Tilly Castelli

drawings, paintings, and projects from Tilly. Follow me on Instagram! @tillycastelli

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Here’s a painting I recently did. Oil on paper. I wanted to experiment with geometry. Cubes floating in space.

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I recently did these 8 drawings on 8x10 inch Canson Illustration board- great stuff to draw on. I used Prismacolor colored pencils, and micron pens.

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Here’s a fun gouache painting I did. It’s fun to fill a page with a bunch of the same type of shape/object and make them all a little different. I sold this to a friend, but can make prints if anyone is interested.

follow me on instagram! @tillycastelli 

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These are oil paintings I made based on photos from my family. 12x12 inches each, on wood.

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These are some sketches of cannabis plants I did for a project that ended up not happening (a mural in a dispensary). I wanted to show the stages of the cannabis plants from seed, to seedling, to vegetative stage, to a fully formed bud. I’m not an expert on how cannabis develops, but it was fun to get a little more knowledge on the growth stages of the plant. The drawings are done with ink, and a brush pen, and the last one is a copy of my original drawing that I colored in with colored pencil to see how it would look.

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I made this colored pencil drawing for a new baby of a friend. I had just gotten a box of colored pencils and was super excited by looking at all the new colors all lined up.

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In June 2017, I took a drawing class at Haystack Mountain school of craft in Maine. I ended up using a lot of charcoal, not a medium I use often. I was happy with how my drawings turned out. I was especially fascinated with the blacksmith studio, and I made a couple drawings in there. Charcoal was a nice medium for drawing a blacksmith studio as it echoes all the coal dust in the shop. 

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These are more from my illustration subscription service. I started experimenting with letters- how to stretch them and change them while still making them legible. And, using letters as interesting shapes unto themselves, or just as a starting point to experiment with color. 

And then, I painted pancakes for some reason. Actually, I did that one because the phrase “one and a half cups was stuck in my head.”

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Last year in January, I attempted to start up a subscription service via email. I got a few subscribers, but it didn’t pick up/ I didn’t keep up with it. These are some of the illustrations I made for my “email illustration subscription service.”

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This is a little watercolor illustration I made for Price Rentals and Events (Chestertown, MD) to use on thank you cards for their clients. They are a rental company that delivers equipment and sets up parties all around the eastern shore of MD, and beyond!

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My client for this bathroom mural asked me to paint a forest inspired by Where the Wild Things Are (by Maurice Sendak). They requested no animals, just plants. I definitely went wild with this and thankfully my client loved it! Plants are a favorite subject of mine, and I love the artistic license to be super imaginative. I wish more people wanted super wild bathrooms like this!

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I was approached by the Kent County Arts Council (Chestertown, MD) to create a mural in conjunction with an eighth grade girl scout who needed to do a community service project. The result was this mural in the Recovery in Motion building, part of the Whitsitt Center in Chestertown, MD. The mural is in a meeting room where women have meetings to discuss and aid their recovery journeys. I worked with the girl scout to decide on butterflies and flowers, and the quote that’s at the top of the mural. The mural adds cheerfulness and hope with its bright colors and strong message. Thanks to the Kent County Arts Council for a grant that made this project possible.

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This mural features beachy items like oyster and mussel shells and tall grasses. My client also requested goldenrod and asters (wild flowers). The bathroom was pink to begin with. I covered a lot of the pink, but utilized some of it for a fun, magical feeling.

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This is one of the first murals I ever made. This was in 2011 or 2012. It’s in a bakery, Evergrain, in Chestertown, MD. The five vignettes are bordered by weaving stalks of wheat, which are the motif of the bakery’s logo. The first images shows a hand sowing seeds, the second image shows a scythe used to harvest wheat, then there is a mill, a loaf of dough going into a brick oven, and the final image shows a pair of hands slicing a loaf of fresh bread.

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Here are a few more photos of the Chesapeake Bay/Chester River mural project.

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This mural is in a long hallway in a dentist office in Chestertown, MD. Chestertown has a river running through it, the Chester River, which extends from the Chesapeake Bay. I made this mural with my husband in the space of one week. On the left side of the wall we painted the Chester River. On the right, we painted the Chesapeake Bay. 

Before starting on the wall itself, we painted two sketches to scale on plywood, one of the Chester River and one of the Chesapeake Bay. We drew grids on our plywood sketches, and measured a grid on the wall. This process helped us to draw a map as accurately as possible.

Patients walking into the office have fun looking up close to the map, and pointing out where they live, and where they have been.

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Here are a couple close-up shots of a mural I made in a garage. (I’m kicking myself for not having a full image!) This mural is a copy of a logo created by the Walt Disney company for military boats, specifically PT boats. The owner of this mural keeps boats in the garage, and collects a lot of antique military and nautical items, so this was a fun project for a themed space.