Like a lighthouse illuminating your creative journey on the rough high seas. The Inspo Report is back with the fifth installment, hot off the presses. Now that’s what I call reporting!
Hattie Stewart’s Insta-Story Inspo
Mash-Ups of Paintings, Photos, Magazine Scans & More
One of my favorite artists, Hattie Stewart is known for cheeky acid induced hearts and flowers. Painting her colorful creations over luxury magazines and ads. Stewart builds a rainbow filled world with a touch of psychedelic Lisa Frank but one of her more slept on offerings are her Instagram stories. Almost weekly Hattie shares a handful of images that have been inspiring her lately. Heady combinations of surreal paintings mixed with vintage High Times Ads. Colors from every corner of the color spectrum and heavy contrasted black and whites. They have become one of my favorite things to look forward to on that dastardly platform.
Before sharing the conclusion to your creative process, it’s just as important to share what served as your guides along the way. True legendary juggernauts like Hattie know this to be true. Her creative references are deeper than the Mariana Trench and it shows in her work. Rich colors, abstract forms, and fun subject matter - all traceable through her Instagram story inspiration. Let her lead you along the path to creative enlightenment god damnit!
I recommend you give her a follow if you haven’t already. Her work is reason enough. But this Insta-story inspiration will get your brain out of lazy limbo and back pumping iron in no time.
Fruit Sticker Fun
An Apple a Day Keeps The Creative Block Away
If you are a graphic designer and enjoy branding of the vintage variety you may have already heard about Instagram account @fruit_stickers. A haven for lovers of vintage typography and illustrations of fruit. Easily one of my favorite accounts on Instagram, Fruit Stickers is an aggregator for vintage fruit stickers through the ages. Now they even take artist’s submissions of their very own to keep the timeline from going rotten like a brown banana. I had to reach out and be apart of this digital collection in some way. I submitted the below two designs and luckily I was picked ripe and showcased to my fellow fruit lovers.
The account served as a great way to get some new eye balls on my work. If you are a fan of the account, submit your own fruit sticker design and see what happens! This is a perfect example of reaching out to people you are fans of. There is nothing more exciting than the validation you can get from peers you truly admire. Fruit Stickers has done a fantastic job of building a following of people that can’t wait to see what they post next.
Never be afraid to start a side project. I know the person running this account is a working CMO and a succesful freelance designer. She’s insanely talented and created fruit stickers because she was passionate about them. It’s now an insanely popular account, creating successful merch campaigns, and being featured in magazines like Bon Appétit. You never know when your side project could become your main project. Hey, that’s kinda the whole point isn’t it?
Free Visual Resources
This Shit Gets Expensive Man
Trying to find an artist/designer with a full paid subscription to the Creative Cloud is difficult now a days. Pricey monthly price models make it tough to pick up some of these creative tools. While I can’t consciously find you all a CC download link from the dark web, I CAN hook you up with some totally free and legal tools to add to your utility belt.
Perfect for icons and little illustrations in a pinch. If you don’t have time or haven’t yet mastered the Illustrator pen tool. This is the perfect website to check out first. Thousands of icons available for free in png and vector formats. Love using simple icons from The Noun Project at my 9-5. They work great for presentations and signage.
Truly good stock photography can be hard to sniff out. When I found out about Pexels I nearly wept. Thousands of photos and videos available for free in high resolution formats. I’ve used the video countless times for my personal work, and the photography works great for email campaigns and pitch decks. Don’t get me wrong the content totally skews more professional but a great creative mind can reinterpret anything for their own work.
Another great batch of stock photography - These beauts come by way of emails directly to your inbox. Each week you receive a folder of highly stylized stock photos with a particular theme. Their goal is to be the antithesis of traditional and often times boring stock photography. The photos are submitted by artists and photographers from all over the world but still somehow have a singular visual voice. So they tend to work great when paired together.
Use these resources wisely and share what you create! I hope your mind is fed and ready. Until next time I’m Ryan Evans and this has been The Inspo Report.