Sign's Up!

My sign is up and the number is on!

Pizza Shop Sign

The pizza shop is opening this week and they were still without a sign for outside. So they asked me to put one together. They wanted their logo incorporated some how so I decided just to paint it. They are not sure if this is the sign they will always have hanging or if someday they will have one printed with the logo instead. I'm not a fan of hand written letters unless they are precisely gridded out and perfect but this is not something they wanted me to kill myself over. I do like how both sides of the sign turned out. I think I did a fairly good job of making the logo look the same. The only thing not showing is the phone number on these pictures. I actually went to a home improvement store for that and got the plastic numbers you can put on the side of your house. They came large enough. Sadly, they did not make letters big enough, so I just hand painted the name.  Overall, I am pleased with this project. And the owner's were too :)

Otter Pizza Menu

Front and back pages

Inside spread

Here is the menu I put together for the pizza shop. It was fun to be able to design a menu and play with type and layout. We did lots of proofreading so hopefully out of everyone checking, we didn't miss something. It is not a sit down and eat kind of shop, just a place to order food and part of the shop is a convenient store. The town doesn't have any other near by places to get the things you might need. That is why we made the menu simple and black and white. It is cost effective, and we can get them printed anywhere and hand them out to every customer.

NYC Street Art

I went to NYC for a day visit with a friend who had never gone. While visiting and showing her around, we saw a street artist working so I had to watch. In 8 minutes he created this picture. I wanted to support him so I bought it for 20$. I think it looks pretty incredible for as fast as he did it. I also took a video of him painting another piece very similar. You can see in the video the different tools he used, none of which consisted of a paint brush.

Sammeth the Mammoth

Here are two sketches for my next children's book. A story about Sammeth the Mammoth. I still have a ways to go. I think that the bottom one he looks a little old for the story so I need to work on making him look consistent, and younger.

Otter's in Color

The pizza shop is going to get magnets to hand out as a type of advertisement. So this is my first attempt at putting the logo design in color. I'm just waiting to hear back from the owners to see if they want to change anything or if they want to go through with this design.

Baby Announcements

Here are a few ideas so far for a baby announcement for my nephew Leif. I'm trying two different versions, color and black and white. I'm also playing around with different photos of the baby. Since he is less than 2 weeks, it is still kind of difficult to get a calm picture of him. We don't want to keep flashing the little guy, so we have to use all natural lighting so it is never guaranteed that it won't be blurry or have silly shadows or something.

Hand Drawn Fabric Design

Since I just finished a cool project with the wedding certificate I decided to enter the weekly fabric design contest. The category was "Hand Drawn" so it seemed to perfect not to enter.

Finishing up the Wedding Certificate

So it's the night before my brother's wedding and naturally I'm finishing up the project assigned for me to complete for the wedding day. I had shown an idea before but my finished product is looking a little different. I'm still using chery blossoms and a blue bird. The lady that did the text on the certificate did it very lopsided so I had to come up with a way to best distract from that. I don't have a full photo of it yet but here are some of the process so far and some close ups.

Sorry, It's up side down.

Wedding Signs

They don't look like much but they are part of a project I am working on for my brother's wedding this weekend. Pretty self explanatory. They are signs we will put up on posts around the yard. More pictures to come of the finished project.

Slowly but Surely

I haven't painted on this piece in a while but I realized that I had not posted my latest progress. After this weekend I will have a lot more time to spend on it. This weekend my oldest brother is getting married so most of my time will be spent helping getting things ready for the big day.

Anyway, I'm really pleased about how it is coming along. I wasn't brave enough to tackle the shirt or the face yet so I thought the safest thing would to start with the pants. This entire painting will challenge me to see if I still have the painting skills I know I had at one point. If I can paint a wrinkled flannel shirt, and a worn old man's face, I can paint anything.

A beautiful Experience

Leif Orrin Neill was born May 2, 2012, and both he and the mother are doing well. He weighed 7 lbs 2 ounces and 21.5 inches long. As my father says, he was an average bass.

I recieved a phone call at 5:22am from my sister. I was not remotely close to being awake when my sister told me her water broke. That definitely got my attention. So my mom and I got ourselves ready and we were on our way to Pittsburgh, Pa (about 3.5 hours away).  When we arrived, my sister, Anja, was just admitted into a room. She wasn't having contractions at this point but since her water broke, they wanted to keep her monitored to make sure they baby had enough fluid. It was not until 6:30 the next morning that her labor actually started.

The actual part of the adventure I would like to share was how it felt to actually witness a birth. I don't need to write any details because it is not my story to share. My brother in law had asked me earlier if I wanted to stay in the room when my sister was having the baby. Honestly, the thought terrified me. Why would I want to see something that seemed so personal to me, I had every intention of leaving the room as soon as things were getting started. But Leif thought otherwise.

Anja had received news that seemed like things would still take hours. So I made no effort in going anywhere. In fact, I'm pretty sure I took off my shoes with intentions on staying a while. Half an hour later, things started happening so fast. I was distracted by watching the nurses and midwife running around getting things ready to deliver, to think about getting myself out the door. Sounds comical but I really thought I could just sit in the corner and be a fly on the wall. Once I heard the midwife say Anja was at 10cm, the tears poured out of my eyes. I had no control. Probably just the thought of her pain being over soon enough and the excitement of meeting the little guy soon overwhelmed me.

As I am standing behind the line of people helping my sister, I felt awkward in the fact that I had zero knowledge of what is normal and what is not in this situation. I had absolutely NO idea on where to look, and I heard the midwife say she could see the head. She had asked my mom if she wanted to see and right away my mom looked. After she saw, she went immediately back by my sisters head to help comfort her. Then the midwife turned to me and asked if I wanted to look. For some reason, despite everything I had originally thought, I wanted to see.

After the entire experience, I had learned so many things about such a beautiful process. I thought that if I had seen it all happen, it would scare me away and I'd become a nun. That's definitely not the case. I have more respect for all women who have given birth, especially to those who do it naturally. Maybe I am just crazy but I am so glad to have had the chance to experience it.