Karou

Karou, from Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. Because I can never paint enough blue-flowy-haired girls. And I'm going through story withdrawals. 

In the Trees

When I was growing up we used to hang out quite often in the tree in our front yard. We built blanket forts and hauled up picnics, or played with our American Girl dolls (they were always running away to the woods to have adventures). Sometimes we just sat in the branches, impractical as it was, and made a pretense of doing homework. I always thought it would be fun to have a treehouse, which of course would then have paper lanterns. And really what good is illustration, if not for painting up places you wish existed?

The Yanos

Had the privilege this past week of being commissioned to do an illustrated family portrait. It was a fun challenge and I very much enjoyed it!

If you're interested commissioning something like this, please contact me at siminib@gmail.com.

Hazel and Augustus

In honor of that coming Valentine's holiday... Hazel and Augustus from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, which I read this week.



Terribly lovable characters and beautifully written.

(And in case you're concerned... Augustus doesn't actually smoke. He carries the cigarette around for "metaphorical resonance" incidentally... the book is dripping with metaphorical resonance.)

Chime

My take on cover art for Chime by Franny Billingsley. It was one of my favorite books I read last year. So I thought I'd take a stab at it.

Without the type treatment:



And a detail:



Started this several months ago after doodling a super rough color study and thinking hey... that might be cool. I've worked on it every once and a while since then. Stretching it out over so much time resulted in lots of repainting and an appreciation of how much my style has shifted in the past few months as a result of my internship. Also of the difficulties of calling something done when there is no deadline...

Yutu and Miki

I just finished up some illustrations for a an educational text about an Inuit boy and his dog Miki:






The art director requested that I work within this specific color pallet:

I admit, I was a little unsure what I would be able to do with that at the beginning, but I ended up really liking the result. It's amazing the variety you can get just playing with value and saturation! I'm excited to experiment some more with this concept.

Color. It's truly my favorite thing.

Stowaway Magazine

A few months ago I did some spot illustrations for the winter issue of BYU's travel magazine Stowaway.

Mmm. I love travel. Possibly one of my favorite topics.




You can read the articles online here and here, or flip through the magazine in it's entirety here. My friend Karen has some excellent illustrations in there as well.