Christian Musselman Illustration Custom Home Portriat

Just Completed! - a new series of Mid-Century Modern home prints.

4/24/2016

Over the last year of creating home portraits for clients, a request kept coming up - something like: "I don't live in a Mid-Century Modern home, but I'd like something similar to your home portraits for my walls". I even had calls asking if I'd sell prints of other people's homes! It got to the point that I felt I should listen -and act.

I gotta' tell you, I love the enthusiasm that MCM'ers have for the homes, and the styles of that era. They LOVE their homes, their furnishings, their artwork, the history and pedigree of what they fill their lives with. It's truly exciting to be a part of that enthusiasm. It brings me much happiness to have found (and be found by!), this amazing group of people.

I experimented -quite a bit- with the color palette for this series, as well as working with (and reworking) the homes to see how best to show their MCM style; complete homes?, cropped images of the homes?. There were benefits to both ways of presenting the images. Ultimately, I liked the graphic qualities of the cropped version the most and they seemed to highlight the design styling of the homes. The illustrations filled the print area with larger blocks of bold color, and cropping allowed for some extra details.

I'm offering the prints in 2 sizes (20x16 and 14x11) and in limited editions of 250 each. I hope this series will find it's audience. It's great to get them "out into the world" I listened! ...and more importantly, acted! ;)

I've been working on this collection for quite some time. My hope was to create a series that embodied the iconic styles of homes from that period -and had a feel for the unique optimism of the era. Architecture from that time period had this great forward-thinking sensibility. What did it mean to be living a modern lifestyle in the 50's and 60's? You can easily see the answer to that question in the homes from that period.

Clearly some very new and exciting experiments were happening during that time, many that are still part of how we choose to live today... open floor plans, kitchens that were not separated from the activity of the main living area, big windows...lots of light!, the use of new materials. You get were this is going...

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"You should be proud of where you live"

4/11/2016

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Recently I completed a series of illustrations for Jonathan Alpert of Treehouse Brokerage and Development. Jonathan learned of my work through the Modern in Denver Winter edition. I was honored to be asked to work with him on created a collection of artwork for 5 of his properties.

We met at my new favorite neighborhood cafe and restaurant - Black Eye - which happens to be in one of the Treehouse properties that I was asked to illustrate - MOTO -Just down the block from my condo.

I chose to create an illustration that included all 5 structures as a linear collection - with no breaks in between the individual properties. I think it makes for an interesting, lively composition -as if it is all one building. Because some of the building are residential and others are rather large multi-dwellings, I felt like the best way to manage the differences in size and scale, was to create a cropped visual of each of the buildings. Great too, was that most of projects use similar materials and coloring which helps to unify the finished art.

This was a great project to work on -and for a wonderful company and developer who feels that "Without great design, we do not see the purpose to build". -which, if you live in Denver right now, is certainly not the prevailing spirit in development (don't get me started!)

Thanks, Jonathan for asking me to work with you on this project! It was a great opportunity to work on a project that includes some of my favorite new Denver residential projects.