Illustration

Bird-Brained

| Erika Schnatz

Now that I’m finding myself with free time (almost too much free time – I’m still looking for summer employment because I need to work more than one day a week) I have more time to draw. I often have a hard time figuring out what I want to draw, which is why I really like Selfless Portraits – when you agree to participate, they send you the profile picture of someone else using the app on Facebook, so you get to draw someone else’s portrait. You need to do it fairly quickly too – within 48 hours.

It’s a good exercise, though I don’t know if my random stranger is going to like my portrait. I found his features to be quite birdlike (especially his hair), so I just turned him into a bird. It’s not a very representational portrait, that’s for sure:
The poor, random boy assigned to me
The resulting portrait

Pretty crazy. But it was a fun exercise. Now I’m awaiting the portrait some random stranger drew of me. Perhaps that artist has turned me into an animal as well.
Materials: Sakura pens, Prismacolor markers

Neil Diamond Background Conundrum

| Erika Schnatz

Hey!

So I have a frame hanging on my wall that is sans a picture. In an attempt to rectify this situation, I drew a picture of Neil Diamond last night, because, why not? The man has amazing eyebrows.

I was going to pick a background for him, but then I thought, “Why not put this up to a vote? Maybe people want to contribute to this amazing portrait.”

Dear readers, I come to you with a conundrum: which background looks best with Neil Diamond?

Option 1: All American Hero.

 This is the background I initially planned to use. Because Neil Diamond is a real American hero.

Option 2: Groovy-licious.

Neil Diamond is also a super groovy man, so this may be an appropriate background.

Option 3: Silver Fox

For some reason, Neil Diamond looks the most suave with this background. Or maybe that’s just me.

Drop me a comment to let me know what you think! Let the people decide! The winner will be revealed at some point. Maybe Monday?

Materials: Micron Pens, scrapbook paper

Serve San Francisco T Shirts

| Erika Schnatz
My apologies for the lack of posts. I’ve been traveling a lot in the past month and I’ve been slacking on my art stuff. Here’s something I worked on during the past week:
I am currently an AmeriCorps member, and I like to help my peers out when I can. When another member of my program needed help with t shirts, I volunteered my services. Her group is going on several alternative spring break trips, and they need to outfit everyone in t shirts. 
This is an idea from one of the students she works with. It was a basic design for their upcoming trip to San Francisco.
However, I wanted to try and give them something with a little more character than a city skyline. I find that it’s really hard to distinguish city skylines from each other unless there are strong visual indicators (like the Eiffel Tower in Paris), so I wanted to do something else. I drew a cable car, since I associate them with San Francisco.
Above is the basic sketch for the cable car, based on some old travel posters I found on Google.

This is was what I submitted to them for the front of the t shirt.

I didn’t veer very far from their original idea for the back.
So I submitted it, and none of the alternative spring break committee members preferred my cable car design to their idea of the city skyline. So I wound up going back and creating this for them:

Below is a rough idea of what the t shirt will look like:

So there you have it. I learned not to mess with a design idea they really liked, because it cost me time and energy (especially because it was all pro-bono stuff). Meh. I still like my cable car drawing.

A Week of Gnomes: Day Two

| Erika Schnatz
Day two of the 365 challenge: Use your favorite animal as inspiration for today.
My favorite animals are elephants, so somehow that inspired jousting gnomes on bitty baby elephants.
 
The linework!
 
All colored in!
A slightly nicer version of the final art.
Materials used: pen, Prismacolor markers, recycled paper, white acrylic ink & brush
More gnome action tomorrow!

Jay and ‘Ye in SPACE!

| Erika Schnatz

My brother is a huge fan of Jay-Z and Kanye West, so I made him this ridiculous illustration as a Christmas gift:

Here is the line art of Jay-Z and Kanye
I decided to stick them in space (totally normal, right?) so I created this background with some watercolors and acrylic paint. I found a super easy tutorial on how to do this via YouTube:
Then I cut out the line art and Mod Podge’d it to outer space. Easy peasy!
This was a super fun project and it only took me a few nights. I need to start drawing more!
Materials used: Micron pens, other black pens, watercolor paints, white acrylic paint (for the stars)
More posts will be coming your way next week!

Portlandia!

| Erika Schnatz

I will be leaving Portland for a short span of time to spend the holidays with my family, but I love this quirky little city so this week’s posts are Portland-related.

This image is something I made for my friend who has recently left Portland for somewhere in Colorado, so I wanted to send her off with a slice of Portlandia. I tried to think of the most “Portland-y” thing I could think of. According to my brain that was a hipster elk/deer thing riding a bicycle past Powell’s Bookstore while drinking a PBR.

This is how it turned out:

If this image captures even a fraction of Portland’s oddness, I consider it a success.

Materials used: pens, watercolor, colored pencil

I really hope Megan got this in the mail by now and I didn’t totally spoil the surprise by posting on here…

Travel

| Erika Schnatz
Last fall I created a series of illustrations so I could throw together a stop-motion-y video for a Southwest Airlines competition to win 30 million rewards points to fly wherever I wanted. I love to travel and thought I threw together a fairly convincing and creative presentation as to why my broke AmeriCorps butt should be able to jet across the country on a whim, but they didn’t pick my video. (You can still make things right, Southwest!!!)

I was pretty bummed that I did all that work for nada, but you all can view some of the pieces I created. Maybe I’ll try to throw the video up on YouTube or Vimeo or one of those places. I wrote a children’s book-esque script to go along with the video and narrated it myself and used iMovie to edit it all together because I have lost whatever Final Cut abilities I gained in college.

I’ll shut up and show the pictures.

That’s supposed to be me. Broke and living in Portland, Oregon. BUT HAPPY!
Then I discussed driving across the country in my tiny little car to serve in AmeriCorps because I am an amazing, selfless person.
This is a really weird combination of images: Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and a geyser (Old Faithful if you’d like) from Yellowstone, because I saw both of those things on my drive across the country. It’s kind of surreal and I really like how it turned out even though it makes no sense without explanation.
Hey, look! I don’t have enough money to fly anywhere and go on tropical vacations.
Like 99% of Americans.
I explained the awesome things I would do if I was able to fly all over the country for free.
You may notice that I love alliteration.
 I tried to tug at the heartstrings of the soulless marketing folks who didn’t choose my video. I talked about going back to Philadelphia to visit my family because I missed them very much. That’s a pretty accurate representation of my Pops.
Then I did a little stop motion bit of the ridiculous amount of flights I would be able to take with all those reward points. I even made the airplane look like a Southwest plane. Because I have a crazy awesome eye for detail!!!
Then I cleverly brought it full circle by using the first image, but I changed the words on the sign! Brain-explosion-inducing, I know.

So those are some pictures. I made them with patterned paper, markers, watercolors, and Mod Podge.

Giraffes!

| Erika Schnatz

This was a project I completed earlier this year for my dear friend Kayla (who is sort of famous). The girl has got some pipes. But I digress.

Kayla’s close friend just had a baby, and Kayla wanted a special card made for the family. Specifically, she wanted a family of giraffes. When I finally got down to drawing it out (I procrastinate heavily without concrete deadlines), it didn’t take me very long. I drew out one rough sketch to show Kayla:

 
The finished art looks pretty similar. I got a little crazy with Momma Giraffe’s hair, but it’s a good look for her.
And here’s what the card looks like:

All I used for this card was some Micron pens I think. Some kind of pens. I don’t quite remember.