line art

Dam Good Books

| Erika Schnatz

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!

Dancing Cats

| Erika Schnatz

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:

The text from the spread I picked to illustrate: 
“Eight cats tap…tip bowler hats in pink tuxedos, canvas spats”
Left page refined sketch:
Right page refined sketch:
Left page line art:
Right page line art:

Super-Sized Squirrel

| Erika Schnatz

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 put together a t-shirt design for my peer mentoring program. We have a thing about squirrels (they’re in all of our program newsletters), so it was a no-brainer to draw this up:
Embrace the squishiness!
Here’s a picture of mentors wearing the shirt with my design on it:

Ooligan Press Blog Branding

| Erika Schnatz

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.

These initial badges aren’t bad, but our digital and social media department lead was looking for something that is obviously made by the human hand. So I went back to the drawing board (literally), and came up with these:

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.

All of the Cats

| Erika Schnatz

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.

Mr. Tea

| Erika Schnatz
A fun 80s mashup between Mr. T (who pities fools) and Mr. T (who has tall teeth) at a tea party (naturally). This piece was part of “Jibbart Jabbart: A Mr. T-Themed Art Show & Experience” at the PhilaMOCA in Philadelphia.
Line art

Picture from the show (c/o Ben and Amy Leach)

My art on the wall! (c/o Ben and Amy Leach)

Another view (c/o Ben and Amy Leach)