I was lucky enough to get hired by the Olympia Downtown Alliance – Love Oly to design an illustration to project on the empty Goldberg Bldg. at 4th and Capitol bldg in Downtown Olympia. I pull my inspiration from the animals that live around us. We are often visited by raccoons, deer, and rabbits in our yard on the West Side of Olympia. This winter at the “lighting of the tree” ceremony as part of the downtown Oly Winterfest, there was an owl that came down and perched in one of the trees right above us on 5th and Washington and watched all the proceedings. I was surprised to see an owl so curious and seemingly unfazed by all the commotion downtown, so I knew I wanted to include an owl in the lineup of characters for this, someone who would be watching all the people walking around Oly having fun in the evenings.
I tried to veer away from the stereotypical relationships often portrayed in Valentine’s imagery. I hope these unlikely romances represent Olympia’s diverse and quirky population. We have such a vibrant and creative downtown, I also wanted to emphasize how important it is to support our local businesses so I made sure all the accessories and activities in the illustration were representing things you can buy or do in Downtown Oly.
I love the illustration style of woodblocks, so even though this is all drawn digitally on an iPad, I tried to infuse this illustration with that high-contrast hand-drawn style. I try to avoid being too cartoonish when illustrating animals and instead use images of actual animals and accessories to base the proportions on. I am so impressed with how far technology has evolved and how these advanced tools can mimic the experience of drawing with pen and paper, but make it so much quicker to get the finished product into a format that can be manufactured. I send the digital file off to a company in Italy that specializes in making glass slides called a gobo (a piece of glass or metal that goes inside the focal point of a lighting instrument to project an image, often used in theatrical lighting). They stack layers of dichroic glass for each color to create a highly detailed 3” glass slide that can withstand the intense heat of the specialized high-powered LED lighting instruments that can project the image 20’ tall from 60’ away.
This is the fourth design I have projected onto the empty Goldberg Bldg. at 4th and Capita]ol Blvd. in downtown Oly. Todd Cutts from the Downtown Alliance (now called Love Oly) approached me three years ago and wanted some ideas on fun decorations that weren’t “traditional” representations of the winter holiday season. I collaborated with Dave Sederberg from Pacific Stage and we convinced Todd to purchase a couple of specialized high-powered LED lights that could project a large image to cover the sides of the building. That first year I projected some illustrations of salmon in silly winter hats, that I called the Coho Ho’s. I was marking the return to the Downtown ofter our long hibernation during COVID, just like the salmon return to Oly every year. That year I had also created four large light box sculptures of these festive salmon that hung in trees around downtown. Those Coho Ho’s are still finding places around town to add a little holiday cheer, this year they filled several empty storefronts. Each year we have been slowly building on the capabilities to project on that building, buying more lights and better lenses. Last year I created some festive birds and this winter there were a bunch of critters all doing Winterfest type of activities like sleigh rides, an ice skating deer, and a raccoon getting all tangled up in holiday lights. We hope to expand and bring in more artists to design imagery to be projected there.
