2025 Utah Taekwondo Championship

I had the privilege of creating a tournament poster for the Utah Taekwondo Association and their state championship tournament coming this spring. Since I was able to photograph a bunch at last year’s tournament, I used a handful of those photos for this year’s poster.

I even managed to use a photo of my youngest son. He’s the red belt on the right breaking a board with a tornado kick.

The fun challenge with these was color-correcting all of the reflected light on everyone’s white uniforms. It’s something most people don’t notice, but our white taekwondo uniforms reflect everything, and the mats at this tournament were bright blue along with very yellow fluorescent overhead lighting. Even when I look at the poster now, I see a few spots I wish I could go back and correct a little more.

Photographing these tournaments is a photography challenge all in itself with needing high speed in pretty low light.

Because I was on a roll when working on this, I went ahead and made versions that were social media-friendly for FB events, Instagram story, and more.

I’m really happy with how these turned out and I’m looking forward to being at this year’s tournament to take photos again. I am still deciding if I will compete again myself.

Spirit For Us Canadian Whisky

Through a friend of a friend, I got an email one day from Kevin. He was starting a business in bottling Canadian Whisky and wanted to hire me to help him build the brand from scratch. He sent me the vision he had along with some general ideas about colors, mood, and where he was thinking this business would lead. We played around with a few logo concepts and some ideas on what kind of bottle label we could do.

The first round of logo concepts was pretty broad, playing with different fonts and a play on a slogan he already had: The Rising Tide of Canadian Whisky. We toyed around with some ocean-themed graphics but didn’t want it to look too pirate-y.

Here is the final logo. I really love how it turned out.

And after many, many iterations, here’s what the label will look like on his first bottling.

We will make adjustments to all of the little details like batch, cask, distillery, and age with each variation that gets bottled. Also notice the little label above the main label saying “Whisky for Us.” That will change if they ever decide to bottle a different spirit.

I made these bottle mockups so they could use them on their website.

Kevin was kind enough to send me a bottle along with some labels so I am going to see what kind of photos I can get with my camera and my very-non-professional lights. Hilariously, I live in Utah, where it’s illegal to ship alcohol. So I asked Kevin to ship the bottle to my sister in California and she drove it to me when she and her family visited over Thanksgiving. :::eyeroll:::

Thanks, Kevin!

Irvington High School Custom Hats

I had the pleasure of creating a watercolor painting for the sole purpose of putting it on a trucker hat for Irvington High School’s track & field and cross country teams in Fremont, California. The most recognizable peak in Fremont is Mission Peak. It’s barely a foothill by my Utah standards at a mere 2,516 feet in elevation, but it’s by far the most well-known by residents in the area. Since I grew up in neighboring Newark, California, I know this peak well.

I don’t live in the area anymore, so I had to use images from Google as reference and we went with a viewpoint as close to the high school’s as possible. The color of the hills themselves varies on the time of year. In spring, the hills are a vibrant green, depending on how much rain they got in the winter. By late summer, the hills turn to a harvest gold color, and become a huge fire hazard! I have always thought they are pretty in either colors, but I know some hate the gold, calling it brown instead.

This was such a joy to paint and I LOVE how the hats turned out. I designed the IHS logo that we added. Irvington’s track and XC coach had the hats printed with Boco Gear in Colorado. He actually had two hats made; one with the painting and another that was solely a running hat in white with just the viking logo that I designed earlier this year. They both turned out awesome.

I know they are planning to use the hats for a little bit of fundraising, so I am excited to see what kind of money they bring to their track & field program this coming spring.

You can watch a timelapse video of my process with this painting here. This view of Mission Peak is close to what can be seen from Irvington High School.

I really had a hard time getting my iPhone camera to capture the correct lighting when doing this painting. It looks pretty washed out in the video. One one snippet, I turned off my overhead light and just used the natural light in my office, but I couldn’t keep that up as I worked on this well into the night. Maybe there’s a light setting on my phone that I can mess with?

Patrick, the track and XC coach at Irvington HS had a second hat made with the logo I created. This one is a running hat and he went with a simple topographic map design that Boco Gear already had. It’s such a comfortable and lightweight hat. And it looks rad with the Irvington logo.

This was such a fun project! I cannot wait to see what other paintings I can make to be turned into hats!

Laura's Holiday Card - 2023

2023 marked 10 years that I’ve been working with Laura on all of her creative and fun holiday cards. Here you can see every fun holiday card Laura and I have worked on together.

2023 was no exception when it came to something fun. Laura joked about doing a traditional card with just a family photo. I told her their family would wonder if something was wrong or if there was a hidden meaning.

This year was simpler than previous years; minimal Photoshop this time. She just sent me the photos of her family and I went to work with the Polaroid concept and the simple wood background.

What a fun holiday card!! Thanks, Laura!

Ten Decades and Counting Book Cover

I had the absolute privilege of designing a book cover for my grandpa’s autobiography this spring. He turned 104 in July and he’s been working on his autobiography for a few years with some help from his eldest daughter and a few of us grandkids.

My grandpa, Kenneth, was born in Missouri in 1920. He grew up during the Great Depression and served in the 106th infantry division in WWII where he played with the USO band. He met my grandma by chance at a USO dance. She also served and was a nurse. They were married for over 75 years until she passed away at 102 years old. They raised 4 kids together. And when I say together, I really mean it. My grandpa was more hands-on as a dad than so many men from his generation and I know it made an impression on the kind of father my dad was/is. I’d like to think it even influenced what kind of dad my husband has been to our kids.

With his heavy background in music, my grandpa taught music, band, orchestra, and more in Kansas public schools for decades and was inducted into the Kansas Teachers Hall of Fame in the 1980s.

One of the tasks I was more than happy to help with was editing and cleaning up the photos from my grandpa’s life; photos of varying ages and conditions. We knew that any photos printed in the book would be in black and white, so I was able to clean up quite a few photos and converted any color images to grayscale. This is definitely NOT a specialty of mine, but there are a few I’m quite proud of.

Correcting photos with silver oxidation was a new one for me. Many thanks to YouTube for a few different techniques.

My grandpa is the kid on the left with his brother and his dad, my great-grandpa.

My grandparents in the 1940s.

Top left: my grandma with my Aunt Sue and my dad. Top right: my grandparents with their 4 kids for some kind of “family of the year” photo shoot. Bottom left: my grandparents when they got married. Bottom right: my grandparents in Bali in the 1980s.

For the book cover, my cousin Chris and I had a handful of photos of my grandparents together that we decided between. We agreed that this one worked best for the cover. I love how they aren’t looking at the viewer and it feels like an intimate moment between them. I love the look in their eyes and how my grandma is messing with his jacket button. It’s a perfect pose that shows me how in love they were without looking like it was posed. Honestly, I don’t know if it was a posed photo, it may not have been.

For the cover design, I wanted to isolate them from the background, but I didn’t want the background to be empty either. After cleaning up as much of the dust and spots and noise in the scanned image as I could, I played with some different blurring effects and colors. In the end I’m really happy with how it turned out.

My cousin Chris, wrote the blurb for the back and we were able to get it published through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing.

My grandpa’s book is available for purchase on Amazon if you want to order one. CLICK HERE to buy through my affiliate link.