Jackie Powers

Design+Illustration | 32 | Californian | Art Director | Licensed Graphic Apparel Designer

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My T-shirt Design Portfolio

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Bratz Magazine cover design, 2021 Bratz dolls are mine, photos are mine, graphic is mine. I created this at my Licensed Apparel Job at the initial request of MGA when we signed with them. Someone on the Bratz team wanted to see photo real executions - this was before they had many photo real assets of their own and a clear marketing direction with their reboot. I did this and four others after a full day photo shoot with my and my coworkers dolls (this was also before I had a sizable Bratz collection of my own - Dana and Meygan here were the first two.). Although one MGA team made the request, another team did not approve any of them - which to be fair, I dislike 3/5 of the final results, as the person who initially made the request had some pretty corny theme ideas they wanted us to execute. The two I like were my own concepts (the other being a Nevra x Roxxi pride one; this was before their two-pack release.). There are also some tweaks I'd make here especially the longer I look at it, but I was going for an homage to the original Bratz magazine style. Regardless, they were all super fun to make.

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Boy howdy did I forget I tried to make a portfolio blog once. In the last five years, I've really gotten away from going a lot of digital art outside of work. I rarely post on instagram, but I occasionally post on deviantart - on my original account: Find my most recent drawings here

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Shed and Shred | Character Design Challenge #68 Animal Skate Park

August 2020

From Artstation: Recently, I became the last artist on earth to find the Character Design Challenge, which, with all these tags and challenges there's always other things I wanna do first and I never bother. But not this time! This month's theme is #animalskatepark, and I got an idea for a neon skate punk snake inspired by 80s/early 90s skateboard graphics. But I ended up putting her in a little inline to zoom around in because she can tuck her tail inside. Despite her lack of ears, she's got a mix of stuff like the Replacements and Sublime on that Walkman. [Did you know there's a shortage of skates right now? I guess people got over this idea that they were for kids or too 90s and realized how fun it is due to Covid...I wanted to get some again since last year, as inline skating is one of two sports I was ever decent at and I've only roller skated not bladed in the last decade which is like riding a tricycle after learning how to bike thankyou. So I caved and bought an obnoxiously trendy pair. Anyway...] I'd really like to try to push myself into more stylized and dynamic character poses and designs. It's an easy start to draw a snake, but I'm hoping to apply this kind of style, which feels like a merging of my recent acrylics into digital art, with human characters in future challenges.

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Zodiac Girls - Redeux | Leo and Virgo

Digital 2019-2020

Halfway mark! Might finish next year! Who knows.

Original series from 2014

The 2014 Zodiac Girls were starting to look rather like rough drafts. They were at the time my favorite digital art to date, and I realized that had a lot to do with the color combos and textures. I started to redraw them in Photoshop, taking what I liked about the original and polishing it up. Also just glad to create new versions that are bigger and higher res than the old ones.

Aries and Taurus Gemini and Cancer

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Zodiac Girls - Redeux | Gemini and Cancer

Digital 2019-2020

Here is another project I restarted, now that I am feeling confident with my digital style.

Original series from 2014

The 2014 Zodiac Girls were starting to look rather like rough drafts. They were at the time my favorite digital art to date, and I realized that had a lot to do with the color combos and textures. I started to redraw them in Photoshop, taking what I liked about the original and polishing it up. Also just glad to create new versions that are bigger and higher res than the old ones.

Aries and Taurus

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What I Do At Work Disney Villains Profiles - as seen on Hottopic.com (also available in green tank and grey tank)

I don’t talk about my job in relation to my art much; but as far as jobs for a graphic design bachelor’s degrees go, I have a pretty darn good one (and in a great smallish affordable college town, amazingly). I’m a graphic designer slash illustrator at a licensed apparel company. It’s weird, when I try to talk to people outside the industry about it, I have to overexplain what it is I do to them. People don’t tend to believe you when you’re not a well known illustrator that you are the artist behind something a larger company put out. Which is really disheartening. I want to shed light on how industry’s like mine operate, to demystify some of the nonsense I see around the internet (hint: it’s not a bootleg). But that will be for another day.

I don’t always get to make art from scratch - that is, not manipulating and using other assets from the pop culture companies that we partner with. What might be more colloquially known as fan art, only official. I did a sketch, then traced that sketch and colored it digitally. This was one of the first I had time to make, and I was thrilled Disney approved it and now I get to see it at a well known retailer. I don’t get to own the art, but darnit I am going to brag about it a little. (And if you don’t believe me I’ll post a selfie with the sketch.)

What I want to say is this: not all working artists are visible. Not all of them have a big social media following. A lot of working artists work for larger companies, and don’t get the recognition they deserve for their individual contributions (although my boss is wonderful at making me feel like I’m a great artist/designer). I know many at my company alone, and I know there must be many others out there, in apparel, toys, packaging, even freelancers. Even with these pop culture forms of commercial art, there’s someone with a soul behind it. 

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Zodiac Girls - Redeux | Aries and Taurus

Digital 2019

Here is another project I restarted this year, now that I was feeling confident with my digital style.

Original series from 2014

The 2014 Zodiac Girls were starting to look rather like rough drafts. They were at the time my favorite digital art to date, and I realized that had a lot to do with the color combos and textures. I started to redraw them in Photoshop, taking what I liked about the original and polishing it up. Also just glad to create new versions that are bigger and higher res than the old ones.

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Market Fashion: Jan to April Digital 2018

Here is a piece that started with my first journies back into digital art. I basically was still drawing in PS with a mouse, and I wanted to do a style that used on the basic hard brush. This project helped me completely rethink how I approach digital art, which for a time I thought as only being one type of (highly shaded, rendered) style. This took me a while - late 2017 to sometime last year, and I feel there was progress from the first look to the fourth.

It was also my first fashion illustration project in some time, and was inspired by the local agriculture of the town I moved to in 2017. I had never been quite so aware of what was in season until then, and I also started cooking quite a bit. Each outfit was inspired by the colors of produce and the moods of changing seasons (also a bit of inspiration from 1970s Muppets, but, that’s an entirely different tangent.). I have not yet begun the other 8 months, and I am not sure I will as I have so many more projects to begin in 2020. 

From left to right, Jan/Mandarin; Feb/Broccoli; March/Beet (my favorite!); April/Pea

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Overstock of Wick Wish’s Tarot Card set is sold out, but I loved this photo taken of my art for the site

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I’ve heard the internet loves fan art! Which I don’t do too much (I have fan art for Rammstein’s Rosenrot video in the works though.)Here’s some I did for Crimson Peak (I have a more nuanced opinion of the movie than just being a ‘fan’ though) for Wick Wish Candle’s autumn gift box set, as part of a trio of tarot cards inspired by Victorian Gothic tales (or Victorian Gothic-inspired tales). I had a blast drawing the big sleeves and adding more blood(?) stains.

Wick Wish is run by my friend and former roommate - but her candles are excellent. If you like interesting layered scents, do check out that link.

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Evole 2010 v. Evolve 2019

I aptly named my Spring/Summer 2010 fashion collection Evolution, although at the time I only meant it in regards to the ways in which humans have evolved from the sea (but really there was no grandiose topic, it was inspired by a trip to the California Academy of Sciences and the jellyfish I saw there.). I never finished the color for this illustration, but I had used it over the years as a base for dabbling into digital drawing. In the last year or so I feel I have improved in that regard considerably, and though, why not take a smack at this again. Maybe I’ll finish all the looks this time.

Also, side story, my fashion illustration proportions evolved as exaggerated as they did because as a teen I received feedback that I drew my models too short and stocky. In a moment of satire, I pushed myself to try a figure that looked like a caricature of a tall skinny model, and since that age of 14 or 15, have played with these proportions. There’s all the missing links on f0xr0x.deviantart.com, as well as the full Evolve 2010 half-baked collection. 

And no, I am not going to make a snarky joke about deviantart art or how I made that account when I was 12. It’s not that clever. 

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Instagram is fine and all but I ought to post somewhere else (like here!) to really share the full effect of my art - damn tiny screens and ratio cropping just grits my teeth sometime.

Here are some California Native Snakes, two of my favorite things. 

Finished a few months ago and started last summer.

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Drew myself a new self portrait today in PS. I would update the logo on this site, but, I may need to upload the whole theme to do so, I’m getting some sort of error message when I try to save anything.

2019

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I drew this lineart back for Inktober (I Turned Into A Martian, Misfits) but it really wanted to be in color. Finally just got around to doing that.

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Ice cream doodles in mystery flavors.

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Did this instead of taking my tens today. Makes me want to do more bright blobby illustrations, vector or traditionally painted. Makes me want to see a Wayne Thiebaud in real life again (even though I'm primarily obsessed with his landscapes not his desserts)

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Study After Degas - 2018

I have found that my approach to making digital art is changing in it's methods; to hone in these ideas I did this illustration after my favorite Degas painting "Ballet Dancers in Butterfly Costumes". I used the gouache brush set that can be downloaded with a CC subscription primarily. I could probably keep adding to it, but, I am satisfied enough.