What's your neighbourhood like?

Last Thursday night my partner Marc and I decided to get out-and-about and we headed towards funky Collingwood, where the Design Files together with Lamington Drive Editions were launching their Neighbourhoods Calendar.

It was great to see some creative people about and gorgeous illustrations of some of Melbourne's neighbourhoods by talented illustrators Kat Macleod, Kat Chadwick, Beci Orpin, James Gulliver Hancock, Good Wives and Warriors, Pauline Matthewman, Rik Lee, Jane Reiseger, Marcela Restrepo, Madeleine Stamer, Neryl Walker and Webuyyourkids.

One gallery wall featured a beautiful illustration by Kat Chadwick of Melbourne and its surrounding suburbs. The gallery visitors were asked to decorate a flag and spike it on the map, pointing out which 'hood they belong to.

I also spotted limited edition prints by Kat Macleod, who's work I truly admire. Her beautiful illustrations captured my heart many years ago.

I think the calendar is a great idea, and it even includes a cute illustration of our new hood- Yarraville- by Jane Reiseger, so I had to buy one for myself of course! What a wonderful way to (re)discover Melbourne in 2011.

Journals - Vancouver Series

Do you love a good journal? I do, especially one with a really cute cover on it, that motivates me to pick it up, start writing and share my most intimate thoughts.

I love how a beautiful journal can make you feel, so I've taken on a little personal project, to create some of my very own journal designs.

I am working on a collection of these, inspired by the one and only city of Vancouver... and all its little quirks... like the relentless rain... Here is a sneak peek of the first two designs:

I illustrated the images by hand, scanned them and converted them to vectors, then applied colour using Illustrator. I'm having SO much FUN creating this series!

Would you pick up one of these in a store? Please let me know what you think? I would love to hear your feedback!

Maja

Recently published illustrations

I've come to realise that I have not shared some of my successes of recent times: a number of my illustrations have been published!

Here is a sketch I did for a Summer Haircare article in the Summer Issue of alive Australia, followed by the final illustration done in Illustrator.

I also had the opportunity to illustrate some exercises, which was a bit tricky, but fun!



And lastly, I was thrilled to do 8 original illustrations for the Autumn Issue of alive Australia for a fantastic article about bush foods. I love drawing flowers and plants so this one was an absolute joy to create and they looked wonderful once printed!

I'm in the studio today working on some Vancouver inspired illustrations - I'll reveal them soon!

Maja

Tree again again!

It's been a while since I blogged, mainly because I was off gallivanting around Melbourne, Australia visiting my family and meeting my gorgeous niece Ela.

But I'm back in Vancouver with the Olympics party in full swing. As soon as I got back I became re-captivated by those bare trees - again!

I know I should be drawing the athletes, the crazy crowds downtown or the snow-less slopes but all I can look at is those gorgeous dwindling branches... I just want to hug them! They must be anxious for spring to come (which by the way looks like its almost here).

So, here's another, well, tree, this time on a great big new sketch pad using conte and charcoal. Done on the studio floor.

Illustration Friday - Wilderness

It's been a while since I drew something for Illustration Friday, but this week's topic of wilderness coincides with some illustrations I'm working on for an article about wild Australian bush food.

For now I am just experimenting with the style and materials - I have chosen pencil, water-soluble pencils and ink to create this drawing of a wild lime, also known as desert lime.

Mmmmm.

On the cover!

This month I'm very excited to see the new December issue of Alive come out - a logo that I designed for the Alive Awards has been published on the front cover!

When designing the logo I tried to think of the word "alive" and the products that the awards are for - natural health products. So this is how I came up with the concept of 'being alive' - I wanted to capture that feeling of joy and vibrancy of good health. The idea of a figure leaping with confidence and excitement came into my head.

I sourced a number of reference images and then sketched a silhouette. After scanning my sketches, I used Adobe Illustrator to trace the outlines and simplify the image. There was a number of revisions - maybe three to four pages with 10 concepts per page, before we settled on the final design, above.


The Alive Awards spread also features 17 illustrations that I created for each category! It is very exciting to see them all in print, in stores, in people's hands. Grab a copy this month for a very good read.

Relentless Rain

It's been raining what seems like forever in Vancouver - 10 days, 12 days? I don't know anymore.

It's been very dark, wet and depressing and I'm trying really hard not to let this weather bring me down so recently I began imagining what it would be like if the rain was rainbow coloured!

Here is an illustration I created today showing multicoloured raindrops - so much fun :) Not sure if I'm finished with this yet, I might add more drops or a background hue. What colour would the clouds be? What would the windows look like? Would the drains be filled with rainbow water? I used water-soluble pencils for the blurry, watery effect.

What would our world be without imagination and art? I hope this picture inspires you to walk down the street with your brolly (umbrella) and see what I see - glorious colours.

Enjoy!
Maja

Tree again!

Today I'm stretching and priming a 30x30" piece of canvas... not sure what I'll paint on it yet but I feel like getting my hands dirty and I wanted to use some materials I have left over from Costa Rica.

So, while I wait for the first coat to dry I thought I'd share another tree I drew a couple of weeks ago. This one is an actual tree that is on the corner of my street. I used shellac based black ink on some left over printmaking paper - probably not the best surface to use inks on as it is quite thick and sucked up all my ink instantly so was a little hard to have a nice flow.

Anyway, here it is. I'm really enjoying looking at and sketching trees (when it stops raining in Vancouver) so I think I'm going to continue and start a little tree collection.

Back to priming!

In my sketchbook

Hey its Friday and I'm stretching canvas in my studio, getting a bit distracted...

Lately I've been sketching all sorts of things in my sketchbook, so I'd thought I'd share some of them here.

I'm still fascinated by trees and their bare branches... here is one sketch i did recently. Instead of solid colour I used crosshatching lines to fill it in. I did this randomly but I think next time I will try to follow the texture of the tree.

I've seen a lot of bird illustrations around, I think they're really cute so I had to have a go at one myself. It took me a number of versions to get to this simplified form of an Australian Blue bird (that's me missing the constant chirp of birds and parrots that is prominent all over Australia.) After a few sketches I created a final colour version with my shellac based inks and brush on paper (this time just plain white drawing paper).

I'm also working on creating some Christmas illustrations. Instead of buying cards I thought I'd make them myself this year for family and friends, and that way I will build up a portfolio of images for this season, to submit to greeting card publishers for next year. This one is inspired by my boyfriend Marc-Andre who is an elf this Christmas!

Gotta go and get back into it now - enjoy!

Published!

Wow! Yesterday I got my hands on the November issue of Canada's alive magazine - some of my illustrations and designs are finally published! What started off as a short term contract has now turned into a permanent part-time role and I'm very excited to be a part of the alive publishing team.

Below is my most proud illustration for an article about eco labelling on coffee.


And here are a couple of more pages that I designed and illustrated. Alive is Canada's natural health and wellness magazine and is distributed to health food retailers nationally - 190,000 copies per month. That's a lot of eyes falling in love with my designs :)


















It's a really great read so get your free copy in stores now!