Laura's Holiday Card - 2021

Laura never disappoints with unique and creative ideas for her family’s holiday card. Every year she jokes about doing a “normal” card and freaking out their friends and family thinking there’s some kind of hidden Easter egg of kookiness. Nope!!

This year Laura had fun with Photoshop and some fun, fake book cover ideas. I helped out with some Photoshop too; especially getting her son’s head and their pug, Mr Bean into the Last Action Hero poster and coming up with the book type. I also threw together the plaid background and the actual books that each cover is part of. This was SO much fun to work on!!

A little zoomed-in action. Thanks for this EPIC holiday card concept, Laura!!

Coyote Hills Elementary Logo

A while back my friend, Brandi reached out to me about creating a new logo for the elementary school where she’s a teacher. It just so happens to be the same elementary school where both she and I were students back in the 1980s. The school district made some big changes last year, and one of them included a new name for our old school and I was asked to help them with a new logo.

It has been such fun to be part of the process to rebrand MY elementary school.

They had students submit hand-drawn concepts for the logo and the school committee (made up of teachers and the principal) chose one as a conceptual starting-off point for me. That drawing involved a howling coyote with beams of light in a circle around it. The landscape I created in the background is a portion of Coyote Hills Regional Park that the school is named after. I grew up hiking in those hills and going there on field trips!

It was a fun process taking that student’s artwork and turning it into a professional logo and I’m really happy with the final concept. I sent them multiple versions of this logo in one color, two colors, and three colors. That way they have multiple options in the event they want to print on t-shirts or make stickers.

Thanks so much for this fun opportunity!!

Follow me on TikTok!

As a middle-aged lady, AKA: member of the Oregon Trail Generation, I avoided TikTok as much as I avoided Twitter… which was a lot. But this spring a friend convinced me that TikTok could be a potentially awesome funnel for my business, so I begrudgingly downloaded it. I’m still learning how to upload videos at different lengths and how to find music that fits, all while trying to figure out how to create interesting content. But I’m starting to feel more and more comfortable with it.

My new Canvas Lamp has TOTALLY helped with this. You can read about it here.

One thing I do know, TikTok is a HUGE time suck. I will flip through a few videos and suddenly two hours have passed. I’ll go all day without looking at TikTok and see 50+ notifications that my sister or my husband has shared videos with me. #enablers

I plan to keep the content art-related as much as possible. I did post a video last week of me making peach jam, so there will be randoms non-art here and there. Although some may argue that making jam IS an art.

I have gone back and forth many times on whether to share about my taekwondo training and black belt journey. But since my black belt test is in two weeks, I feel like if I was going to document that journey, I should have started six months ago. Oh well. If I ever decide to get a 2nd Dan in taekwondo, maybe I will document THAT journey. Practicing martial arts is a whole other world when you don’t start as a kid.

Any requests on art content?? Any techniques you’d like to see?? I do a lot of landscape watercolor and wet-on-wet painting. I am considering diving back into oil painting, so maybe I’ll take some videos there too.

LÍLLÉbaby Product Manuals

For about four and a half years, I had the pleasure of working for LÍLLÉbaby as a contract graphic designer. They’re a baby carrier company that sells a variety of babywearing products like infant carriers, toddler carriers, stretchy wraps, ring slings, and more.

Their original user manuals used photographs of an adult and a baby to show step-by-step instructions on how to use the baby carriers. Some of the photos weren’t very clear on how each step was performed and in some instances, it was tough to get the baby to cooperate (which is totally understandable!). Plus, if any of the photos needed to be retaken, it was very difficult to find another baby the same size/age to recreate an image and maintain continuity.

They came to me with the idea of having a simplified drawing for each step rather than a photograph AND a goal to make the drawings as clear as possible so there could be as little text as possible. When these products are shipped to different countries, they have to have the manuals translated into different languages. Some phrases get confused in translations, so if the drawings were very clear, then there would hopefully be less confusion.

We started with the stretchy wrap and ring sling carriers. These first manuals were fun to create as a single page that folded up to be a little bigger than a business card.

From there we slowly started rebranding all of the booklet manuals for their existing Complete and CarryOn carriers.

As the years went on and they launched new products, I was thrilled to get to create new manuals for them; from carriers and wraps to accessories like a rain cover and a snuggly winter cover. For most products, we eventually created an international version that included all of the translated languages in one, big manual.

LÍLLÉbaby carriers were already my favorites when my boys were babies, so my knowledge on how their products work was integral in drawing these as clear and concise as possible. Understanding safe and correct babywearing made it easy for me to create these drawings and be in compliance with safety regulations and reduce any liability on the company.

Each new product was a new and fun challenge and they were truly a pleasure to create.

Hike it Baby 30 - April 2021

Hike it Baby 30 is here! What is this, you ask? It’s a challenge to get outside with your family every day for 30 days during the month of April. Hike it Baby is a nationwide nonprofit that aims to support families with young children to get outside and explore; no matter what that outdoor exploration looks like. Every April and September, they host a 30-day challenge and fundraiser that encourages and supports families getting outside every day for 30 days. Families who join and make a donation get to join a Facebook group where everyone shares their adventures and supports one another. They are also entered into drawings to win prizes from sponsors and everyone who joins the challenge gets a sticker that is unique to that challenge. Adventures can be in your neighborhood, backyard, local park, beach, lake, paved trail, or in the woods or mountains.

It’s been my privilege to get to design the stickers for these fundraisers since late 2017. Last September, I created a sticker that embraced the uniqueness of spring 2020 by showing a city park rather than a remote wilderness. For this April’s challenge, I continued that theme with a city fishing pond. The hammock and fishing pond was where my family spent a lot of our outside time in 2020, so it was special for me to create it in watercolor.

In addition to the sticker, Hike it Baby had me create a Spring Workbook for participants to use during the challenge. We grabbed some of the activity sheets that I created in the past and added a few new ones along with a spiffy, spring cover. I really love how it turned out.

30 flowers to color for 30 days.

Lastly, we almost always have a t-shirt campaign to go with each HiB30 and this time is no different. I was asked to make our sticker artwork into a t-shirt design that coordinated with previous t-shirt designs and there is a campaign with Bonfire for t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs. Check it out!

I cannot wait to see what we can create for the next Hike it Baby 30 challenge this coming September.