From The Designer's Desk: Hannah

T: Hey, Hannah!  

H: Hey!  

T: Thanks for sitting down with me today!  

H: Thanks for having me! 

T: Of course! This is something that I've wanted to do since I got here, and I think our audience has always wanted to hear more about. I don't feel like we hear as much about artistic design and the specific designers’ backgrounds. So, I'm really excited to get into that with you today.  

H: Absolutely! 

T: Can you tell me a little bit about your background? When was the first time that you thought, “yeah, I can see myself going into art?” 

H: Well, I've always loved art since I was little. I was that kid that was always drawing. I had a thousand things up on my parents' fridge, probably to their chagrin for having to make room for it. I always tried to fit it in with whatever I was doing. I took lessons and classes, but unfortunately, in school, you know, you're only allowed to do one thing at a time, and I wasn't able to do art in school as much as I wanted to. So, I found ways to do it outside of school. But that's from like an early age, I guess I've always been interested in it.

T: When you were doing lessons, was there a specific medium that you knew right away you wanted to do?  

H: I originally took a lot of classes in painting, some in watercolor and some in other mediums…  As I got older and new technologies came out with more digital illustration, I found myself leaning really into that and learning all the nuances and the tricks of it. So, I've gotten to get experience in both digital and watercolor, which I think without having that experience first in physical painting, what I do digitally would be totally different. It's nice to have that background to lend itself into digital illustrations. But I actually didn’t study art in college.  

T: Wait, what did you study? 

H: I didn't know what I wanted to do. So, I jumped around majors quite a bit and I ended up being a theater major. I majored in acting, and then also in costume design. I love acting, I love theater, but I found myself loving costume design because it is very creative. Some of my favorite parts of costume designing were the initial illustrations that I got to do. We'd have assignments where we would have to draw all these beautiful costumes and what we would imagine designing them as if we had an unlimited budget for what we wanted to do. And I loved getting to do that. Even in college, while not getting to be an art major, I got to have my little fix of getting to still do art and get to do my illustrations in another way, and still in a very creative way.  

T: And you still have that love for it? You haven’t considered another path?  

H: Yeah, no, I still want to do this. I still want to go back to it. It’s wicked cool that I’ve gotten to do that and that I've been given an opportunity even though I wasn't an art major.  I feel like I've been incredibly well self-taught. Any chance I've gotten to watch a video or take my own classes or lessons, I’ve taken. I've really tried to teach myself everything that I could without getting the same exposure an art major might have. Being self-taught is fun because I get to keep learning. 

T: Knowing what you've told me about being self-taught and your interest in digital design, I'm looking at this Torii Gate card. Can you tell me about some of the inspiration you found behind that?  

H: Yes! For the Torii Gate card, it was designed for our Japan collection. So, I spent a lot of time looking at anime specifically on how backgrounds are painted in anime. I wanted this card to have a sort of anime style while also keeping elements of my own style. One of my biggest inspirations, her name's Mary Blair—she was an amazing concept artist for Disney in the 50s—her textures and the colors that she used… it really has influenced everything I do.  

H: I love color in illustrations as anyone could tell just from this tiny sampling I have. I love color. I'm a maximalist in every way. I'm like, what if there's more? What if we have more? More color and more of this and more that? Or what if instead of a lot of color, there's a really strict color palette of just blues? I have a lot of fun with that. And with this Torii Gate card, I wanted it to be colorful. Well, it’s in that nighttime setting, so I was figuring out what colors would pop at night, the different greens, the different blues. Really, I spent a lot of time just looking through various anime and how they color nighttime scenes and tried to emulate that in this card, which at times was a little out of my style, but it was really fun to get to get to explore.  

T: Yeah, and looking at this card now, the question comes to mind of, what does the process of deciding what to quill look like? You know, you talked about the background where you had to pick that specific color scheme. And it does really pop, but the contrast between what's quilled against what isn't is also very stark. So, what does that process look like?  

H: So, as we're illustrating, we have an idea of what the focus of the card is going to be—and we know that's most likely what is going to be quilled. Then we have, as the illustrators, a list of all the papers that the quillers use so we can kind of match our illustrations to some of those colors, but also the quillers do an amazing job of blending different papers together to make new colors. It’s always so fun to see what they do. But —you know what's going to be your focus. And so, you know that's most likely what is going to be quilled when we send it to the quilling team. It's a lot of going back and forth, and sometimes, you give an illustration to them, they quill something, and then from there, it's like, okay, maybe I want to adjust my artwork now seeing how they quilled it. Maybe in the card I had put this mountain a little too far to the left and now seeing, okay, if I move it further over, it's going to compliment the quilling a little bit more. So, it's really both, you're designing for the artwork, but you're also designing for the quilling, which is a challenge and very exciting to get to do. And it's very fun to get to collaborate with the quilling team. It's a lot of going back and forth of us discussing what we think looks best, what we like, what different colors we want to try out, until we get to a place that both of us are very happy with. And it's fun sometimes I get surprised by what they send back and I'm like, oh, I didn't even think about quilling that, and it totally changes my vision for the card. Every single time we get the quilling back from them, it's so exciting. It’s like opening a present. Like, oh, what is it going to be this time?  

T: Going off-of your interest in pulling those anime elements in. Can you talk to me about the Kawaii Bunny card?  

H: Oh, I love this bunny! It is so cute! I knew right away when we were doing the Japan collection that I wanted to do a few cards that are in that really cutesy anime style because it's just so fun to do. I knew it was going to be so fun to quill, especially things that have fur. The way that they do the crimping in the quilling always emulates fur so well. I saw that originally in one of the UK cards. They have this Bear, and they crimped the fur in the bear. And the second I saw it, I was like, oh my God, it looks like a little stuffed animal. It looks so real.  

H: I kept thinking—I want to do some other animals that are going to lend themselves really well to that like fuzzy kind of fur. We did the face of a cat and then also wanted to do a little bunny, and it was just playing into that really sort of fun, cutesy Kawaii style that Japan has, which is normally not in my style, but it was, once again, very fun to research. I got to look at a lot of cute illustrations. I wanted to make sure it was something that was not just a picture of a bunny, you know? I was asking myself—what else can I add to it? So, I gave him a little carrot to hold with a bunch of little hearts around it. Because who isn't, when they see their favorite food, so excited! And it ended up working out really well. 

H: I feel like it can work very well as just a fun, cute card. It wasn't even originally in our thought as we were doing it, but once it kind of came together, we were like, whoa, this is a perfect card for Easter. And it ended up being sold as one this year. I think it sold out for Easter, which was wild. It's very different from what we have done before. And so, it's fun to kind of get to introduce some new styles into our line and give the customers a variety of different styles and things to pick from.  

T: These first two cards really contrast with each other. You have this maximalist mountain range background versus going down to just hearts and the carrot leaves. Carrot tops. What are they called? Carrot leaves, I think, yeah. Carrot leaves. Sure. (Editor’s Note: They are in fact stems) What was your thought process behind that? Why is he not in a little meadow?  

H: Well, I am in every aspect of my life, a maximalist. I have so much stuff. If people could see my desk at work, my coworkers have seen my desk, it is so full of a million little trinkets and pictures and things compared to other people. I love stuff. I love things. And so having full backgrounds is where my mind immediately goes. Like the Torii Gate and a bunch of my other cards, I always tend to go into that full background first, but I have been learning in my time here when it's good to pull back and when it is a good time to just have one singular thing as the main focus. That was something with the bunny card that we discussed. We really wanted the bunny to be the full focus of it. I'm sure at first, I probably was like, let's do a meadow! Let's still let me have a thousand things! But having that pause to say, no, it really can just be the little bunny by himself. That is enough. That has been something that I've been working on here, and I’ve been improving.  

H: I think ultimately looking at this card, if I had put a background into it, I think it would have distracted from the bunny and his cute little carrot. So, I'm glad that we went with just a white background. I think there are times when having something isolated in white, it really helps to make that subject pop, versus my maximalism tendencies.  

T: Well, speaking of maximalism.  

H: Speaking of maximalism. Another one!  

T: So, we're looking at the Forget-Me-Not card now. We have so many floral cards. So many. What drew you to pick this one for today?  

H: I love the contrast of Forget-Me-Nots. That bright, bright, bright blue and then the super, super bright yellow in the center… whenever I see them, my eye’s just drawn in, especially to that shade of blue. It is so eye-catching. I really wanted this card to play into those shades of blue. I was very conscious as I was doing it to have everything really stay within that cool tone. You wouldn't look at it originally and think it has a full, strict color palette, but the more you look at it, it's really like, no, it really is all blues and greens and really that's it. I wanted the color of the blue flower to stand out but make sense within the world of this sort of meadow that that I've put it into.  

T: I think you achieved that. And something that I've noticed in a few of our designs that I don't know if this is your trademark, but having the dimensionality behind it where there's still elements of the plant that aren't quilled. We have that base, I guess the base, what are they, leaves, again? I guess they’re leaves. This interview is Tom learns what leaves are.  

H: (pointing) Those are leaves. Those are flowers.  

T: We're learning. I think we've talked about this maybe a little bit, but when it comes to that kind of dimensionality, is that something the quillers determine, or you determine?  

H: I'd say it's a collaboration between the two of us. I think our job as the illustrator is to give the quillers a base that they can look at and figure out what is the area that's behind, what is the area that's in front and kind of helping to distinguish that in quilling. Sometimes it's the front flowers that are quilled, the “front leaves”. Those are the parts that are quilled, and then the un-quilled flowers are what you would imagine are behind these flowers. Sometimes they'll quill it in a way where the front flowers are a lighter shade of green for quills and the ones behind them are darker. It helps to kind of give that dimension. It's a lot of going back and forth with our quilling team. And sometimes, it is seeing what they did and then realizing like, oh, I'll adjust my artwork. They have this beautiful quilling on the bottom. I’ll realize I need to make the background behind it a little darker to help make it either pop or give the idea that these flowers, or these leaves, are in the front so they're the ones that are brighter. It's like it's standing out and it really helps to give that sort of three-dimensional look to the flower where it does look like these flowers are right in the front and you can see the things behind it.  

T: How long does the approval process for these cards generally take?  

H: Sometimes if we're lucky we nail it in one go, and when that happens, I feel like it's cheers all around! The process starts with us working on our artwork first. Once our team’s design is approved and we're happy with it and we feel like it's both beautiful artwork and its beautiful artwork for quilling, we’ll send it to the quillers. Sometimes you'll have beautiful artwork, but you'll realize, no, this isn't going to really work to be quilled. And that's a process in its own to adjust to.  

H: We then send it to the quilling team. The quilling team, they take it, and they have their team of people who are the masters of quilling. They are the best of the best. The way that they're able to look at artwork and match shapes and everything to quills. It's truly amazing what they do. They quill it and they send it back. Sometimes on that first go round, we nail it perfectly and it's amazing and we are shocked, like, wow, that was quick. That was easy. But sometimes it is a little bit more back and forth and it can take sometimes a month to approve a design. Sometimes it can take a week.  

H: It all depends, I think, on the complexity of the design and the shapes. Sometimes at the beginning I’ll see a design where I'm like, okay, wow, this is beautiful, I don't know what else could change, but someone else on the team might have an idea! Seeing it shaped not only between us and the quillers, but the entire design team in general, it's a whole collaborative effort. It's not really one person by themselves. We're a team and we all help each other, and we all want each design to be beautiful. What we end up with—sometimes I look back at that first version, I'm like, whoa, what was I even thinking on that one? Look at this now. It's amazing what working as a full collaborative team can do versus being on your own and being completely solo. It ends up making the art so much better and it's always very fun to see what everyone thinks.  

H: I hope people love the cards and get to feel all the fun, and the joy, that goes into making the artwork. I hope it comes through for people, and I hope they enjoy them. I hope all my people who love maximalist color can live their dream. Have as many trinkets as you want, as many cards up on your wall. I do. So, the more color the better.