Downtown Raleigh in Gouache & Watercolor
I was commissioned to paint a series of food and beverage businesses in and around downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, capturing the places as much as the buildings themselves. The series includes Poole’s Diner, Fiction Kitchen, East Bower Cider Co., and Beasley’s Chicken + Honey, with a little nod to its downstairs neighbor, Fox Liquor Bar.
These were especially fun to make because each place had its own personality, from the signage and architecture to the people, patios, streetlights, and small details that made them recognizable. Looking back, the series has taken on a little more meaning, too. Some of these businesses have since closed or moved on to new locations, so the paintings have become small records of a particular time and place in downtown Raleigh.
Commissioned Illustrations for Book Launch
A playful collection of custom illustrated stickers created for the launch of Rachel Pastan’s newest novel, We’re So Lucky to Live Here, with each design inspired by imagery and details from the book.
One of my favorite elements to interpret was the book’s cob tower - an earthen, adobe-like structure rising out of the grass. Rachel and I had a fun back-and-forth as I worked to translate the tower she had imagined onto paper.
Each illustration was designed to stand on its own while still feeling cohesive as a collection, with smaller cherries and blossoms tucked into the extra spaces between the larger “hero” designs.
The final artwork was created to work both together as a sticker sheet and individually at a larger scale, extending a little piece of the book’s world beyond its pages.
Local Club Logos
This was a commission from a local book club that called themselves "Book Club Besties". They loved to gather periodically, drink good wine, discuss literature, eat pizza, etc. This logo was for meant to be printed on T-Shirts, Stickers, other "merch". It was a very wholesome collab. The photos above just show you a bit of the process. We took it from sketch, to black and white line work, to full color illustration with multiple color ways.
This same client also asked me to design a fun logo for their wine club, Talkin’ Tannins. I started by sketching out a variety of concepts and directions and then they chose the one they wanted to see developed further. From there, I refined the idea and brought it into a finished, full-color version. A small project, but such a fun one to work through from the first loose sketches to the final logo.
