Scott Hull Associates

An interview with art director Josh Baker

Client: Metaleap Design/ Paste Magazine

Title of Project: New Records in Old Cabins; Listening to my Life: Night Rounds

Describe your target audience/client base: Influential independent music aficionados within the 18-35 year old demographic.

What creative/business goals did you have with this project? We sought to visually represent the environment that writer Jenna Sandgate lives in from a creative and fun perspective. We wanted to engage readers and lead them visually into the article in the magazine.

What was the creative challenge? To create a portrait of Jenna, who blogs at Cold Antler Farm, about her adventures of homesteading and farming in Vermont, as well as her love of music. The image was to accompany an opinion piece Jenna wrote for Paste. We wanted to be sure to have the writer’s likeness represented in the illustration. Meg did a fantastic job of placing her in a few different environments before we decided on the final direction.

How did Meg resolve the challenge? To quote from Meg herself, “I read through a large part of Jenna’s blog to understand her experiences and passions. From there I tried to capture her lively personality and the things she loves and surrounds herself with. I attempted to visually convey her lifestyle of being ‘alive with the sound of music’.”

Describe the final outcome of the project: The finished piece shows Jenna surrounded by the animals, plants, and music she shares time with on her farm. It does a great job of transporting the reader into her world, enveloped in music and companionship in an otherwise isolated environment. Meg went with a quirky flowing style to play up the musical element of the story.

Jenna herself was so pleased with the finished product that she posted the image to her personal blog and commented on how much she really enjoy the portrait, “I got to write a full page essay for the new issue of Paste, which I was beyond thrilled about. Also, they hired the illustrator Meg Hunt to do this picture of me for the piece and she managed to really capture Cold Antler Farms!”

Tell us specifically about your experience working with our artist: My experience with Meg is certainly one of the best I’ve had with any illustrator. She creates such great, lush, colorful artwork that really captures the feeling of whatever piece she is illustrating. She is super easy to work with and a great person to boot!

http://coldantlerfarm.blogspot.com
http://www.pastemagazine.com/

View Artist’s Portfolio

Two of Scott Hull Associates premiere artists, Andrea Eberbach and Andy Hayes were recently featured in CA magazine.

Check out the pieces below:

Be on the look out for the January/February issue of Communication Arts, which features our illustrator Penelope Dullaghan.

An Interview

Title of Project: Road Trip with Alice

What was the creative challenge for this project?

The project was a six page magazine feature for the Jamie Oliver cooking magazine, wherein a mother and daughter decide to take a road trip from Telluride, CO to Berkeley, CA and cook along the way using camping equipment and farmer’s market produce. Without the use of photography, matching a dreamy abstracted illustration style with recipe imagery was necessary.

How did you resolve any challenges that were presented?

After discussing what the client was hoping for in a final product, the important thing was meshing together pattern and color with the actual food being produced. Visiting a farmer’s market was great inspiration for color and subject matter, and the final product gave off a dreamlike feel of the story, adding in little elements that pop up throughout.

Any feedback, quotes, funny insights, behind the scenes stories you would like to share?

It was an incredibly fun project– I love to cook and I’d always wanted to work on some food illustrations but never realized how complex it can be. With some of the recipes, I had to actually layer on the herbs and cheese like you would when actually cooking! I can only hope that Alice and Fanny (the mother and daughter in the story) love the end result when they see it.

Art director Adrienne Pitts has this to say about working with Meg, “Meg was an incredibly creative and professional illustrator to collaborate with for issue 6 of Jamie magazine. From what was a fairly complicated and detailed brief, she created large pieces in her signature whimsical style, which really brought the story to life. As is the way with publishing, changes often need to be made, and Meg was friendly, accommodating and creative in the solutions she presented. She was fantastic to work with and I look forward to working with her again in the future”

When Meg Hunt, the newest addition to the Scott Hull family, was a kid all she wanted to do was draw pictures. Even if that involved sketching and coloring in library books. This quirky whimsical attitude has stuck with her, and her latest feature in HOW magazine’s “17 Rising Stars” special, is simply another way she gets to express herself—silliness and all. The magazine launched its first annual talent showcase, and Meg was selected from thousands of young creatives.

Influenced by Charley Harper, Jim Flora, Eric Carle, Richard Scarry, and Maurice Sendak, Meg refers to her illustrations as being “infused with little bits of humor that perk up the viewers’ eyes.” She is also inspired by a lot of vintage advertising and folk art from around the world: Mexican printmakers, Russian folk painters, Japanese pop-art. She says, “I approach illustration like a puzzle, trying to sort out how to mesh a good story with engaging characters and ton of little details. Hopefully, it comes across as timeless and fun, occasionally sinister, but mostly curious.”

One of Meg’s immediate goals is to one day work with Target, or go into house-wares and design patterns for fabrics and dishware. “I’d love to consult on an animated film or do a music video for some of my favorite bands, because I’ve always felt tied to music and art together, and the idea of seeing my drawings move makes me giddy. I basically just want to see my fun drawings everywhere, inhabiting the world I’m surrounded by.”

HOW magazine captured Meg’s spirit of adventure, fun, and promise in a fascinating light. We expect nothing but great things from her.

The OPC Register was searching for an illustration to accompany their feature article on “leading student achievement”. They wanted the art to play with words like reflection, networking, contribution, and improvement. Avoiding the visual cliches that go with academic illustration such as apples, school bells etc., Lorraine had a vision of various birds creating a nest to symbolize what the Register wanted the article to visually convey. The birds were drawn in multiple colors to help along the idea of different parties and areas all working together, while creating a nest was the appropriate kind of image to represent nurturing.

Art director Dale Vokey loved Lorraine’s image so much that he asked Lorraine for additional background textures and some illustrated leaves so he could separately work them into the design of other pages and sidebars. She was more than happy to oblige. Dale praises Lorraine’s finished product by saying, “It is beautiful! You have simply made my day.”

Penelope Dullaghan will appear in the book, 3×3 Awards Annual No. 6.  She submitted the following pieces, and was immediately selected by the judges with these four images.