At long last I can release the superhero drawings I did for Grinnell College. Awesome. For those of you who do not know me personally, and are therefore not up to date on what this project was, I will explain: This summer, I was commissioned by Grinnell College to do a series of nine superheroes based on the tenants of self governance: Awareness, Trust, Community, Common Sense, Communication, Compromise, Respect, Responsibility, and Accountability. (I know, what a doozy!). These superheroes were to be utilized during student staff training and new student orientation. I am really proud of these illustrations, especially since there are amongst my first commissions! Yay!

I went into designing these heroes with a few personal goals in mind. I wanted my heroes to be ethnically and physiologically diverse. I wanted to avoid as many superhero stereotypes as I could. I only moderately succeeded. Three of my heroes are African American, Two are Asian American (though I realized, in retrospect, you can't really tell with Common Sense because of his mask.. oops), and one is either Hispanic or Arab (you can't really tell due to helmet). With the female hereos I tried to avoid the small waited-big breasted look. Trust has small breasts and large thighs, Respect is muscular, Accountability has some meat on her bones, and Communication's not terribly thin either. I also tried to avoid all the guys being super muscular. I think Responsibility is the only male hero with the typical buff hero look. That being said, I know there's a lot more I could have done to make these heroes more diverse and break away from the confining superhero molds of mainstream comics. For one, both my superhero duos are male/female. I did this for several reasons, but mainly because I envisioned these duos as siblings rather than lovers. I probably also could have made another non-white hero (probably Hispanic, since I don't have an overtly Latino/a hero and Awareness is ethnically ambiguous). All that being said, there was only so much I could do to be social-justice minded in the time frame I had and the concepts I had to work with. I really only had enough time to revise a design maybe once and then get straight to work on the final version.

I had a ton of fun working on these heroes, even if it was highly stressful. The entire project took about 60 hours total and I only had a few weeks to do it in. It was like being back in college. I was really flattered that Grinnell contacted me about doing this project for them. They were inspired by the vinyl cut heroes I had done for my senior art project and wanted to me to do more. It was enjoyable but difficult to design nine heroes in a row and make them distinct from one another. The whole project was challenging and highly rewarding. It was also a great chance to work with Illustrator more.

At any rate, enjoy these superheroes! Blood, sweat, and tendinitis filled wrists went into their making.