Celebrating Milestones

I was lucky enough to witness two major events in family members' lives this year. First, my boyfriend's sister got married. And second, my dad celebrated his 60th birthday. I was heavily involved in both events mainly because I designed the invitations. I like doing graphic design projects more and more. I usually only do them for personal things, but I would love to start doing actual client work.

This is the front and back of the wedding invitation for my boyfriend's sister's wedding:

I collaborated on this one with my boyfriend. He's an artist as well. I did the text and layout while he did the illustrations. The three ovals in the middle were sticker designs that were printed out and stuck onto the bags of Costa Rican coffee that were given away as souvenirs to all the wedding guests.

And here they are printed out:

Not the best photos, but I just wanted to include this. They look great in person. Roughly 5"x7".

Here are the invites I made for my dad's surprise 60th birthday party:

I did all the artwork and layout on these ones. And here they are printed out with the green envelopes I bought to go with them:

By the way, the surprise was a huge success. My dad is a smart guy but not very observant at times, so it wasn't too difficult to keep all the planning hidden from him. Great times were had by all!

Portlandia!

I just updated my stop-motion animation reel! I did a lot of animation on the rats sketches in season 3 of Portlandia, and I finally got the footage to add to my reel. I did a lot more than what I included, but I only want to show the best! Most of my shots involved character acting, and I saw a lot of improvement over about a two month time span of animating every day. It felt really good to see such significant progress in my skill set!

To view my reel, follow this link to the video on my Vimeo page: Steele Reel 2013

And just because, here's my website: www.artofsteele.com

Buddha Genie

Here's a papercraft birthday card I made for my little sister. She turned 20 in June.

Birthday Card!

Here's a colored pencil birthday card I made recently for my mom. She likes giraffes.

Rediscovering Colored Pencils!

Here's some stuff I've been doing lately with colored pencils/regular pencils:

I'm in love with Ryan Gosling. His nose makes me swoon. Look at that bump down the middle of his bridge. Gorgeous.

This was in a nightmare I had recently. I drew it so I could get it out of my head.

My nephew and one of my nieces have birthdays within eight days of each other. I made them 4.5" x 4.5" birthday cards this year, complete with sentimental notes on the back in red ink. The one above is for my niece and the one below is for my nephew.