I grew up drawing. I drew lots and lots of cars. I had always thought of drawing as a means to create a design. Drawing was a way to think, a way to express, a way to invent. As my work became more typographic, drawing was no longer as much of a component of the final product and more relegated to the beginning phases. However, I had the opportunity to speak with Louis Danziger, a pillar of 20th century graphic design, while studying at ArtCenter. He encouraged me to continue developing my illustration skills to be a more well-rounded designer.
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I grew up drawing. I drew lots and lots of cars. I had always thought of drawing as a means to create a design. Drawing was a way to think, a way to express, a way to invent. As my work became more typographic, drawing was no longer as much of a component of the final product and more relegated to the beginning phases. However, I had the opportunity to speak with Louis Danziger, a pillar of 20th century graphic design, while studying at ArtCenter. He encouraged me to continue developing my illustration skills to be a more well-rounded designer.
As a hiker and landscape photographer, I'm often on trails in the hills and mountains near where I live. It was a satisfying challenge to pull from my experience of the outdoors to create a landscape illustration, something I had never done before. I had also never illustrated people. Using plenty of reference I think I was able to pull it off. I was aiming for a whimsical style with exaggerated curves and simple shading, creating dimension mostly through line alone.
My task was to advertise the screening of No Más Bebés, a documentary that addresses cases of reproductive injustice towards Mexican immigrants in the US in the 1960 and 70s. American doctors at USC Medical Center sterilized migrant women while giving birth. As an hispanic designing the poster, I thought it would be an interesting constraint to rely solely on the creative talent of hispanic type foundries for text in these posters, in a sense uniting the people of Latin America and South America with the Mexican immigrants suffering from injustice. The second poster I designed several months later as a revisitation to the problem. I did some more research on old cultural symbols for fertility in Latino cultures and discovered Kokopelli. Kokopelli is found all over Southwestern United States in addition to Latin America. He's represented as a figure playing a flute-like instrument. Looking closely I saw a face in the negative space of his form. With the addition of a tear, its impact was intended to be more emotional.
This was a class project where we were tasked with combining two seemingly unrelated words or symbols into an illustration to create an unexpected meaning. Interested in achieving complete unexpected outcomes, I made 100 little sketches of objects, cut them out, threw them in a container, and drew two at random. Once combined, I wrote captions playing off of the combination.
For the holidays I went to Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks in Utah and was inspired by some of the posters in the gift shops. Using my own photography from my trip, I made a few posters in the classic National Parks style.
I was asked by my design professors to design posters for Moorpark College's Year Of Wellness series. Later on, I decided to rework the colors and typographic treatment, seen here. In my illustration work I like to play with visual metaphor. I aimed for a simple yet effective ways to represent our dependence on smart phones and the feeling of getting free from debt.
