Black-Owned Brooklyn Holiday Gift Guide, 2020
The Annual Black-Owned Brooklyn Holiday Gift Guide is a thoughtfully curated selection of NYC-based Black-owned businesses and their products/offerings during the holiday season.
In 2020, my good friends at B-O B, commissioned me and my friend Curt to create the cards for this project.
Cynthia and Tao mentioned that they loved the style of my collage portraits and wanted to find a way to incorporate that into this year's Gift Guide imagery. Their goal was to share something that tied into the holidays without it being overtly Christmas.
Curt and I took to the task with ease. We went through his photos to select subjects for the "people-themed" collections. After that, the art direction was completely in my hands.
Keeping with my use of gold elements and ethereal blue skies, I decided to incorporate seasonal plants that are festive during winter: gooseberries, pine needles, and pine cones. I created variation in the images by changing the shades of the blue and adjusting the placement of the plant elements. To keep the cards interesting, I focused on framing, direction of sight through posing, and creating depth by varying the sizes of the subjects.
Adding the text to the collage images was the last step of the process.
Surprisingly, the cards that received the most likes, whether it was from shares or popularity, were the cards that didn't have human subjects. It was a surprising and pleasant difference to see my work translate in that way.
