The Paint Fairy

Just in case you were wondering if the malicious paint fairy does, in fact, exist ...

XXXXXL Hoodie

The other evening I came up with what I consider to be one of the most genius ideas of my life. I was asking my boyfriend Adam, for what felt like the three millionth time, if I could borrow his sweatshirt when suddenly a light bulb exploded in my head. How about we buy ONE HUGE sweatshirt, like a quadruple X or larger, and just wear it together. It'd be like a three-legged race, except warmer.

BEHOLD:

UNICEF

I was recently lucky enough to collaborate with my friend Dave on some backgrounds for a UNICEF animated spot, which will be used to inform donors and governments about UNICEF's Education in Emergencies initiatives. Here's the final version for your viewing pleasure:

(backgrounds by Jen Blicharz and Dave Schlafman, animation by Dan Flynn and Mike Annear, music by Daniel Koren)

This project was a whole lot of fun to work on, not only because of the talent I was amongst but ALSO because I got to do the backgrounds the old-fashioned way, by hand! This was a refreshing change from the Flash-based backgrounds I work on for WordGirl all the live-long day. I used various patterned papers, plain paper, gift wrap, origami paper, paper grocery bags, tissue paper, napkins, etc; ripped them, glued them, layered them with paint, crayons, colored pencils, ink, basically anything I could draw with; and then I would hand them off to Dave, who collaged them digitally. Here are some of the images in progress, in various states of done-ness, as we were working on them:











Enjoy!

Character Designz

Here are a few unused character designs I did for a project a while back. It was for a paper and office supplies company, hence the legal-pad yellow skin tone on a few of these little guys. All done in Flash. Enjoy!

Skateboarding On The World's Longest Skateboard

Pretty self-explanatory, I think.

Pint of Delight

Here we have a custom beer label I designed for my brother's wedding. He and his wife wanted to give their guests something a little more special than the standard wedding favor, so they asked me to design an old-timey looking beer label that they could get custom printed on pint glasses to give each guest. It features their names and the date of the wedding, and the idea of "Hoppily Ever After Ale" actually came to me in a dream, as silly as that sounds. For you readers who are not well versed in beery terms, hops are used primarily as a flavoring agent in beer, and "hoppiness" refers to the flavor and aroma the hops give it. Anyhow, in my dream version of this label, there were also carrots crossing the back of the design like a skull and crossbones, complete with a little bunny hopping away underneath the text. While I appreciated my brain working overtime and after hours on design work for me, I opted to leave those details out and keep it simple.

Anyhow, the glasses ended up coming out awesome! I, for one, have enjoyed a frothy pint of fine ale out of mine since the wedding a few weeks ago. Congrats again to Mark and Kristi!

The final design:



... and a pint glass in action at the wedding reception:

Breakfast Sangwiches

Here we have my friendy-friend Adam choosing between a jelly donut and a b-fast sandwich. If only all the decisions in life were this complicated.