Billie Claire Handmade

"Billie Claire is an illustrator and digital artist, specializing in hand lettering, botanical drawings, and graphic design. She loves making people laugh from the unexpected, and enjoys pairing elegant florals with profanity and sass. Claire (named after her Great Aunt Billie Claire), is originally from northern New Mexico, where she grew up building forts and catching lizards instead of being ""hip"" to the MTV magic happening on cable, so please pardon her for her extreme lack of pop culture knowledge. (However, she knows a whole lot about native New Mexican plant species and how to get pine sap off your hands. FOR THE WIN.) After going to school in New Orleans and falling madly in love with that city, she spent a decade in Austin, Texas, which is where Billie Claire Handmade was born (and where her obsession with tacos began). In search of change and new places to explore, Claire and her husband recently moved to Washington, D.C.; where she is now a vendor with the historic Eastern Market community and is thrilled to be able to walk everywhere she goes. Claire is a self-taught doodler, and every design of hers begins with a pencil and Micron ink pen in her sketchbook. She sometimes daydreams about the idea of using ProCreate on an iPad, but she’s a bit stubborn and old-school, and loves the tangible aspect of sketching on lusciously thick paper. Once her sketches have been inked in, she turns to Adobe Illustrator to digitize and color her work, and then they are off to the local printshop in DC for digital printing."