hello there, design custom commission: Father’s Day

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Hoping everyone had a very nice Father’s Day, whether you spent it with your Dad, someone else’s Dad, or your significant other. We spent the day driving home from Phoenix, but I did get to talk to my Dad on the phone. And, in his honor, I had changed my personal Facebook page profile picture to this bad ass photo of him taken in 1969 in San Francisco:

I mentioned a design I was working on that was a Father’s Day gift in this post which I had to wait to share until the gift was given yesterday. Well, now I get to share it and I am excited to do so!

First a little back story… some very good friends of mine, Lance and Leslie, adopted a son from Taiwan last August. Lance was also adopted as a small child (although he was born here in this country). Lance was in a foster home and his foster parents fell in love with them and decided to adopt him. On the day of his adoption he was about a year and a half old and his Mom had taken a photo of him on the courthouse steps wearing a t-shirt that said, “Finally I am a Kirk!” (Kirk is his family’s last name).

This photo of Lance, taken in 1981 was framed along with a poem called, “Legacy of an Adopted Child”. Lance’s Mom framed the two and they have hung in Lance’s room/home ever since.

For Father’s Day, Leslie wanted to take the photo of Lance, the poem, and a photo she took of their son Caysen wearing a very similar shirt and turn it into a piece of art for their home. She wanted something modern and more graphic.

Leslie presented me with some examples of pieces of art that she liked and I set to work on her project. I started by focusing on the type involved – the poem. I played around with typefaces/fonts and layouts for the poem until we found a font and layout we liked. Then, I worked with the photos, which we decided to turn into silhouettes with the letters on the t-shirts showing.  Finally, I played around with the layout of all the elements, text and silhouettes. I decided to add in the name, birth date, and adoption date information, and Leslie loved the idea of incorporating that, too.

The last thing we did was play around with color by applying different color palettes to the design. In the end, Leslie decided on a gray and yellow color palette, which I think looks absolutely fabulous. It was definitely the best choice for the design.

Here is what the final design looks like:

The design was printed on fine art paper as a print suitable for framing in an 11×14″ frame. Lance and Leslie plan to frame it and hang it somewhere in their home.

Here is a photo of Lance and Caysen after Leslie presented Lance with his Father’s Day gift:

I cannot wait to see this framed. I am so happy that Leslie loved the final project so much, as I truly enjoyed working on it and was thrilled with how it turned out myself!

A quick little note: I am always available for custom projects such as this one or something else you may have an idea for. Please contact me if you would like to discuss a special project of your own!