Little Falls Canal Celebration Logo

Just finished this illustrated logo up a few weeks ago for the 2014 Little Falls Canal Celebration, and finally have permission to share! The citywide festival will take place August 4-10th. The black and white logo is for the promotional material, and I will be creating some color prints to sell for the Chicks Along the Canal on August 9th and 10th on Canal Place. 

Keep an eye out, I'll be posting some color options soon! 

Also, on a side note, Retro Sorrento is now on Twitter! Follow me on a more regular basis @retrosorrento.

Caricature Logos for Businesses

I've recently gotten into doing some caricature logos for local businesses. Here's a few! 

This first piece was done for Christine's Cookie Shoppe and Sugarbabe's Gourmet Cupcakes in New Hartford, NY. This is a collaborative business between the two girls in one space, and I can tell you from experience, they have some amazing sweets! My Friend Kim over at Creative Designs supplied the logos in the girls hands and the type surrounding. 

This second piece is was done for Suzi's Place, a family style diner opening in Bouckville, NY! Bouckville has some great antique shops, which gave me a little inspiration for the logo. 

New Earrings, New Business Card, etc.

Another new necklace:

Working on this new business card. This is the back. Haven't decided on colors yet:

And my cousins final logo:

And possible business card:

Some new earrings:

I don't know what to call this post.

It's been a few weeks! So busy!

I've 99.9% decided that I'm going to be merging my handmade and illustration business and calling it "RetroSorrento" after my blog and my Etsy shop. [As some of my customers might know, if they are dealing with me off-line, I go by "Maria Vallese Illustration"]

The handmade aspect of my creative life has been intertwining itself with my illustration, and vice versa. It all seems to fit into one package, so it no longer seems necessary to separate the two.

Oh, and now you can like me on Facebook! I'll like you back!!! <3

Something I've been struggling with for the past year is the identity of the handmade business and it's packaging. This is such an important part of my business as a whole but something I never really considered starting out. Anyway, here are some new tag designs that I've come up with. The great thing about these is that they can be used as price tags for hats, earring cards, and can be glued to boxes for a really cute look!

I've also ventured back into some oil pastel work in the past few weeks. Something I felt so passionate about and then got away from, feeling it was an "immature" medium. In hindsight, I'm glad I made that decision because it helped me find my illustration style, but it's nice to go back to this medium and see how I've changed and improved, regardless of the outcome.

I've been reading "Van Gogh: The Life," and I think I can attribute some of my color, subject matter and experimentation inspiration to that.

[You might remember this from a previous post! It's one of my first floral arrangements.]

Last, here are some logo sketches for my cousin's DJ-ing business. In case you're wondering, he's flip-flopping on the name a little bit, but that's something I can identify with, so I don't mind.

Lots of updates!

Finally a few minutes to update amongst all this crazy moving!

A few weeks ago my fantastic group of friends and I graduated from RIT! Still feels a little weird and hasn't sunk in totally, but I'm okay with that.

So now that I have my B.F.A. in illustration and all these congratulations are coming in the mail, it's time to start sending out thank you cards! Here is my initial sketch for a digital painting I will be doing for the front of the card:


Obviously influenced by wallpaper and fabric from the 70's here. I have been using colourlovers.com to come up with some color pallet ideas.

I put in an order for my first set of mailers, and am looking for local printers to work with to get copies of my portfolio made. I have a huge list of companies I will be submitting my work to, and I am really excited to be getting to this!

Also, a side project I am working on for my Uncle Al! A logo for ZitoFest, which is a get-together he will be having at his camp at the beach. He wants a logo he can get put on glasses. He owns a boat, so I decided the boat might be an appropriate theme. Here are some sketch ideas (I am pretty sure we are going with the last):


Such an plain colored blog entry. Hopefully will have some color soon!

Hope all is well with everyone!
Love,
Sorrento

Designs.

Also, Mr. Clapton is on the board and ready to paint this afternoon, and I will have a good scan of Hunter today too I hope.