More plants!

Here are a few more Pacific Northwest fauna drawings for the new Ooligan site:

A pine branch!

Another pine branch with more pine!

Strawberries and leaves.

I like how these drawings turned out. I need to work on more art that isn't so cartoony.

Plants!

Cute animal drawings does not a website make, so I needed to do some Pacific Northwest flora drawings to balance out all the cartoony animals.

A fern. These are relaxing to draw.

Another fern. Also relaxing.

Trillium. There is a lake named after this plant in Oregon.

Cute Animals!

More drawings for the new Ooligan Press website. Who knows what our webmaster is going to do with all of these, but she's brilliant, so I think these drawings are in safe hands. The internet pretty much runs on cute animals, so it makes sense to fit them wherever we can on the site. Can't wait to post screenshots of the site when it goes live!

Beaver!

Chipmunk!

Fish! They're supposed to be salmon, but I think they're probably not very accurate. Also, it's hard to make some cute because most of them are hella ugly (especially salmon).

Tired huskies. The faces are kind of weird, but whatevs.

A raccoon for the 404 page. It just makes sense.

Nature Drawings

Here are a few images I've put together for the redesign of the Ooligan Press website:

Branch!

Leaves!

Log!

Pinecones! (Really hard to draw!)

I don't quite know what our webmaster is going to do with all of these images, but I'm glad it's getting me to draw more. I have a few more drawings to crank out soon, so those should be posted here soon.

Dam Good Books

Here's another little thing I whipped up for Ooligan Press:

I offered a beaver-less option if the press wanted to be a bit more high-brow, but I'm happy to see the little guy made the cut.

Ooligan Press is putting together "Dam Book Bundles" - basically a collection of 3 titles that our press has published. The titles are offered at a discount because you're buying multiple books. It's a pretty sweet deal, and you can check it out here if you want to buy some excellent titles from a student-run independent press. Check it out for the puns alone!

Even More Dragons

Because I have some drawing abilities, I couldn't just design a book and be done with it. No, I had to illustrate the book as well. I left things to the last minute (as usual), so I only had time to work up some line drawings. I'm content with the way they came out - I think the quality of the line in these drawings compliments the rest of the book's design well enough.

Here's some handlettering I did for the title page (of course I had to put spikes and a tail on the "g").

I love this sleeping dragon drawing.

Chill dragon is also one of my favorites.

Here Be Dragons!

For my Book Design class this term, I had to design an entire book (it was awesome!) so here are the cover comps I came up with:

This first one had some nice elements, but it looked a bit old for the target audience of this book (middle-grade level readers).

I really liked this design as well, but it looks like an adult book.

This one was the clear favorite of my peers. It was by far the most age appropriate, and since it's a book for younger audiences, I could get away with having an image-based back cover. The author photo and bio is much more of an adult book element anyway.

Here's the final! I made some suggested improvements, like handlettering the text on the cover and adding the dragon's arms to hold the banner. I obviously redrew the front and back illustrations as well, and added some cracks around the dragon butt to add to the illusion of the dragon breaking through the back of the book cover. My classmates liked where the colors bled outside the lines in the comp, so I replicated that in the final. I moved the ISBN box to a more sensible place as well.

I had some trouble finding reference images for the dragon's butt, but as multiple people reminded me, dragons aren't real so I could draw it however I liked.

Dancing Cats

Continuing the week of cuteness, here are more cats (if you need more cats drawings, just scroll through past blog posts). I was supposed to have a finished spread for the SCBWI-Oregon conference, but grad school got in the way, so I only finished the line art. This summer I need to color it in. Of course, nothing I do is going to compare to Jon Klassen's work, but a girl can dream.

Initial sketch:

The text from the spread I picked to illustrate: 

"Eight cats tap...tip bowler hats in pink tuxedos, canvas spats"

Left page refined sketch:

Right page refined sketch:

Left page line art:

Right page line art:

Super-Sized Squirrel

You may have noticed a trend on this blog (not in the last couple posts, but in a bunch of my cat drawings) that I love drawing really obese animals that look more like toys than anything living in the wild. The following is no exception.

I put together a t-shirt design for my peer mentoring program. We have a thing about squirrels (they're in all of our program newsletters), so it was a no-brainer to draw this up:

Embrace the squishiness!

Here's a picture of mentors wearing the shirt with my design on it:

MAPS Re-branding

Ooligan is not the only rebranding I've worked on this term. I wound up reworking one of my own designs for the MAPS team, a group of peer mentors that I am responsible for organizing. Conveniently, this means I can change the look of our brand whenever I want, because I have the power (please read that in a He-Man voice because I think he says that).

Anyway, long story short, I had to update the logo to make it digital-friendly. It lost a bit of it's character, but it's sleek-looking! Also, I learned what kerning was.

Original:

Revamped:

A fancy button I made that connects to a fancy webform:

All of the revised work fits with Portland State University's visual branding guidelines, which is probably important if this mentor group is going to have any longevity. Hooray for learning graphic design things!

Ooligan Press Blog Branding

I've completed my first year of grad school. Crazy! The next few months are going to be relatively light, responsibility-wise, so expect to see new material pop up in your news feeds on a regular basis. Unless I get really lazy this summer...

Anyway, what follows are some blog badges I created for the student-run publisher I work for, Ooligan Press. We're working on rebranding the Press and changing up the website, and my silly little doodles are part of it all.

First time around I created everything in Adobe Illustrator, which made everything graphic and clean, but these were missing the hand-drawn/human element that is an integral part of the press' identity.

These initial badges aren't bad, but our digital and social media department lead was looking for something that is obviously made by the human hand. So I went back to the drawing board (literally), and came up with these:

You may notice I was roped into creating a few more badges. This is not the last you'll see of the Ooligan-related work I did this term.

All of the Cats

Here's something I did a few months ago for the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) in Portland. They needed a half-sheet sized catalog cover to promote classes and events offered in February and March of this year. To the surprise of no one who has skimmed through this blog, it features cats.

The Valentine's Day image was the front cover and the St. Patrick's Day cats occupied the back cover.

Type Specimen: Adobe Caslon Pro

One of our assignments for my book design class this term was to create three type specimen sheets. Here's the final one I made (and my favorite), for Adobe Caslon Pro:

It was tough to find a limerick that wasn't too ribald for class, though I quite enjoy the one I found.

Type Specimen: Rockwell

One of our assignments for my book design class this term was to create three type specimen sheets. Here's the second one I made, for Rockwell:

Type Specimen: Century Schoolbook

One of our assignments for my book design class this term was to create three type specimen sheets. Here's the first one I made, for Century Schoolbook:

National Poetry Month

To celebrate the end of National Poetry Month, here is a line drawing of one of the all-time greats: Emily Dickinson.

This piece was published in the Winter 2014 edition of the Portland Review, along with a drawing of Edgar Allan Poe (which will show up on the sketch blog in the near future).

Birthday Goose

Made this for my sister's "golden" birthday last fall. I'm glad she understood my weird humor.

Front of card

Inside of card

Mr. Tea

A fun 80s mashup between Mr. T (who pities fools) and Mr. T (who has tall teeth) at a tea party (naturally). This piece was part of "Jibbart Jabbart: A Mr. T-Themed Art Show & Experience" at the PhilaMOCA in Philadelphia.

Line art

Picture from the show (c/o Ben and Amy Leach)

My art on the wall! (c/o Ben and Amy Leach)

Another view (c/o Ben and Amy Leach)