I like vegetables and I like illustration. I like animals a lot so I don't eat them. I like cooking and I think I'm pretty good at it, having convinced many a skeptical omnivore how good vegan food can be (although I'm not all the way vegan. mac+cheese/pizza forever, vegan plus cheese). I really like doing design for things I really care about.
My brother likes eating locally, seasonal ingredients, and sustainable agriculture. He likes helping the planet and sharing his knowledge with his community, both local and online. His website, From the Ground Up North, does just that.
Food. We both like food. I guess we're related, right? For the past year or so we have had a Frank-Frank food-based collaboration. Four seasonal homepage banners for From the Ground Up North: summer, fall, winter, and now spring. He told me what vegetables grow each season in the midwest and I drew them.
A fun part of this project was delving more deeply into this coloring style I've been working on. I always do illustration using my Wacom tablet in Illustrator, then make it into a live paint group. Perhaps it is a slight bit of OCD, or perhaps it has a better reason, but once I have those live paint sections I like to make each one its own unique color, different from every other color in the image. Subtle color differences make for easy shading while larger differences are obviously more clearly different. Learning about color theory in college was one of my favorite parts of drawing class and Josef Albers' Interaction of Color is forever one of my favorite books. Seeing the interaction of colors in these drawings is really exciting to me, and also allows me to think about it more as putting different shapes together instead of just drawing.
Plus vegetables! One of my favorite subjects. Leafy greens are exponentially more fun to draw than I thought they would be going into this. And carrots are sort of boring. (Unfortunately, I don't think level of drawing fun and taste necessarily coordinate, although that would be a fun project to explore.) Its an interesting progression from the summer banner to spring, as I got more into smaller details and sectioning things off more. Similarly, its cool to see the seasonal colors, how summer is bright and vibrant and winter is much more muted. I can cook all the vegetables, and I can draw them all, too.
Check out From the Ground Up North for more food and plant knowledge, and see more of my work for them here.