A personal project using one of my fave old-time-y cocktails as inspiration! I sought an opportunity to play with adding texture to vector art (a new technique for me at the time) and I figured making a poster for the Monkey Gland would be the perfect testing ground. I love how this turned out, and how it’s evocative of art from the time period that this cocktail was created. © Chrissy Kurpeski
Map design for the book Rebel with a Clause by Ellen Jovin. Printed 1/c at 9.25in x 6.25in across a 10.5in x 8.25in 2-page spread. Straightforward continental USA map that highlights the Grammar Table visits — stylishly minimalist with a little bit of personality and fun to match the tone of the book! Learn more here. Art director: Chloe Foster. © Mariner Books / HarperCollins Publishers
Personal project — available as a greeting card and other goodies. © Chrissy Kurpeski
Personal project — an idea that popped in to my head and thought it would be fun to make happen in Adobe Illustrator. I’m pretty pleased with the letters: it’s a beautiful typeface called The Salvador Serif with inline layer; then I customized the small H, the U, and the S. Available as a fine art print, greeting card, and other goodies! © Chrissy Kurpeski
Personal project — a witchy kit kat! Available as a fine art print, greeting card, and other goodies. © Chrissy Kurpeski
Monomer does fantastic chiptunes-y music! I designed and illustrated the album art for this EP; its theme examines the changes one undertakes when facing and adapting to challenges, while it musically takes on the challenge of exploring new territories within the chiptunes framework. After considering a few different ideas for the album art, we decided to visually interpret the "trials" theme with a bunch of bad guys representing a threat. Since Monomer's music isn't traditional chiptunes, I decided to create not-8-bit art. Check out Monomer's tantalizing tunes at monomer.bandcamp.com! Illustration © Chrissy Kurpeski
Personal project! After finding pockets of time to learn map-rendering and picking up new-to-me tips/tricks in Adobe Illustrator, I used some of this knowledge to create one of my personal map projects: I redrew the existing Museum of African American History’s Boston Black Heritage Trail map in a style evoking 19th century (when most of these buildings were built and first utilized) American ephemera. Created to print 1/c at 8.5” x 5.5” (half Letter page). Didn’t go too crazy with effects because I wanted it to be super clear, readable, and useable. Doesn’t look impressive on screen, but it prints well! Fonts: a blend of both ITC New Baskerville Std (text) and Baskerville MT Std (display), Burgues Script, and a variety of decorative ornaments. Pattern swatches are standard Adobe Illustrator swatches that I modified. I had so much fun working on this! Design © Chrissy Kurpeski
Painting for a love-y greeting card: etsy.me/1O9xWF9 **I love bats!** © Chrissy Kurpeski
Personal project — warm fuzzy friends! Available as a greeting card. © Chrissy Kurpeski
Personal project! I created this for my D&D group: Fairharbor is my gold-obsessed Dragonborn fighter’s hometown, where she grew up as a scrappy street urchin. Someone from her past stole all of her gold, so she and her adventuring buddies return to her hometown to find the jerkwad that stole it. I wanted this to look like my character drew this with the fancy stationery set that she’d purchased during her travels. And honestly this was a great excuse for me to play with The Dead Pen vector brush set by RetroSupply Co., as well as a slew of new typefaces and some vector imagery that I’ve picked over the past couple of years. Typefaces (with some major customization in places): Bromello, Driver - Handwritten, Iokharic - Italic, Phalanx, Sekut. Bostonians: does that coastline look familiar? If you’re wondering about that black cat icon near the bottom of the map, well that’s the symbol for my character’s old street gang that she used to run with: Relbat Robbers. (“Relbat” is Theives’ Cant for “Booty.” 🤓) I’m including their “logo” that I also designed for them. Had so much fun putting this together, and I learned a ton!
Personal project — available as a greeting card and other goodies. © Chrissy Kurpeski
A little painting for a thank you card: etsy.me/1rMg9Ii Frank is my fave! © Chrissy Kurpeski
This is my first-ever map personal project — I’m not great at geography, so I literally made this for myself! I’d been looking for a poster-size map of the U.S. to hang in my studio, to help me learn the location of all the states and capitals as well as the general area names. But I couldn’t find any posters that I really liked, so decided to make my own. Originally I was hoping to make something more graphically stylized, but the base map that I used was so detailed that I decided to keep things more simplified. And I wanted to try working with a limited color palette that I haven’t really seen on other maps of the U.S. I admit that I may not have the capital cities in the exact precise location, but for my purposes I just needed it in the correct general area. Visually I think this map is a little on the boring side, but I think I’ve taken it as far as I can, and I learned A LOT working on it and I can’t wait to hang it the studio. Base map is from Open Vector Maps; info is from multiple sources. Fonts used: Filson Soft - Light & Heavy, The First Division - Inline, Paganini - Light Italic, and West End - Lined. Design © Chrissy Kurpeski
Watercolor painting of my cute lil bloodfin tetras, that I ended up using for a cute lil greeting card: etsy.me/1yHUHYG © Chrissy Kurpeski
