Surtex or bust!

For the last few weeks I've been afraid my life might be on a turn down to 'a slightly better life than the average 25 year old' phase. In a very exciting turn of events - my life has just become more fabulous then it already was!

It's official, I'll be showing at Surtex 2008 at Manhattan's Javitz center!!

I'll be in booth 405** and the design frenzy starts today. . .

It's my goal to have 5 designs a week to add to my portfolio while I'm redesigning my website. I've decided to keep a Surtex folder on my desktop to upload five new designs to every Thursday night. I've promised myself I won't sleep on Thursdays until there's a new batch in there. Most of the designs have to have a 'top secret' air to them, but I think it will be fun to document my journey by posting at least one inspirational object or sketch that's fueling my week's stockpile.

As some of you know, I get fan mail from kids ages 5-10 at my job. As an artist the personal letters we get from the babes really help to fuel the projects I work on. My favorite is tacked next to my lightbox in my studio and it simply reads:

Hay people,

You better Draw mor pictchers in 3. . . 2. . . 1. . . NOWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!S

Your friend,

Alex P.

I feel like it was written especially for this grand occasion.

**Hi Everyone! There's been a change of plans. This year I'll be calling Surtex Booth #2518 "Home." Booth 2518 is in Hall 1E. Stop by for a temporary tattoo and a smile :)**

SpinPin - Spin Away

I designed this pattern for one of my new favorite clients to licence . It's entitled 'SpinPin.' It has been growing on me in a very steady way for the last few days. Now I am ready to marry it. I thought the bunch of you would get a kick out of it. If you don't love it now, wait a couple of days.

Behold, My inspiration! I found this picture online and it fueled me.

This photo helped me pull back a bit. At first strike my color story for this was too dark, but it's always hard to realize that's the problem. I just new it wasn't working. When I found this I knew that I really liked the way the blue interacted with the purplish. I thought it'd be nice to post a bit of my thought process, since this 'SpinPin' pattern actually had a thought process :)

Most times it's hard to track the thought process for my work and explain it to other people. Most often it's just me in Gus-Gus mode. There's a lot of that "Ooooh . . . Beads!! Pretty beads! Pretty beads for Cinderelly," in me. That's the stuff that's better thrown into my art and not into my writing. *wink.

Tomorrow I'm going to the Beach!

Happy Labor Day!

Girls With Pens Development Drawings

I've never posted nude sketches on my blog because very early on I received a few choice emails from parents who told me that my blog was big with their 5-10 year olds. Those letters greatly influence my decision to never post any of my life drawing work here for your innocent peeps.

These little nudie cuties are just too sweet an innocent to offend anyone. After a lot of thought I've decided to show them off. This is a big day, a day for a little skin ;)

The Alchemist

Jenny and I spent the day at Coney Island. It was a lovely day for hot dogs and sand and good times. We copped a squat next to a little girl who made me giggle with glee. She' is immortalised in my Moleskin in two dozen little sketches, the ones above are my choice pics. These were done with a ball point pen and a carefully rationed prismacolor marker. I love a prisma when it gets down to its last days of glory, somehow that's always when it does its best work.

Sketches on the Beach

Return of the Cute Girls

Okay! I know, I know. I haven't posted in a stupidly long amount of time. I have an excuse though, honest! I'm actually so busy with freelance work at the moment. As I'm freelancing I really strive to keep my client's confidentiality. That way they're allowed to use a trade secret approach to any product or design I make for them. That client confidentiality goes right out the door the minute I flaunt the nuts and bolts on my blog while we're building stuff. So when there's not a lot of new work on my blog it usually means I'm busy working but that everything is under wraps.

However, one of my favorite projects I'm working on right now is just too fun for complete secrecy. These are a couple of the drawings that we decided to discard recently. I loved them too much to completely toss them aside. The products for this new client are going to be soooooooooo spiffy! I love my other freelance clients too. I've been really lucky lately, all my freelance clients have great stuff for me to do and work is totally exciting development-wise. Juggling it is hard sometimes, but it's more than worth it.

Since I'm such a nerd, in addition to my freelance work I'm chipping away at my independent stuff. I'm still working on my children's book. Hopefully I will have some pages to show off before too long. My biggest goal for the late summer and early fall is to redesign that website we all know and love so much, that's right - we'll be creating a new face for www.AmberAlvarez.com. Please contain your excitement.

Growing Up Keats

These illustrations are all for a little movie I'm working on right now about the life of Ezra Jack Keats. I'm waiting to hear back from the lawyers of his estate. There's only so much we're allowed to do. We're allowed to use his original book covers but none of his original artwork. We also want to be "sensitive" about the subject. That's a word being thrown around a lot at the office this week. It's just plain weird having to create art about an artist. They don't want me to in anyway use his style of illustration and they have all these rules about the difference between "homage" and "satire." Hopefully these pass the test and I can move on to animation soon. I really think these are fun to do. I like the bold lines and while they're different from my typical stuff they're a closer marriage between the way I draw and the way the company's work looks. They've been great about giving me creative license and allowing me to make these stand away from our typical style at the studio.

Splish and Splashed - All done!

Here's that pattern I was working on. Here it's shown on an infinite repeat which is where the pay off comes. I'm pretty happy with the result but part of me can't decide if I like it better with the raindroops spread out the way they were last night or if I like them now that they're all squished together. I thought for the splish and the splash to make sense they'd need to be in a downpour. Now I'm not so sure.

Splish Splash

I love walking in the rain. . .but so do jungle animals! I love textile design, I love the math side. I think that's why I'm an animator, scientific principals and wild creativity always seem like the best marriage. This is a rough design. It still needs a lot of work. I had to do it in Photoshop as my version of Illustrator is acting all kooky. I hope when I open the illustrator files tomorrow at the Manhattan studio that everything works perfectly and I can turn this into a proper textile design and a fab repeat. Some of the raindrops still need to be moved for line up purposes and stuff like that. I'll post the final tomorrow! xo - Amber