illustration, it’s a process

Find the Calm in the Chaos:: a change of background was the answer!

Loving the text, not loving the Easter!

Hmm, I wanted this to be different than the LET GO illustration.

Trust me, the irony of how much I had to wrestle with this illustration was not lost on me. I won’t lie, I was feeling uncomfortable with how much time it was taking! I took a bit of a break and started to play with it again after some feedback from my husband and my Monday co-working group of fellow artists.. Above is what I came up with.

I’m finding gardening every morning very satisfying and to quote Blur in Park Life, “It gives me a sense of enormous well-being”. It’s also basically manual labour and switching tasks isn’t fatiguing for my brain. However, yesterday my son asked me to watch a YouTube video about productiveness (mostly I was listening because I had no idea what I was looking at in this League of Legends Streamer’s video). I LOVE what he had to say! And I loved even more that our 20 year old, was listening to him (saying stuff we’d been saying for some time now-ha! parenting!). Needless to say I love learning about ways to be more productive and my favourite Huberman Lab Podcast episode is with Dr Cal Newport: How to Enhance Focus and Improve Productivity. Which this steamer mentioned! See Kiddo, your mom is COOL! Ha!

This is the square version.

Since then I’ve been wondering if I’d be happier dedicating a full day to design work, not just mornings. Knowing my time is up at lunch makes me feel a bit chaotic and it’s hard to relax into the design process. The brain change is well, a bit distracting and taxing.

Either way, I worked on this illustration today after knowing it could be better and I didn’t want to settle with just alright. I thought, maybe I need to change the background? I loaded up the Endless Summer repeat and YEP! There it is! YES! I KNEW IT!

This is the 8x10 inch version

So to recap, last year after I had designed the Goin’ Surfin’ collection (after camping and surfing) I assumed, yep, that’s what this collection is about. Nope. It wasn’t until it was done that I realized for the last two years our lives had been turned upside down. We were sinking and taking on water. Our lives were total chaos. Think of the movie, “Everything, Everywhere all at Once” , that was us. Then, in the middle of it, and with help from the good people at The Foundry, we found the calm. Much, much needed calm in all that chaos.

My hope is that everything in your life never gets wildly out of control like ours did. However, if it does, please know this illustration is dedicated to bring you comfort & support.

ENDLESS SUMMER : : VANS

One of the very best parts of Tofino, other than the beaches and waves, is Tacofino, a parked food truck that serves tacos and my very favourite, Diablo cookies!

So there we were, after a day of attempted surfing (but successful boogie boarding), we thought we’d head into town to Tacofino. As we were driving to it we saw it! The most beautiful van I had ever seen…

The next day we went back to Tacofino for round two, and we also enjoyed ice-cream at Chocolate Tofino. While waiting in line for the ice cream I noticed this chalkboard painting of a van with surfboards stacked extremely high on it (I thought it was funny and took a very fuzzy photo of it). While I didn’t stack my surfboards that high on my vans they definitely influenced mine! Inspiration was everywhere on this trip!

I haven’t even told you about the sunsets yet! They were blazing and reminded me of the Endless Summer movie poster, hence the name for the top left print.

With every collection I love to do a standalone illustration for the name of the collection. While playing with some markers, I came up with the goin’ surfin’ lettering and ended up incorporating it into a tossed goin’ surfin’ van print.

So the moral of the story is, eat Tacofino, it’s good for your health, especially the diablo cookies, as is ice cream at Chocolate Tofino! Oh and yes, inspiration is everywhere… especially in Tofino!