The Little Things are the Best Things

Another year of the Lilla Rogers Global Talent Search has come and gone, and I’m happy to report I’m a loser.

Don’t get me wrong – I would’ve loved, loved, LOVED to have made it to the next round, and eventually be picked to be the winner that receives 2 years of representation. It makes me sick to my stomach that I didn’t get into round 2. I want to push my illustration career so badly, and I am a little mad at myself that I wasn’t good enough to move forward.

But at the same time, I’m happy.

This year, I pushed myself harder and stretched myself farther than I have in a long, long time for a personal project. I spent an entire week creating sketches, drawings, and paintings following the tiny terrariums theme for the rearignment, that would later be collaged together in Photoshop:

The little things… they’re my kids. And I made this art all week long with them. I sometimes have to remind myself these two little things are the reason I push so hard to make this business succeed. So that I can be home with them, and enjoy them.

The fact that I could just play with drawing and painting with my kids for a change, and have fun with it while we all played with art… I don’t even care that I lost.

Because really, I won.

This piece is for my kids.

Joy’s obviously in the handdrawn typography – Phil’s contribution is more subtle. The peachy coral painted background is two separate scans of his watercolor paintings, layered together and recolored in Photoshop.

This piece was a family affair.

Huge thanks go to Josh and Carole, making this a piece of art that the whole family got involved in. My huzz put up with crazy levels of stress while I was working on this, and Carole stepped in to help me tweak what colors went where in the final moments before submitting. I literally couldn’t have done something this cool without everyone else in this house.

I knew I wanted to put this art on Society6 so I could order a really nice print of the finished piece – but then I pushed myself juuuuust a little bit farther, and I played with editing the image to create artwork that’s more specific to their different products.

And as I did that, I started realizing that I want to move in a slightly different direction with my own illustration work. Maybe I’m just in a phase of my art life where I’m really starting to explore – who knows.

This art is way out of the norm for the kind of stuff I usually do on my own. But I love the idea of taking my drawing and painting further than one off funny sayings with cartoon characters.

I wanna push my character art into a realm where it feels like it’s got more of a place in the licensing slash surface design world, where someone could use a package of my related art elements easily for a bajillion different things.