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!