Archive for January, 2008

Lucy and Puff enjoy listening to grandma read many ‘tales and legends’ before bed. Click here to rate this illustration!

Karen from Sugar Nellie approached me a couple weeks ago to create some illustrations for her rubber stamp collection. Sugar Nellie is a UK based rubber stamp company. These stamps are often used in card making but can also be used for scrap booking or other paper crafts.

There are some incredible card-makers out there, making absolutely beautiful cards with these stamps! I met a couple of wonderful artists while working on this project – check out their blogs to see some of their lovely work: Erica at Scrapalicious and Claudia at Pretty Pressings (both these ladies have also kindly asked to use one of my illustrations in their banner!)

The challenge in creating these stamps was to take my sketchy style and convert it to solid black and white lines. I made a few attempts in Photoshop but ended up having to bring my illustrations into Illustrator in order to get the type of line quality needed to make rubber stamps. I was worried about losing my style in Illustrator, as it’s vector based and doesn’t give the same light/sketchy feel that can be achieved in Photoshop. I played around with different lines and techniques and ended up with a vector version of my style that I’m really happy with!

The collection of 9 stamps is based on my characters, ‘Simon and Lola’. There are also a couple animal friends in the collection – I love illustrating animals and couldn’t leave them out! The collection should be available in a couple weeks at Funky Kits. I’ve included a sneak peak of three of the stamps (they must be watermarked rather intensely in order to prevent people from simply printing them out for their cards… tisk tisk)!

I’m so excited about this collection and hope the stampers out there love it as much as I do :)

Teddy is feeling a little plain next to his girlfriend! Click here to rate this illustration.

I have tons of spot illustrations in my portfolio but definitely lack full page spreads. I want to incorporate more spreads in my portfolio in order to demonstrate my ability to work an illustration into a layout with text. I had a bit of fun in Photoshop and tried to make it look a bit like a real book :) Let me know what you think!

Click here to rate this illustration!

Sophie Griotto is an incredible artist from France. I have always admired and been inspired by her work. She’s a fashion illustrator who has an incredibly unique and beautiful style. She works digitally, as well as with natural materials. With light washes of colour, intricate line work/detailing, and beautiful silhouettes, Sophie is one of my favorite current artists. I hope you are as inspired by her as I am! Take a look at Sophie Griotto’s website for more samples of her work.