Professional Portfolio
I create the images for the labels that I design for Brix Cider in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. Brix is a local food hub that emphasizes socially and environmentally just food production. The business operates in a spirit of respect for each other and nature, and we like to celebrate those relationships through whimsy and humor and joy.
Brix’s home in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin touts itself as the troll capitol of the world, hence the recurring troll character. Anyway, trolls are good mascots in that they are a good balance of mystic and silly. The above image is used for the “Troll Juice” bottle label. Troll Juice is a Cyser, meaning it’s made with a lot of honey. To me, it tastes like a long, slow summer day. I like to take a lot of bike rides and walks through Wisconsin’s prairies on such summer days. This image captures how I feel when the prairies are exploding with life and the apple trees are “loaded” as we say in the business;)
I try to keep my images representative of the region they represent. Nothing says ice to me like tundra swans and ice skating. The swans hang out on the lakes around Madison from the late fall all the way until the lakes totally freeze over. They remind me how wild the planet is, and how the wildness depends on connective stewardship across migration paths that span continents. Just saying.
Brix’s restaurant and tasting room reside next to the Military Ridge Bike Trail. The bike trail includes signage depicting the planets in our solar system distanced to scale with Madison being the sun. So, Mars is closer to Madison and then Earth. The Pluto sign is right outside Brix’s windows. So, we made a black currant cider and named it Pluto.
Open mic is a big deal at Brix, so when the crew made a cider using sour cherries and named it sour note, I was tasked with designing an open mic themed label. This was a fun collaboration of multiple conversations about which animal would best represent. Thanks to our cider-maker, Royal for suggesting an opossum!
Here’s another bike ride inspiration in the form of “Basil Beach.” The cider made with honey, lemon balm, and basil reminds me of a sunny day at the beach. I came up with this design idea while biking on a sunny day and thinking about going to the beach. Anyway, Southern Wisconsin’s riverways are home to paddlefish. They’re so cool! And white pelicans are cool too. If my powers of magic were a little more intense, this is the beach day I would choose.
It takes several drafts to land on the final design for any of my labels, posters, or logos. Here’s a peak at the process with a look at an early draft of where Basil Beach might have gone.
Another troll! First Annual Burning Troll Celebration hosted by Brix Cider at beautiful Donald Farm. This illustration was predictive of how the event unfolded.
The following are a few recent examples of illustrations I have made for local events and businesses.
My brother and sister-in-law, Matt and Marie, own Brix, which is a farm to table restaurant and cidery. Brix has relationships with farmers across the Driftless Region of Wisconsin and beyond.
Matt had the idea that he’d like something cheerful in the large vacant space above the main entrance to the cidery. The cidery was once a cheese storage facility, so the ceilings are high. Whatever filled the space needed to be bright and full of life to meld with Brix’s jolly atmosphere of open mics and live music events grounded in a vibrant local food scene and social hub.
I like drawing goofy animals. Matt suggested I draw farm animals playing music at open mic. Turns out some of our wild neighbors wanted to join the party.
My first step was to fill a sketchbook with animals that might want to attend the party. Here, the badger in profile seemed like a good fit, so I inked over my pencil lines. Notice the poor, rejected badger left to languish forever in pencil. When I had something I liked, I took a photograph and edited the photo to something like the dog to the right.
I set up an Adobe Illustrator document with all the individual animal characters saved in a way that allowed me to easily rearrange them. When I landed on something that felt good, I overlaid a grid then penciled out the grid to scale on the 12 foot long and 8 foot high plywood I used as a canvass. Transferring the image to the plywood was the most tedious part of the project.
The bird hanging with these goofs got cut to make room for the guzzling deer. I’m sorry to all the bluebirds who were left unrepresented. I love bluebirds. Good thing robins are bluebirds’ cousins, and a robin can be seen forever flying over the barn in the mural.
The sheep turned out to be my favorite, but really, sheep are always my favorite. I love that the golden fleece looks fleecy enough to bring up the sensory memory of burying my hand in wool to push a resistant sheep through a gate back in my shepherd days. If sheep were musicians under human terms, they’d all write endless protest songs. Bah!
I made a mural!
Here I am hanging out with all the critters I managed to fit on my first ever mural. This is by far the biggest painting I have ever done. You can see it in person at Brix Cider in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. I look very serious in this photo, but it’s only because I’m standing on a high ladder meant for picking apples, and I’d rather be on the ground. I’m thrilled with this project.
There were a lot of steps between this and the squirrel in pencil below. The cow’s dress! It was a puzzle, just a blob of yellow for weeks on end. It looked unfinished and boring. I didn’t know how to bring life to it. Then, in the middle of the night, I woke up and remembered a watercolor I made during the first week of lockdown. It was based on a similar circle pattern. I fell back to sleep knowing what I wanted to do with the dress.
This pencil drawing is on quarter inch thick plywood that I painted with three coats of primer. Sheets of 4’ x 8’ plywood aren’t cheap, and I needed three of them. (Well, originally I thought I needed six of them, because I measured wrong. Measure twice, paint once!) The grain of the plywood presented a bit of an obstacle for smooth painting. Also not cheap: paint. Because I had such a large surface to cover, I chose the most affordable option, interior wall paint. It doesn’t behave as intuitively as other paints I’ve used.
This tambourine playing border collie was eventually rejected because I couldn’t find a space where it didn’t overlap with the other animals in a way that would make the painting look too busy when viewed from a distance. Notice in the finished painting how I try to frame faces using background features. That’s a trick pulled from many hours of watching Bojack Horseman. Even though this dog didn’t make the cut, I’m glad it now exists in the world. PS, border collies are never this chill.
I filled in the background first. The background happened to be the second most tedious part of the whole process. Do you like my midriff sweatshirt? Perfect for painting. That yellow in the sunbeams can also be found all over my winter jacket.
Oh my how things progressed! For finishing touches I used acrylic markers. I LOVE them. I’m used to watercolor topped with various ink pens for filling in details. House paint and acrylic markers were a fun, if challenging, change of pace.
Climate Smart Guide
In the summer and fall of 2022 I was contracted by Driftless Area Land Conservancy to write a Climate-smart guide for area landowners. The guide covers the basics of climate change as a process, an overview of what to expect in the Driftless region, offers mitigation and adaptation strategies, and includes interactive property audits to be performed by landowners for diverse landscapes. Please click the button below to view sample pages from the guide, and check out some of my favorite images I created to supplement the text.
The Driftless Area is home to a diversity of natural landscapes with prairie and agricultural systems as landscape highlights. This image is designed to show readers how landscape stewardship carries through all features of a systems with water as the key to connection.
When motivating to make positive change, this is an important point to remember.
Soil microbes trade plants nitrogen for carbon in a symbiotic relationship. The chemistry behind a topic as complex as climate change can feel overwhelming. I like to add a little whimsy and humor to help audiences lock onto key concepts.
A quick iconographic demonstrates how diverse systems thwart pests on several levels. Evolution is probably my favorite thing about studying biology. I love looking at a system and thinking about the ways each organism fits into it like a puzzle piece. Click on the black button at the top of this section to read the text that accompanies this image.
WNRF’s Birdathon: Brix Biking Bird Brigade
In the spring of 2021, I organized a team for Brix Cider to participate in our first ever Wisconsin Natural Resource’s Great Birdathon. Our team raised money from donors to support projects and habitat critical to Wisconsin birds. To promote the event and offer a fun incentive to donate, I created this design and had 100 stickers printed to sell at Brix. The stickers quickly sold out, and all proceeds went towards our $1000 fundraising goal. Brix also used this design for a limited edition birdathon cider with a portion of those proceeds also going to the birdathon.
A fun crew of diverse birders (all employees of Brix and their families) spent the a glorious spring day counting birds. We detected upwards of 80 species. Yes, we saw plenty of sandhill cranes.
One last Brix Cider Label (My First)
Making labels is fun. I hope to do more in the near future. Look out world, I’ve been playing around with an idea for a series of laidback apples riding lowrider bikes!