Birthday VIBES FROM YOUR TRIBE

One of the cards in the collection picked up by national retailer, Paper Source.

CELEBRATE YOUR WAY - HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

The other card in the collection picked up by national retailer, Paper Source.

I’M IN AWE OF YOUR STRENGTH

Also available as an 8x10”, which proved to be a popular sentiment and gift these past few years.

A common refrain from us freelancers/self-employed, work-at-home people is how lonesome and isolating it can get. Not just the physical “being alone” part, but how the work itself starts to feel disconnected from the rest of the world or in a weird little vacuum chamber. And this was even before a global pandemic.

Sometimes when you really need some feedback to push it, this is bad. And sometimes it’s good because you’re able to create weird little original pieces without too much influence.

In my case, on a particularly self-loathing day in 2018, it was both: I had wasted so much of my workday spiraling into the abyss of Instagram that out of desperation just to create SOMETHING of my own, I doodled a self-portrait in my sketchbook and posted it on my own feed. It was me, hiding behind a sign of shame (like those poor dogs on the internet who destroy a living room while their owners are gone, or eat Costco-sized rations of Cheese Puffs or whatever). And it said, like a confession, “I didn’t make any art today. I was too busy looking at other people’s art on Instagram.”

People responded to it well, and then, I kinda forgot about it.

Then months later, Victoria Venturi, Founder + CEO of Paper Epiphanies, reached out with a proposal to collaborate on a line of cards with her for spring 2019 release. I was floored.

When we went to lunch to chat about her vision for it, lo and behold, the illustration she referenced was that weird, sad, confessional Instagram post.

We decided to structure the collab in the same way: womxn communicating their hearts through signs. Some are more confessional than others, but the formula worked across all our designs.

The result? Ten heartfelt, honest, specific, usable greeting cards, and the first JROCROxPE collab.

initial sketches before first draft presentations

This is how it all starts for me, typically: pencil and pen on paper. I like these sketches because you can clearly see that we completely changed direction on a few, while I made simple tweaks to others by adjusting letting styles or facial expressions.