Yesterday after work I had the pull to do something artistic/creative. I’ve always loved drawing and especially drawing with markers. While marker art it is not considered a fine or high art, it is a lot of fun for me and lets me express my creative visions. I pulled out a sketch pad and started working. This was my first concept:

When I was an early teen I found some old love-letters that my mom had kept from an old high school boyfriend of hers. The envelopes and letters were highly artistic and I found myself wanting to try it out for myself. So I did. And over the years I have created probably about 50 different envelopes front and back sides hand drawn in either colored pencil or (mostly) marker. Some of them I sent to friends with a letter, but most I have kept.

Some of my designs (front side) (click to enlarge for details)

Back of envelopes

So I thought it would be fun to put my sketch concept onto an envelope and fine-tune some of my original sketch-pad drawing. Here’s  how the envelope turned out (a photograph):

The feeling I was going for was a warm tropical vibe. Similar to our current banner on this site, I wanted us, a chicken, a bee, the sea, some flowers, fruit and palm trees. I also wanted to show the Colorado and Puerto Rico connection through using the flags. Puerto Rico’s official flower is the red hibiscus so I used that as the dot of the “i” on Life. The Planet backdrop tied the whole concept of “Transplanet”.

I would like to make this image a little crisper to use as a logo and header for this website. When photographing paper, it’s sometimes difficult to get the exact colors. I was also toying with the idea of cartoon-izing a photo of Britton and my faces instead of the actual cartoon.

What do you think? Do you like it? Any feedback? Should I have a professional graphic artist have their hand at it or does it have a special sentiment/cool factor in its very amateurishness as Britton says? Overall, it was fun and I think we have a good general concept with which to work.