Plant Native Plants

Back in February,  a local scientist who I really respect, Sarah McAnulty (founder of Skype a Scientist), reached out and asked if I wanted to team up to create a small poster campaign to promote planting native plants here in Philadelphia. Among many other things, Sarah does a great job advocating for local environmental issues. It feels like we’ve been running in the same direction with the work we both do, but hadn’t crossed paths much. This project was a great chance to do that. Her idea was to create posters that could be put up in public spaces that encourage people to plant native plants. They would have pretty flowers illustrated on them (drawn by yours truly). But the coolest thing about it is that the posters would have small packets of seeds attached to the bottom that the general public could just take for free and plant in their porch pots or sprinkle them in their back garden beds right here in the neighborhood. Each seed packet has a QR code on it which provides directions and incentives for easy peasy planting and growing. And why flowers? Well, we’re watching insect populations decline all around us and, zooming out a bit, we all need insects to keep pollinating so that humans have life around us to live off of. Planting flowers is a win-win, really. They’re pretty and bolster life of all kinds. Check out this article about butterfly population decline, which is one of the impetuses for this project.

With all that said, I was all in on this poster campaign from the beginning. It’s a great idea. Innovative, original, imaginative, creative. I loved it.

The three plants we chose to highlight on the posters were Monarda, Echinacea, and Milkweed. I have been growing these three flowers in my back yard for years, so I am plenty familiar and already have an affinity for their beautiful blooms.

My process for most of my illustration work is:

1.     Get an idea. A great one, if possible.

2.     Research all visual elements that I’ll be drawing.

3.     Do thumbnail sketches to figure out the composition.

4.     Draw the image in as much detail as I can get pumped about.

5.     Scan it at a high resolution.

6.     Color it digitally.

…And this piece was no different.

We had the great idea. And even though I have visual knowledge of what these three flowers look like, I couldn’t tell you if their leaves have ridges or if they grow opposite or alternating up the stem. So I had to do my due diligence with compiling research. Since we started this project in Feb, my garden didn’t have the flowers up yet, so I scoured the internet for the exact images I needed so that I could create my composition and use the reference images to get all the details just right.

Some of the reference photos for the Milkweed:

The poster size was to be 12”x18” with space left at the bottom for a row of seed packets. I figured that my flower drawings should be a little smaller than 12”x18”, so I drew these pieces on 11”x14” 80 lb. Strathmore Drawing Paper. That’s some of my favorite drawing paper. It has a good tooth, and is smooth enough that my pencil marks can blend nicely. The pencils I used are a Pentel mechanical pencil with .05 size lead and a Blackwing Matte pencil. I used kneaded erasers, the Blackwing eraser, and Tombow Mono Zero Elastomer erasers.

I scanned in the original drawings and cleaned them up in Photoshop. When I do this, I use the Levels tool to make the whites as pure white as possible and darken the darks so that I end up with a nicely contrasting image.

I then colored the flowers and insects to be accurate to what you’d see in your flower pot once they flower. For the background, I wanted to pop the colors a little more than I normally do. I tend to lean on more subtle colors and although I love that aesthetic, this needed something else. These posters were to be hung outside in public, so I wanted people to notice them across the street and be enticed to cross over and check it out. I chose a gem-tone color palette for that reason, picking background colors that contrasted the flower colors so they’d leap right off the page. The the graphic design, I made the type as big, bold, and simple as I could. Sarah came up with the words, I came up with the design.

Once I was done with the design, Sarah took over the reigns and has done an amazing job distributing these posters across the city, teaching other folks how and where to hang them, how often to replenish the seed packets, and maintaining the patience that comes with having public art that gets defaced, ripped up, and stolen. She’s also held numerous seed-pack-filling nights where dozens of folks come to sip brews, eat pretzels, and pour native flower seeds into hundreds of tiny bags.

 After a few weeks of having this campaign up and running, folks started asking me if I would make posters of just the flower image without the text. So I designed my own version of the posters that I printed as high quality art prints. They are available on my online shop! Proceeds from these sales are split between myself and Skype A Scientist. Here’s what they look like:

This project exsists because of people who donate to the cause. If you are interested in purchasing a pack of these three posters, you can pick them up from me at one of my art markets (see list here on my website) or buy them online at Skype A Scientist’s website. If you’re jonesing to have this type of campaign up around your city or neighborhood, you can start your own campaign by following these steps that Sarah has generously laid out for folks. If you are interested in donating some funds to help us buy more seeds for this project and to fund Sarah as she continues to come up with these novel ideas that she so readily shares with the public, you can donate on her website here. As of right now, we are way over budget with buying seeds and printing posters. This project is a huge labor of love from both Sarah and myself, so a flurry of donations would be epically helpful to keep us going and filling the city with beauty and life! Cheers!