Brown Paper Bag Just another WordPress site

Illus­tra­tor Rebecca Green has per­fected pink cheeks and red noses. Using del­i­cate brush strokes and sub­tle col­or­ing, she con­structs a world that is full of dream­ing, wist­ful­ness, and a lot of celebration.

I think I most enjoy her paint­ing. The strokes and glaz­ing give her ladies and ani­mals more visual weight and place them firmly in their composition.

All images via her web­site.

Share on Tumblr

Illus­tra­tion is a form of prob­lem solv­ing. You take an arti­cle, a cre­ative brief, etc., and apply your unique lens to the prob­lem. Some illus­tra­tors have a style that is very dis­tinc­tive and gen­er­ally looks the same. Not every­one chooses to work this way. Some peo­ple enjoy let the tone of a project dic­tate the exact visual solution.

I would put illus­tra­tor Grace Dan­ico in the lat­ter camp. While her shapes and visual lan­guage are con­sis­tent, she is obvi­ously com­fort­able with sev­eral dif­fer­ent ways of work­ing, whether this be sim­ple line draw­ings, dig­i­tal col­or­ing, or printmaking.

You’ve prob­a­bly heard of Grace before, espe­cially if you read the illus­tra­tion and design blog Grain Edit. She writes for it and is the illus­tra­tion editor.

All images via her web­site.

Share on Tumblr

Emily Haasch is a col­lage artist and designer liv­ing in Chicago. Her gen­eral col­lage aes­thetic is min­i­mal and con­trolled, with bursts of ges­ture and some­times may­hem. A pho­to­graph or care­fully cut paper is often joined with paper that’s been torn or crum­pled, some­times using ink. Emily writes about her process, say­ing, “In my prac­tice, I like to work with the lush­ness of phys­i­cal mate­r­ial, space, and color in order to illus­trate par­tic­u­lar moments of emo­tion. In many pieces, the vari­a­tions of prox­im­ity, exclu­siv­ity, and escapism are the major focus.”

I intro­duced Emily as a col­lage artist and designer. In addi­tion to her art­work, she is com­plet­ing a degree in visual com­mu­ni­ca­tions at the School of the Art Insti­tute of Chicago. This has helped yield the pub­li­ca­tion Offline, which focuses on self-initiated projects by design­ers, artists, and mak­ers within Chicago.

All images via Flickr. Check out her web­site, too!

Share on Tumblr

Today on Time Travel Tues­day, let’s take a look at the story Tales of Uncle Remus by Joel Har­ris. Pro­duced in 1979, the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, funky shapes, and bold color com­bi­na­tions imme­di­ately caught my attention.

The prob­lem with Tales of Uncle Remus is that the entire tale is in Russ­ian. I don’t know any Russ­ian! But, I can glean that Uncle Remus is the fox-looking char­ac­ter and he is either the keeper of the peace or an insti­ga­tor of trou­ble. Read­ers that under­stand the lan­guage, help me out!

The book’s for­mat is rather nar­row, so the illus­tra­tions are all spots, with no robust, full-bleed scenes. But, the draw­ings them­selves though are pull of pat­tern and color and stand on their own.

Read the book here (all images found there).

Share on Tumblr

Happy Mon­day, ya’ll! And how about those Ravens, huh?

I wanted to extend a huge THANKS to you for your patience over this past week. I had some irri­tat­ing tech­ni­cal issues to deal with (and am still deal­ing with), but I am grate­ful for your readership.

So, how about some­thing jubi­lant for the start of the week? Chad Kouri posted this on his Tum­blr last week, and I fell in love. It is a music video by Shugo Toku­maru for the song Katachi.

I really like the song, and the ani­ma­tion has me in awe. As some­one who has been dab­bling in stop motion ani­ma­tion lately,  this is an excel­lent use of it. The color, the rhythm and con­tents of the video are very appro­pri­ate for the feel of the music. It’s also amaz­ing how water and swim­ming is con­veyed in an envi­ron­ment that feels rather cold.

Share on Tumblr

The water-based media that Ching Ching Cheng uses in her work takes advan­tage of its prop­er­ties, cre­at­ing bursts of washes and some whose shapes call (to me) of ships and ocean life.

Despite this, she states that her work has no defin­i­tive sub­ject, writ­ing, “…but only a med­i­ta­tion on per­sonal expe­ri­ence and emo­tion. The sub­ject mat­ter that influ­ences and inspires my work the most comes from psy­chol­ogy and nature.“

All images via Ching Ching’s web­site.

Share on Tumblr

You are most likely no stranger to the illus­tra­tions of Matte Stephens. He has worked for many large clients, includ­ing Her­man Miller, NPR, and Chron­i­cle Books. A fan of vintage-esque illus­tra­tions, I am cap­ti­vated by his muted palette, lively scenes, and knack for design. I am impressed that Matte uses col­ors that can become so eas­ily mud­dled — but I don’t think that they are. The color adds to his aes­thetic of a flat­tened space, sup­ported by bold shape design and crisp lines.

All images via his blog. He also has an Etsy that does very well.

Share on Tumblr

Much of Naomi Kolsteren’s work focuses on small moments, be it abstracted or not. Tex­ture is an obvi­ously impor­tant part of her port­fo­lio and takes var­i­ous forms. Naomi looks to be using it via pho­tog­ra­phy, col­lage, ink, and more.

All images thanks to Naomi’s Flickr. She is also apart of the col­lec­tive Stu­dio Fluit.

And, from tex­ture to lack of tex­ture, Naomi also puts together plas­tic still lifes that I enjoy:

Share on Tumblr

A for­mer urban plan­ner, Kathryn Clark is very aware of the fore­clo­sure cri­sis that is hap­pen­ing in the United States right now. Her series, Fore­clo­sure Quilts pairs quilts with this cri­sis, and inter­est­ingly ties home own­er­ship with the handed down his­tory of quilts. She writes:

It was impor­tant to me to present the whole story in a way that would cap­ti­vate people’s atten­tion and make a mem­o­rable state­ment. Mak­ing map quilts seemed an ironic solu­tion. Quilts act as a func­tional mem­ory, an his­tor­i­cal record of dif­fi­cult times. It is dur­ing times of hard­ship that peo­ple have tra­di­tion­ally made quilts, often resort­ing to scraps of cloth when so poor they could not afford to waste a sin­gle thread of fabric.

The neigh­bor­hoods shown are not an anom­aly; they are a recur­ring pat­tern seen from coast to coast, urban to sub­ur­ban neigh­bor­hoods across the US. The prob­lem has not been solved, it is still occur­ring, just chang­ing shape, affect­ing more of us.

All images via her web­site.

Share on Tumblr

With a mix of the highly ren­dered and styl­ized, Paula Duró pro­vides us with land where the super­nat­ural is pos­si­ble and flo­res­cent col­ors are apart of the nat­ural land­scape. The Argentinian-based artist paints extremely nar­ra­tive works, a lot of which focus on the hands, and the pow­ers derived from them.

All images via No Defin­i­tivo, of which Paula is involved with.

Share on Tumblr