I recently watched this Etsy Portraits video featuring Australian born Brooklyn based Artist Sophie Blackall, a successful children's book illustrator, as well as author of Missed Connections - Love Lost and Found. Sophies illustrations are inspired by the many ads placed in the Missed Connections section of online bulletin board Craigslist. For those not familiar with Missed Connections/Craigslist, the idea is this: You are on a train/at a park/at a private party in some trendy Soho Loft and you happen to make a connection with a stranger and by some twist of fate, nothing ever eventuates. You cant get that person out of your head and you hope that by some chance, they feel the same. So what does a New Yorker do? they place an ad in Missed Connections. Where they hope, by some chance, to reconnect with that person. Sophie spent many hours reading the ads and drew inspiration from them to illustrate her favorites. Here are some of mine:
The New York MTA recently invited Sophie to create a poster for their Arts for Transit program for 2012. The program invites 2 artists a year to design Subway related posters that will then appear on the trains all over the city. For this Sophie had to to narrow down her list of characters to only 34 (as that was what the space provided would allow). I imagine this would have been very hard for her, as looking at all her work, there is surely enough there for at least 3 posters!
Here are my 2 favorite scenes from the poster:
Having ridden on the subway many times, I can assure you that Sophie would have enough inspiration to draw her characters from for many years to come. One of the many reasons why Martino and I love the city.
View and purchase the poster via the MTA site here
Visit Sophies Etsy store to purchase her work here
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