A Mother of the Bride asked me to draw the lovely exterior of her daughter’s wedding venue for the Save-the-Date card. The venue will be The VanLandingham Estate in Charlotte, NC, and it’s a stunning building. The client showed me several other samples of cards with venues drawn in simple line and I loved the classic, elegant look of them.
She sent me a perfect head-on photo of the building and I drew it first in pencil.
A graceful and dignified mansion, is it not? After the ok from the client I inked it in cleanly with black ink and sent it off.
Just a few days ago the Mother of the Bride sent me the finished card, beautifully printed on heavy rag paper. The letterpress printing was done by Scott McClelland, with assistance from Bo, at Paper Meets Press in Glenside, PA. Letterpress is a traditional printing technique that creates a relief of the type and image in the paper – you can feel the depression if you run your fingers across the text. Some of the impression is visible in the closeup below.
I think the finished card is a very stylish and appropriate look for what I’m sure will be an elegant wedding.
In the last few months I’ve designed some logos for various events.
For TAFE (Theater Arts for Everyone) in York, PA, I created this logo for their stage show An Enchanted Bookshop Christmas, which involves characters from a number of children’s stories. First I started with a quick sketch with Tom Sawyer, Scrooge and Dorothy with Toto, and the fairy that brings them to life.
The director thought it might be better to show the bookshop itself, so I drew this graphic image.
The director suggested changing the boy in the doorway to the quirky bookshop owner, and making the fairy chubby, so with those refinements we finalized the logo to this:
I created a logo for the newly formed BuxMont Networking Group. I presented three ideas, below – can you guess which one they chose?
And finally I drew another graphic logo for TAFE, for their upcoming show Mystery at Senior Manor. This one involves some old folks who knit and play checkers at their retirement community, and what happens when one of them goes missing.
You can let me know in the comments which of the BNG logos you think is best, and I’ll answer it after a few guesses.
The Youth Orchestra of Bucks County gives children in grades 4 to 12 the chance to meet other young musicians, participate in group activities, and get a taste of what it’s like to be in a real orchestra. I was happy to be asked to create some logos for their fundraising galas in the last few years.
The first gala, which was held virtually in the spring of 2021, had a Night at the Movies theme, and their coordinator suggested images of popcorn, theater curtains or movie reels. I came up with some ideas for them to consider –
They liked the popcorn theme, and with suggestions from their coordinator I developed a marquee-type logo for the final –
This year’s gala will be in person and has the theme Tropical Rhythm, so the coordinator suggested images of bright flowers, greenery and some type of rhythm instrument. I drew a basic idea and tried various fonts & details –
The coordinator suggested a great ‘tropical’ typeface and a revised logo for YOBC, and I modified the design to his suggestions, for the final logo.
He did like the toucan I put in the first design, so he may use that in the program book where some art is needed.
Once I had drawn all the pages of Laurie Nowlan’s Robbie to the Rescue! as pencil sketches, I scanned all the drawings and colored them in roughly so both the author and I could see the placement of color throughout the book.
Early on when Laurie and I discussed her main characters, we had decided there should be some little bits of clothing to humanize Robbie and his older brother Ben. Laurie liked having Ben wear a baseball cap, and perhaps big sneakers for Robbie, to make him look smaller and younger and maybe a little clumsier than his older brother. In initial sketches I had given them orange and red jackets, thinking they’d stand out in green foliage – then when I started doing pages I realized it was autumn in the story and the leaves would be those colors. So I switched their jackets to blue and green.
The story has a number of scenes that take place during a rainstorm so I tried to vary the spreads between pages that bled off the sides and vignettes where there was white space around the illustrations, as well as full double page spreads where it was warranted, to keep the scenes from looking too similar.
Laurie suggested that the storm scenes should stay very blue and gray, so that at the end of the story when there are beach scenes, the change to sunny warmth would really be apparent to the reader. I agree it worked really well.
After this stage I started painting finished art for the book. I’ll write more about that, and about developing the cover art, in Part 3.
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“Robbie to the Rescue!” is available now through BookBaby HERE.
Every year I design the poster for the Bucks County Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s musical comedy, and last year because of lockdowns we had to postpone the event. I’m happy to say the group is back in business this season and they will produce what would have been last year’s show, since the whole cast wanted to reassemble and perform it – and the show is Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Sorcerer. It will be performed LIVE, with a full live orchestra, on July 16, 17 and 18 in Doylestown. I love the wacky plot of this show, which involves a sorcerer in Victorian England who is asked to create a love potion of which an entire town unwittingly partakes, with chaotic and comic results. It strikes me as typical Gilbert & Sullivan silliness that instead of a cauldron like witches traditionally use to brew potions, this very proper Society Sorcerer’s potion is steeped along with a pot of tea.
I was lucky to be at an early costume fitting for the actor playing the title role, so I took photos of him in costume for reference when drawing, and the prop staff even had the large teapot that will be in the show on hand. I knew the kind of pose I wanted for the figure and started with pencil sketches –
I put some rough color on the sketched figure and placed him on the poster page, with the text that will go around him, and drew in the background roughly with a digital gradation, markers & colored pencils, to get a rough design of the page.
I refined my line drawing of the figure and did more detail on the digital color –
I worked on the title logotype next, to shape it around the sorcerer’s arm & umbrella. I used a fun typeface called “Island of Misfit Toys, ” although I played with the letter shapes a bit, stretching and adding some curls, to give it a consistent feel of whimsy.
I drew the cloud emanating from the teapot digitally and put the figure in place –
and then dropped in the title logotype and added some more magical swashes and particles circling the Sorcerer and the cloud, for the finished art.
The singers and musicians of Bucks Gilbert & Sullivan are busy rehearsing now and are thrilled to be back onstage live, with the full Bucks County Gilbert & Sullivan Orchestra accompanying them. I recommend everyone comes to The Sorcerer, performed at Delaware Valley University in Doylestown, PA, to enjoy this fun show! Tickets are on sale now through Eventbrite HERE. And to enhance the audience’s enjoyment of the show, the group provides interesting background info on the show on the website HERE.
Along with other designers I was interviewed for a blog on typography, and some of my remarks are cited in the article. I find the whole piece very interesting since it explores the way different designers look at type for commercial purposes. It’s a good read, I recommend it and the blog alphablogger for typography fans. The post is HERE.
I recently worked with Chef Kelly Unger, Chair of the Doylestown Farmers Market, to design a new logo for this very popular weekly gathering of Bucks County area farmers and shoppers, which has been going on for 45 seasons.
Kelly mentioned it would be nice to have some element in the design that would tie it to our location here in Doylestown, and that there are often buckets of bright flowers at the entrance to the market, a parking lot in the middle of Doylestown; so it would be nice to include flowers along with fruits and vegetables. I suggested making the logo reminiscent of a Mercer tile, since Henry Mercer is historically speaking the town’s favorite son. I did some rough logo ideas to show her and others on the market board.
(The designs below are (c) Pat Achilles. Are you interested in purchasing any of them? Contact me at achillesportfolio@gmail.com and we can discuss.)
(The designs shown in this post are (c) Pat Achilles. Are you interested in purchasing any of them? Contact me at achillesportfolio@gmail.com and we can discuss.)
The tile theme was popular, and so we tried adding more elements logo –
but it was determined that it got too busy. The image of the bike stuck though, for its symbolism of sustainability and since many shoppers do bike to the market, so we simplified the design but kept the outer tile-like border. I drew this rough pencil sketch, trying to show just enough of the bike to make it recognizable, but trying to keep the basket full of food the center of interest.
I drew the items in color in a graphic style and deliberately made the handlebar and flowers break through the border a bit, to give it a more contemporary design. I was asked to change the typeface at the request of the board, who wanted to keep a similar look with the brand of the established Bucks County Foodshed Alliance, of which this farmers market is a part. The finished logo is below.
I’m looking forward to the Doylestown Farmers Market’s 46th season opening on Saturday April 17. They will have over 30 local vendors selling beautiful cut flowers, fresh produce and delicious baked goods from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and you can meet some of the vendors as they are featured on the market’s Instagram at doylestownfarmersmarket.
The Christmas in Doylestown House Tour, run by the hard-working volunteers at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church since 1992, needed to be re-imagined this year to accommodate social distancing. The highly-anticipated Tour is a holiday tradition for many in the Central Bucks area, allowing delighted attendees of years past to wander through four beautifully-decorated and designed homes in the center of a town filled with historic buildings. Throughout the years the House Tour has raised more than $193,700 for the Bucks County Housing Group to support the Doylestown Homeless Shelter.
My original logo for Christmas in Doylestown, which took place mostly during daylight hours, was this:
The team in charge this year has come up with a number of alternate activities to keep patrons entertained and healthy at the same time, and they hope to still raise some funds for the Homeless Shelter. To avoid crowds, the tour will be primarily in the evening, where anyone can drive or walk down the designated streets to see beautifully lit grand houses from outdoors. There may be entire streets of homes that will participate, so it should be quite a show! This outdoor tour will be free, though donations will be gratefully accepted on behalf of the Bucks County Housing Group.
In addition, St. Paul’s will still hold its popular Christmas Attic sale – with a twist – where shoppers can find great bargains on all sorts of holiday decorations. To keep this safe for patrons, the sale will take place as an online auction.
I updated this year’s logo with suggestions from the CID team, to reflect the changes for 2020, and I think it still makes an eye-catching design –
For further info on this December’s Christmas in Doylestown and Christmas Attic, and to learn how to donate to the Bucks County Housing Group, click HERE.
I was pleased to help the wonderful Lenape Chamber ensemble get some of their delightful music recordings into a format suitable for posting on the internet, and now all can enjoy them for free. I created title screens for introducing each recording and combined the audio and video to make a finished video for their website.
I invite you all to enjoy these pieces, recorded last summer as part of the Lenape Chamber Ensemble Summer Gala Series, including works by Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, Beethoven, Haydn, Milhaud, Dvořák, Cherubini, Ravel and Taneyev.
Click HERE to go to their Recordings page and listen to any one of these nine beautiful pieces.
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