Illustration

14 posts

My 2-year Chicago Anniversary and New Clarity Print

Today marks 2 years since I moved to Chicago and I’d like to celebrate by releasing a new print.


“Clarity”

You’ll find signed prints in my Etsy shop. For unsigned prints, framed prints, Tshirts, hoodies, iPhone cases/skins, totebags, and more check out my shop at Society6.

Moving somewhere may not sound like too big of a deal, but it is to me. It’s part of life’s process and progress. I’ve been trying to move here to Chicago since our plane landed at O’Hare in 1994 and we immigrated from Ukraine to America. I’ve lived in Wisconsin Dells, Galesburg, and Peoria before finally getting here. I love Chicago and so glad to be here. Chicago really feels more like home, a feeling I’ve been missing since moving away from the city I was born in, Kiev.

A lot of things happen in our lives that allow us to realize different types of clarity. Even in just the last 2 years , I’ve really had my share of it, but I’ll save that for other posts. For now, I’d just like to celebrate 🙂

Hugging Trees Vs. Pushing Paper

“Carry” for Illustration Friday

 

It’s sometimes a little conflicting to me that I love nature and trees, and I paint on paper.

(Paper comes from chopped down trees. But you knew that, right?)

Well, I actually have a thing for paper, too, like a lot of artists. Its texture, the grain, the way pigment rests on it or becomes absorbed into it… I’ll stop there before this turns into a porn novel.

Paper has always carried my work in some way. And it just so happens that I work at a print center for my day job. That’s where I print a lot of stuff on paper. It’s also where a lot of paper get wasted. A lot. Of paper.

Last weekend there, I worked on a job that had me print 500 packets that consisted of a total of 28,000 sheets of paper. It was for a big conference for a company. With today’s technology, why they couldn’t do this digitally (like email, website, or hand out a PDF on a flash drive), I have no clue. This kind of thing happens at a lot of places.

I’m just going to assume that as you read this, those 500 people have either recycled the paper. Or hung it up on their wall and are admiring its texture, the grain, the toner glistening in the light…