I’m not a huge Halloween person, but in a time when the world seems more terrifying and depressing than ever… honestly witches and ghosts seem like a pretty welcome break. Digging into traditions reminds me that time is still passing, and the seasons are still changing, despite the seemingly endless days at home. So here I am, enjoying Halloween! (sort of)
Feel free to use on Zoom/Teams/your own desktop/print it out/whatever you want
Working on this book has been an amazing and challenging journey, and I’m excited to show everything we’ve done! I thought I’d share my illustration work process with you and how I got from concept to the final product.
Berrett-Koehler Publishers was looking to create a colorful illustration for Blaze Your Own Trail, a choose your own adventure book by Rebekah Bastian. The target audience was young women in their 20’s and 30’s who are navigating many of life’s difficult choices, and their team wanted to create something that showed women being empowered while exploring many different life paths.
I wanted to represent the concept of the book (empowering women and facing a multitude of choices in life) in a way that added depth to the main idea and wasn’t overly literal about the metaphor of paths and choices.
I pitched six sketched concepts to the client, with the goal of showing six different ways to represent exploring life’s many paths. I drew from my own feelings and experiences being a twenty-something trying to navigate adulthood–and the feelings of being lost and lonely, but still quietly optimistic and hopeful for what’s ahead.
I drew these on a super old Wacom tablet connected to Photoshop…not my ideal drawing tool anymore!
Step 1: Make a nice messy, crappy pencil sketch and take a photo of it. I bump up the contrast so I can see it more easily when I trace it in Illustrator.
The client was most interested in exploring the concept of having the scenes and paths coming out of her steps, but splitting them into different paths.
Like always, I started with a sketch to just dump my idea out on paper–in this case it’s a few unglamorous, scribbly pencil sketches (plus a few potato chip stains).
Afterwards, I made the first rendering draft in Adobe Illustrator. While Illustrator can feel clunky since you can’t really “draw” well in the program, it allowed me to edit and experiment more quickly than I could have in more drawing based apps (I also didn’t own an iPad at the time!).
Here’s the part that often is the hardest to get through, but is often what really pushes and improves my work the most (in ways that I’m happy about in retrospect). It can be tedious and frustrating, since you feel like you’re so close but so far away from finishing the piece! I was lucky to work with a wonderful art director who encouraged and guided me the whole way.
Confession: I struggled with the pose of character quite a bit. Hands and feet are STILL a challenge for me, especially when it’s in vector and the shapes have to be really precise. You can see from the first to last image how much she changes (from being super flat & rough to much more realistic), and I think the design is better for it, even though that wasn’t my instinctive style.
And… the final design! The entire illustration process spanned over two months (it took even longer with interior illustrations, which I’ll share more about later!).
Check out that sweet spot gloss on the cover (all you paper/printing nerds will feel me on this)! The book will be released on February 12th, 2020–with a launch party at The Riveter in Seattle!
Image Desc: Brightly colored mural depicting a girl listening to headphones and holding a cup of tea, while the rolling steam shows images of early Chinese immigrants arriving on ships and working on farms.
In more recent years, as I’ve learned more and more about the history of early Chinese-American immigrants to the States, I feel increasingly that those stories have largely been forgotten. While I had briefly learned about the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act in school, I never knew about the riots where residents violently forced Chinese workers out of cities (Seattle and Tacoma had some of the worst ones) or that Chinatowns were created as a way of protecting people from the violent racism beyond their boundaries. I wanted to find a way to talk about it and start conversations about it.
When I was brought on to the Allgire Project by the (amazing!) team at Overall Creative, they asked if I had any ideas about what I could design that would tie into the local history of the mural site at Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island. I discovered quickly that the there had been many Chinese immigrants who lived there during the 1880’s, working on potato farms and in fisheries. Eventually, as anti-Chinese sentiment grew, they were forced out by mob violence, when other local residents dynamited Chinese potato patches.
Through the design, I wanted to show the connection of Chinese-Americans today to those early stories. The main figure is a girl of today, but she’s tied to the stories of those who came before her in the scenes depicted in the rolling steam of her cup of tea.
Human for scale.
Just a few of our amazing community volunteers who helped make this possible!
I was so thrilled to get to create this piece and reference a piece of history that I think has mostly been lost there. On the first day of painting, people of all ages showed up to contribute their time and energy to seeing this come to life, and I’m so grateful for that. I hope that through art, we can continue to tell these stories.
Thank you to Sarah at the Allgire Project, Kathleen & Lina at Overall Creative, community donors, and all the wonderful community volunteers who helped paint the mural, for letting me share this story! (also thank you to my parents and Jay for graciously giving up part of the weekend to help me do this!)
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It’s finally here! My first utility box wrap, designed for the Renton Arts Commission, was installed in June and seeing in person was so much fun! As someone who works digitally most of the time, a lot of my work never leaves my 13-inch computer screen - to see it beautifully printed in high-quality and 5 feet high was such a treat!
This was originally a design I made for the back of one of my business cards when I first started selling prints and exhibiting at art shows, so it has a special place in my heart. I’ve also been selling it as a print at art shows!
So many thanks to all the wonderful people at the Renton Arts Commission and City of Renton for supporting my work and giving my opportunity to share what I love!!
