Address Your Stress

Here's an ad I illustrated for Kripalu Institute - a yoga retreat located in the Berkshire Mountains. The ad appeared in the New Yorker - and is geared towards stressed-out city folks. Kripalu is a peaceful escape from the hectic grind of life in the Big Apple. Thanks to Elena Erber for a perfectly stress-free assignment.

Here are ideas I submitted for this ad:

If you ever need to address your stress - at home or in the office, 

please try these five minute yoga exercises  which I animated.

You can do them right in front of your computer!

namaste.

Take a Kripalu Yoga Break!

Intuition tells me that yoga would be beneficial in managing the stress of daily life. If only I could motivate myself to attend an actual class. Well, this assignment helped to bring instruction right into my studio!

Elena Erber, a fabulous client for over 15 years, is the creative director at Kripalu, a premier yoga center in the Berkshires. She approached me about illustrating a new feature on their website, 'Take a Kripalu Yoga Break'. It's a series of 5 minute recordings, by expert instructors, who guide you through an entire exercise right in front of your computer.

 These exercises give a taste of what Kripalu offers; a retreat from our stressed out professional lives. The drawings would be a visual aid to go along with the recordings. For novices such as myself, this is helpful to know you're posing properly. So far I've drawn over 130 frames for this enlightening project. These drawings have done wonders for my downward doodle!

You can take a yoga break right here:  http://www.kripalu.org/article/649

I went through numerous rounds of  sketches to achieve the right look for this project. I played with the palette which Kripalu uses for identity and publishing materials. Below are some examples.

I found it invaluable to have photo references of all the exercises. My yoga-instructor friends, Alice & Teresa, were so helpful in modeling these poses for me. Putting the photos into order helped me see the flow of each exercise:

Namaste.