Karlotta Freier x Hermès
On July 25 I got an E-mail from Hermès.
For a store opening in New York they were commissioning 6 local artists to interpret the storefront for Instagram. They needed the first ideas within a week and the final by September 6th. With the first email they also send along a short brief of work of mine they liked. I interpreted it as: they like cityscapes, objects and people, a touch of something magical. For a $2000 budget.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2b27f6a060e2f206d77d6e99e036da13b3634c9051decf1a9aff24797d752117/2.jpg)
I often get excited about a visual idea first, that then that leads me through the project. In this case I was looking forward to drawing bright colors, inspired by the Hermès scarves, horses and exciting clothes on characters. I wanted to compose a very detailed image with many elements and sent along three sketches. Two of them I was very excited about, and a third I did last minute. I knew I could make the colorful fish or the group of animals look good, but unfortunately none of them were quite right.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a9f2c0011f3175bc4e3651c5f7623629e26e4aecbe049f89f88048beb370def0/skizzen.png)
They sent me another reference of my own work that had a feeling they were hoping to emulate. And they liked the idea with the floating scarves – the one sketch that I wasn’t that excited about.
That is something that happens to me so regularly that I have now made it a practice to not grieve over my favorite sketches for even one second. I pretend the job starts right that second and this new brief is the only one I ever got.
The new visual ideas that I am excited about are: folds in the scarves, colorful fabrics, horses, flowers. I researched flowers and plants that looked exciting to me and looked at a lot of Hermès fashion for the little people that interacted with the landscape. A nice thing about working with an art directors vision is that it leads me to leave my comfort zone and find new ideas and solutions. The jobs where I didn’t get to implement my favorite sketch often turn out to be the illustrations that I like the most.
The art director was happy with this direction. The only change that I got was to take out the little people. Then the art director went on vacation and I had a whole month to work on the finish. I mostly work in editorial, so I never have that much time. This particular month was one of the busiest of my whole life so far. I also know that my work doesn’t necessarily get better when I have a lot of time to overthink things. In the end I did the line work on one day and the color on the next day. It ended up being one of my favorite jobs.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/63df9c8cac63237388d58b4ea73fcbf53bc62979b5648c263d62b7b9222a8671/10.png)