The Adventures of Alice & Max

Here's a recent piece that I did for one of my classes. The assignment was to include two children, an animal, architecture and a landscape. It had to have flat shapes, reverse perspective (things get bigger the further away they are) and it had to narrate a story. That's a lot of specific features that had to be applied to one piece. We looked at a lot of old retro children's book illustration to help us understand elements like "reverse perspective" and how to design with flat shapes. I really loved some of the old artwork that I found. Artwork by people like Marie Blair, Richard Scary, and Elizabeth Brosowska. Most people that know me, know that I have a taste for things that are old. So these old retro children's books really appealed to me. I had a lot of fun with it and though I'll be making some slight changes and improvements, I'm happy with how it turned out.

I titled this story "The Adventures of Alice & Max". My wife and I have had so much fun the past two years with our little girl Alice. We now are expecting our second baby next month. It's a boy and his name is Max, and the best way to describe these past two semesters is an Adventure. My wife Brooke has been a champion this whole time. First of all she's been pregnant obviously, but on top of that she's been going to school full time at BYU while I've been at school as well. When you throw a 2 year old in the mix of that, life starts to feel pretty exhausting.  We frequently imagine "how great" it will all be when we're done with school, but at times when I think in a larger perspective I feel very happy for where we are right now in our lives. I'm not sure if there will be a time of more rapid growth and learning than what we're experiencing right now, and I really am loving it.