Genevieve St. Charles

Yes! I'm a lifelong visual artist and have worked in a ton of mediums and on many different types of projects over the years, both physical and digital. My basis has always been drawing & illustration and my pieces are usually character-based and on the whimsical side. I had an art studio in Seattle for a few years where I worked a lot with spray paint; I would design pieces digitally before cutting out the design with a jigsaw, spray painting the color, brushing on the linework, and finally pouring high-gloss resin over it. I would make all kinds of these cutout pieces, ranging from small pop art pieces (La Croix cans with different flavors like "Thighs" and "Dad Bod") to large street art-style "hangable murals", as I called them, with all kinds of human-like animal characters.

These days I'm doing a lot more digital work and have been loving leaning into a more symmetrical & geometric look. I'm working on a lot of packaging design at the moment, which is my dream - I absolutely love designing labels and working on marketing materials.

One of my most recent projects is definitely a favorite; I designed the bottle label and corresponding marketing materials for a mezcal producer in Oaxaca, Mexico. This was a dream project for me because there is so much history and culture in Mezcal - it was a joy to work with them on an eye-catching, modern, and culturally significant design.

When I'm working on a commissioned piece that has some open-mindedness, I start with pen and paper and begin by writing keywords, moods, and attributes related to the piece. Then I move on to very rough sketches while keeping those initial words in mind. Sometimes the underlying significance and message of a piece can get lost, so it's important for me to keep the meaning alive in my head as I develop the sketch.

Haha, yes - consumables have an appeal that I just can't get over, especially often-overlooked foods or foods that are slightly suggestive in nature. I guess that's the pop art lover in me. One of my favorite solo shows was called One Night Snack and it featured paintings of things like crumpled Chinese takeout cartons, milk jugs, and an oversized, resined white and red THANK YOU bag.

As for the surreal and abstract characters, I've been on a Moebius kick lately and have loved illustrating desert dreamscapes and otherworldly characters - I love how evocative these scenes can be and how personally relevant people find them.

That's a great question and definitely something that can be a real challenge. Each project has a period of narrowing down style and aesthetic; usually, I send off a couple of very rough sketches and do some back-and-forth emails of "Is this warmer or colder?".

Thankfully much of my work is very niche (resined fruit coffee tables, for example), so I get a lot of requests for duplicates and variations of previous pieces. It's always a joy to re-create a banana coffee table, for example, but in blue instead of yellow!

With my more recent digital work, many of my clients are those who have seen my work in publications and are looking for something stylistically similar for an editorial or marketing illustration. A client who had seen some of my work in the Portland Mercury commissioned a collection of editorial illustrations for an article they were publishing about snacks. Illustrating a bunch of snacks was an absolute delight!

I have a ton of artists and art material saved that I reference all the time if I'm feeling like I need a boost of inspiration. Sometimes when I get stuck I look at how other artists creatively solve problems with shapes, colors, and lines. Some of my current favorite artist inspirations are Ori Toor, Soudassix, and Tony Riff (among many others).

I'm currently a bit nomadic and my studio practice is on hold, so I'm working 100% digitally. A typical day is working on commissions, usually using a combination of Procreate, Photoshop, and Illustrator. If I'm feeling funky I'll work on personal pieces - right now I'm really into geometric shapes and jungle-y fruits and animals with an 80s kick.

Oh my gosh, yes - I recently got into dice-making and it has been an absolute blast. I made a set of d20s for my husband; each d20 was styled after a location that's significant to us, so there was a rocky-looking die that corresponds to our favorite backpacking mountain, and a peacocky ostentatious die for when we got married in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival. I can't believe how much fun it is to mix resin and experiment with dyes and powders to get just the right effect. I also made a set of ripe banana-colored dice and I LOVE how they turned out.

One hundred and fifty.......six.