About My Inner French Girl‘s new logo/header

Longtime readers of My Inner French Girl know that I’m a big fan of artists and other creatives. I can draw a decent stick figure, and thanks for a particularly gifted 6th-grade art teacher I can also quickly sketch a nice-looking palm tree, but otherwise I’m in complete awe of folks who can wield a pen, pencil, marker, Sharpie, or brush and produce, say, Starry Night. And I know it’s not fairy dust, either. Like any other creative endeavor, art requires considerable mental and physical energy, especially if you plan to devote your life to it as a vocation.

I love original art in particular and knew from the moment that I began planning the MIFG redesign that I wanted an original painting that would serve as My Inner French Girl‘s header and official logo. I had no clue what it was going to look like, or even what medium I wanted, but I did know that it was going to be something special.

I met local artist Lindsay Randall Boone at Primo’s, a brand-new coffee house in Arlington, TX, that’s located in a space formerly occupied by Starbucks. (I know, can you imagine the irony?) To be more precise, however, I met Lindsay’s art at the Primo’s. She had a couple of pen sketches on exhibit, just in time for the cafe’s introduction to the community.

B. noticed them first and pointed them out to me. They were beautiful fashion illustrations similar to the kind you’d see in Vogue from the 1950′s and 1960′s, the heyday of magazine illustration. While they weren’t the exact look I was going for in the new site, I knew immediately that whoever drew them would be the perfect artist to evoke the spirit of My Inner French Girl.

I finally had the pleasure of meeting Lindsay a few days later, and it wasn’t too long after that we had finalized the idea for the logo. During our initial meeting, I had brought her a few pages I’d torn from magazines as well as a couple of photography books that I thought would serve as inspirations for us. Very quickly we zeroed in on a particular photograph in the book Parisiennes: A Celebration of French Women, which I had just reviewed.

The large, black-and-white photograph featured a thoughtful young woman sitting on the ground, her back against a wall, with the flowing Seine separating her from the Eiffel Tower in the background. Those of you familiar with the book might remember that it has tons and tons of photographs, but that was the one that I kept coming back to. I knew I had to recreate something similar for my blog. I mean, it was me, for cryin’ out loud! The Eiffel Tower! The typewriter! The complete indifference to everything going on around me, my sole focus the words on the paper in front of me. (And yes, we know that it’s not really geographically accurate — remember the Seine between the girl and the Tower? — but I wanted a clean, summery mood, and, well, it’s my vision. It’s art, daaaah-ling!)

In the end Lindsay did a fantastic job, and I thank her from the bottom of my heart for creating such an unforgettable logo for MIFG. She did the original painting in watercolor, then scanned it into the computer and overlaid the typewriter-style  lettering. She then sent me high-resolution JPG’s and the font information and even broke up the logo into its individual elements so that I can play around with it if I wished with something like thank-you cards or other stationery.

I plan to have more original art featured on this site, but in the meantime, I encourage you to pay Lindsay a visit on her own blog, Texas Vittles. And if you’re in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and want to see some of her other work, stop by Java Jo’z coffee house in Arlington (just west of Green Oaks and SH-360), where she currently has a small exhibit.

Oh, and you know how I knew – beyond a shadow of a doubt — that Lindsay was the artist for me? When I found out that her mother is actually from France, and that Lindsay herself spent an entire year in Paris during college studying art and art history. If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is.

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