprise of no one who has skimmed through this blog, it features cats.
The Valentine’s Day image was the front cover and the St. Patrick’s Day cats occupied the back cover.
To celebrate the end of National Poetry Month, here is a line drawing of one of the all-time greats: Emily Dickinson.
This piece was published in the Winter 2014 edition of the Portland Review, along with a drawing of Edgar Allan Poe (which will show up on the sketch blog in the near future).
Made this for my sister’s “golden” birthday last fall. I’m glad she understood my weird humor.
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| Front of card |
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| Inside of card |
Erika Schnatz 