Inspired and On Time
Macy's Drum Majorette © Macy's
As December marches on and it gets harder to avoid the need to shop for gifts (or materials and ingredients to make gifts), I’m reflecting on some illustrations I did for one of the big retailers, Macy’s. These line art and color images were used for holiday ads. Ho ho ho…
Santa's Watch-Macy's © Macy's
Macy's Gift Box © Macy's
Macy's Sleigh © Macy's
I Heart Macy's Car © Macy's
Macy's Shopper © Macy's
This Sunday, September 9 at 11:00, Ragini Michaels will present a FREE Teleseminar featuring 16 of the 26 illustrations I created to help her explain her strategy for achieving happiness and peace of mind as described in her recent book Unflappable. (I posted a blog about my sumi illustrations in that book on May 19, 2012). Here are some examples of my NEW stylized “stick figure” characters acting out their tensions both antagonistically and as a creative dynamic as they struggle to resolve their quite unresolvable dilemmas. These illustrations are quite different from the book artwork as they are totally created as vector art for the web in Adobe Illustrator.
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Each concept is formatted with a boxed heading labeling the issue category that we may be struggling with. We fluctuate between polar opposite feelings that are stated by the text that makes up the character’s torsos. Antagonistic expressions of the tensions have jagged bases labeled “dilemma”, while the Creative Dynamic Tension expressions have a rounded base with the “dilemma” label. The polar pair characters are made of one rounded character and one angular character, also distinguished by tone. Here’s another simpler set:
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You can see that I had fun with colors, fonts and vector art while creating these illustrations. It was also fun working with Ragini to figure out what sort of actions the characters might be doing. Here’s a set just in time for football season:
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Tune into Ragini’s Free Teleseminar on Sunday to see the rest of these illustrations. It will be fun for me to see them in use and perhaps we can all find more enlightenment, happiness and insight for dealing with our inner tensions.
Hot off the press from Conari Press is a long awaited book by Ragini Michaels titled “Unflappable: Six Steps to Staying Happy, Centered , Peaceful – No Matter What.”
I contributed several sumi paintings to this book about navigating the paradoxes of life, represented by the infinity loop, that has us continually cycling through the polarities of our emotions. Ragini draws upon the wisdom of the mystics and contemporary psychology to give us a process to become truly unflappable in a “land of unresolvable dilemmas.”
Ragini has been a pleasure to work with. Her upcoming webinar will feature 26 of my illustrations in a whole new style. Stay tuned. Congratulations, Ragini, on realizing the dream of this book coming into being.
With the higher demand for vector illustration these days I’ve been recreating some of my favorite traditionally drawn images as vector art. This gives me a chance to update the line work to my current stroke styling, opening it up. Below is the original art for a packaging design for Caravali Coffee’s Irish Creme flavor. I credit that assignment with the birth of my current style. With creative freedom, I had 13 flavors to illustrate, creating a new direction and a new portfolio to present to a wider market. The strong line and vivid color has found many uses in print and web as seen on this web site. My styling lends itself well to vector, don’t you think? But, I still welcome any opportunity to paint! Let’s paint the town GREEN!
Illustration for laser surgery article
My line art image of a hand and face was used by Joan Barrow at Connecticut Magazine to enhance a Health story about the advances in laser surgery. Not only are lasers useful for vital surgical procedures but also for making our slightest flaws disappear without damage to surrounding tissue. A magic tool for health and beauty! Here’s how the art looks on the page in the current February 2012 issue! Sorry, I don’t have a link to the whole story which is hard to read here….
