The Making of the Misha & Puff Neighborhood
A Creative Collaboration With Artist & Designer Martine Trélaün, and all of you!
Thank you to Martine, a longtime friend of ours for bringing it all together. Martine is a graphic designer & creative director based in Paris who has been a big part of Misha & Puff throughout the years. She’s created the newest addition to the SS20 Activity Party, a wonderful neighborhood of your homes for us all to be together.
This truly is great show of our community from all around the world, that we feel so thankful for. We wanted to put a spotlight on the process, and how she brought it to life. The connection between your amazing drawings and Martine’s final creation.
It all started with a shared idea and collaborative illustration from Anna & Martine.
Spending time thinking about the idea of home and all the different meanings it can have, they love the idea of bring these together, and connecting our communities across the globe. They turned to the work of artists & designers Klee & Marimekko and their beautiful cityscapes serves as inspiration. Martine was reminded of the beautiful view up Castro Street in San Francisco, where she lived as a child. The patchwork effect of all of those colors and shapes stacked up the hill were the inspiration for the composition.
The Process
For Martine, the first part of the process was actually choosing which media to use. In her own work. Martine is a designer, but enjoys the immediacy of drawing, and sketching out an idea much faster with a pencil than with a mouse. After loosely working out an idea on paper, she next moves to whatever medium or software makes the most sense. As the kids’ drawings were done in pencil, crayon, marker and paint, she knew she’d need to pick a medium that would simultaneously create a visually cohesive whole and capture the spirit of the kids’ drawings. After some tests, her and Anna both agreed that gouache was the way to go.
Once that was decided, she printed out the kids’ houses in black and white, cut them out and started fiddling with how they might look stacked or grouped. At the same time, she was thinking about how to interpret the houses as outlines for coloring, how many details to include and at what scale.
When the paintings were dry, she scanned and arranged them in different layouts, with many back-and-forths with Anna and Izzy to gauge composition, brushstroke weights and overall size.
From Martine, “I love the kids’ artwork so, so much. When I was painting, I really wanted to do justice to their creativity and make sure I expressed their sense of freedom and joy. Some of the details I knew I had to include: the cat-faced sun, the bunny, and of course that amazing sunflower!”
The final creation is a beautiful, collaborative masterpiece between Martine & you all, and and can’t wait to see how you can join in.
From start to finish, this little neighborhood has warmed our hearts, and it’s not done yet! We’ve left plenty of room for little ones to add another house, a park, or their pet playing outside.
Download the final creation on our Activity Page, right here!
If you would like to check our more of Martine’s work, here is the link to her site.