Heart Sketch

I was designing invitations last night for my brother's wedding, and sketched out quite a few ideas to determine the look. This ended up being a very different direction than we took for the invitation, but I decided to develop it anyway.

Retracing Dan's Past

Having previously lived in Missouri his entire life, my stepdad, Dan, has adapted fairly well in accepting that he is now a permanent resident of Kansas. Although there are times when he complains about the terrible drivers he has encountered with "the Johnson County tags." (I'm not sure what is so surprising about encountering drivers with Johnson County tags when driving in the vicinity of Oak Park Mall.) Still, he has learned to watch Jayhawks basketball and put up with our annual "Kansas Day" tradition.

With my brother, Nick, on spring break, Dan decided to take us to the Missouri side of the state line to see the areas where he grew up. I was happy to see the places that he talks about so often and get a better picture of his childhood neighborhood. We started off in Blue Springs, worked our way through Lake City and Fort Osage, and then wound down the day in Independence. Along the way we saw four different houses that he had lived in, and heard stories from each location. All in all it was a nice adventure in retracing Dan's past.

RFK Illustration

For my latest project I chose to illustrate one of my political heroes in one of the most famous moments in American history. I started with a video still from Bobby Kennedy's famous last speech at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968, where he had just won the California primary in his bid to become President. It is right after this moment, where he flashes the peace sign, that he walks off stage and into the hotel's kitchen that he is assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan.

The powerful thing about this moment for me is how Bobby is speaking to his self-built coalition of people from diverse backgrounds, and that he is offering an alternative to the violence and divisions that were present at that moment in our nation. In the illustration I wanted to incorporate different colors and make it somewhat abstract in order to symbolize the broad spectrum of people and ideas that contributed to Bobby and his campaign.

This whole project was done in illustrator as a vector piece of art. I thought it would be interesting to document the process as I went so here are the results. The final piece of course is at the bottom.