Emerging Talent: Taylor Horne
“I think my biggest fear as an artist (and when I walk home alone at night) is that people might try to put me in a box.”
Roster Refresh - Homestead Creatives
Homestead Creatives is a premier artist agency and production company based in Austin, Texas, founded by Shannon McMillan and Maddie Hamilton. Homestead unites and showcases independent local photographers, designers and advertising creatives on a national level, and one day will be worldwide.
Featured Contributor: Linus Curci
Recent Moore College of Art and Design alumnus, Linus Curci, boasts a refreshing portfolio of paper cut illustrations. Upon first glance, the viewer is brought to a familiar location – a frequented bus stop, a boarded up moonlit building, a corner bodega. And while there is a looming sense of singularity prevalent in many of his works, there remains a profound sense of introspection, rather than loneliness.
Mike Cressy’s Luck
Seattle illustrator Mike Cressy recently landed a fantastic gig drawing the cover of popular children’s magazine Spider. Although he hadn’t done a job for Spider for the past several years, Mike stayed in touch with them by sending postcards of his recent work. This persistence paid off when an email landed in his inbox offering him the opportunity to design the cover of Spider’s March 2014 issue.
Mike enjoyed carte blanche with this gig, the dream of most freelancers. He was told that the illustration was related to an article about leprechauns, mirroring the St. Patrick’s theme of the issue. Apart from that, Mike had free reign over the cover design.
Straight away Mike began researching leprechauns for inspiration. He asked himself what a leprechaun might do on his down time, and what sorts of activities they might engage in. Applying this “real life” thought to a mythical creature helped the illustrator develop a few concept sketches (see above).
After discussing eight or nine concepts with the art director for Spider, Mike finally settled on the factory design seen in color above. His experience working in a factory when he was young clearly comes through in the final product.
“Sometimes Art Directors play it safe which tends to lead to boring, uninspired illustrations,” Mike said. “I was thankful that I was allowed to run with this one, and I’m proud of what I produced.”
To see more of Mike’s wonderful illustrations, visit his FoundFolios portfolio.
Joanne Hus Draws Up a Play
After seeing the stellar images on Joanne Hus’ FoundFolios portfolio, the managing editor of SportsBusiness Journal, Ross Nethery, knew that she was the illustrator he was looking for to create the cover of his magazine’s twentieth anniversary issue. A quick phone call later and Joanne happily accepted the job.
Joanne briefly discussed with Ross what the cover image should convey, and then got to work sketching up a concept. Her initial thought was to use sports stadiums shaped as the number “20” as the centerpiece of the illustration. After sending a draft back to Ross, they both agreed that there should be a more modern twist on the piece to convey the passing and changing of time from when the magazine first launched in 1994 to present day. This gave her the idea of using a smartphone in the image because “streaming video on a device would not have been possible even just a few years ago.”
Needless to say, Ross loved the smartphone concept. A few drafts later, Joanne turned in the final product. Her finished illustration was the perfect complement to the magazine and truly conveyed the celebratory mood that SportsBusiness Journal wanted.
A big part of the success can be attributed to the great relationship between the client and the illustrator.
“Ross is the type of client that I love working with,” recalled Joanne. “Even though he never worked with an illustrator before, he didn’t micromanage, and basically gave me carte blanche to come up with a concept.” This freedom ended up paying off big time.
Joanne Hus creates playful illustrations that appeal to kids and the grown-ups who buy for them. To read more about the process, head to Joanne’s illustration blog.
Emily Welham’s Silent Absurdity
Emily Welham’s imagination is her greatest asset. It’s clear looking at her illustrations that she is hugely influenced by “inane stories and the strange and sinister.” After years of perfecting her craft, Emily has come to refer to her wonderfully detailed drawings as “silently absurd.”
During her degree, Emily discovered satisfaction in portraying a wordless narrative. “I enjoyed the challenge of conveying something solely within the drawing, without relying on words to explain what it is illustrating. In that sense it’s much more of a slow hitting type of imagery.” Without text or other clues to direct the viewer to the meaning of the image, the mind is free to interpret Emily’s work however it may. In fact, one might see or interpret something entirely different upon revisiting her work. This is Emily’s goal.
Despite the label of “absurd,” there are definitely elements of Emily’s work which are grounded in reality. She draws inspiration from things she observes in real life, and then thrusts these things into devilishly skewed universes of her own imagining. This mashup of reality and absurdity gives the viewer a certain uneasy feeling. For her, Emily’s fantastic and highly meticulous illustrations create, in her words, “an environment where I can illustrate a tangent of thoughts and random situations I have imagined.”
To see more of Emily’s intriguing concepts, go to her FoundFolios portfolio.
Eric Rosner Goes Hollywood
As part of a recent gig, illustrator Eric Rosner was working with The Crest Theatre, a historic landmark in Westwood, California. Thinking about ways to get the theatre more exposure, Eric was able to convince the manager to host a classic film festival honoring the genre. To promote the festival, Eric was looking for a way to refresh old posters for classic films like Psycho and Georges Méliès’ seminal A Trip to the Moon. Of course he knew that he would use his singular talent for ink marker illustrations, but it took some time to develop a concept.
“I decided I wanted to modernize these film posters by highlighting different elements of the films that weren’t the focal point in the past posters.” The original poster for Psycho, for example, featured Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins but no reference to the now infamous “shower scene.” Nowadays, that scene cannot be disassociated with the film (and indeed American cinema as a whole), so Eric wanted to showcase this in his recreation. “I really wanted to illustrate the terror of the shower scene that Hitchcock was able to impart.”
For the A Trip to the Moon poster, Eric knew that the most memorable image from the film was the rocket crashing into the moon’s eye. So, he decided to illustrate the “before” scene, with the moon and rocket intact.
The festival turned out to be a big hit thanks in part to Eric’s awesome promotional posters – and he isn’t running out of steam yet. “Although painstaking and time consuming, I still find doing these ink marker illustrations a fun and exhilarating process.” Currently Eric is working on illustrating posters with a more political slant, trying to shed light on important social issues. “I really want to stir it up and get people’s attention.”
For more of Eric’s fantastic illustrations, check out his FoundFolios portfolio.
Kim DeMarco’s Favorite New Yorker Cover
Artist and designer Kim Demarco has enjoyed what many illustrators would consider a dream career.
Her work appears often on the cover of The New Yorker magazine and in The New York Times; her A-list advertising clients include Kate Spade, Harrod’s and the New York Public Library; she’s graced the faculties at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Parsons School of Design and Philadelphia University.
But ask Kim, currently a Senior Lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, to pick a favorite professional memory, and she’s likely to recall this New Yorker cover, which led off the magazine’s 2007 holiday issue.
Of all her New Yorker covers, all the commercial assignments she’s completed for Mikasa and Barney’s New York, this snowy cityscape holds a special significance for the artist for two reasons.
The first, she says, is simple: “I love New York City. I lived in the city for many years and it’s the place where I really developed as an artist.”
The second reason this memory stands out is that New Yorker covers are almost always conceived by the artists who create them, and she was “honored” when New Yorker Art Editor Francoise Mouly selected this wintry homage to the Big Apple for the magazine’s prestigious end-of-year cover.
“It’s one of the few areas in illustration where one can propose his or her own idea or perception,” Kim notes. “A kind of visual editorial.”
Click here to see some of Kim’s other New Yorker covers and more of her top-shelf work.