i like fun.
The Basics: strawberryluna is Allison & Craig. We are passionate about Handmade work and craft and our work is handmade and handcrafted by us both. We are a married pair of designers, illustrators, and screenprinters as well as music and film nerds based in Pittsburgh, PA. And yes, the correct way to spell our studio name is “strawberryluna”. All one word, all lower case. Full on. When it’s good, you don’t need to shout.
Allison was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania while Craig is Pittsburgh through & through. Allison moved 300 miles away from home to Pittsburgh, only to realize that she is, in fact, still in Pennsylvania. This gives us a lot of practice correctly spelling “Pennsylvania”.
In 2004, Allison noticed that there was a slew of hand screen printed wheatpasted street art showing up around Pittsburgh and figured that somewhere, someone was working in a studio capable of producing cool stuff. Having always had an interest in learning how to silkscreen print, she began to play Sherlock Holmes until she found the Artists Image Resource community print co-op in Pittsburgh in 2005. Beginning with a weekly Open Studio night, she started printing and learning the craft in a very "sink or swim" environment from the talented likes of Mike Budai and Heather White, but no worries! After completing her very first silkscreen print comprised of 3 colors and an edition of just 8, she was hooked on hand screen printing immediately.
From there Allison & Craig began designing small art print editions, which lead to being commissioned to design and hand print rock posters for bands. As strawberryluna began to grow and grow by 2006 Allison quit her day job with the full intentions of finding a new one soon. However, at the end of 6 months of working freelance while looking for another job, Allison & Craig soon realized that strawberryluna *was* Allison's new full time gig.
While Craig still holds down his day job in the creative field, he and Allison are always working on new prints, posters, and new product design for their shop pretty much non-stop. All while maintaining and growing an active design studio outside of Etsy.
We travel to about 8-12 craft fairs and arts festivals a year. Some of our favorite perks are things like being able to meet people who love and bright, clean design in person, as well as get to see our crafty and poster artist friends throughout the year. It often feels like summer camp, no matter what the season.
Handling most of the heavy lifting on the hand screen printing side of our posters and prints is Allison, hand pulling our silkscreens the super old-fashioned way - completely by hand. Originally working out of the amazing community / artists run co-op studio in Pittsburgh called Artists Image Resource (AIR for short), now Allison primarily prints at our studio in the Friendship section of Pittsburgh. Craig is not only an insanely versatile designer and natural trivia champ, but is also a Superman in the kitchen.
We love to work on illustration and design projects outside of silkscreen posters and prints. We’ve done individual and full tour posters for bands, season run identity posters for theater companies, illustration and design work for magazines and television shows (most notably to date the Summer Concert Series posters for The TODAY Show), custom illustration work, book jacket illustrations and design layouts, created full CD & vinyl packaging designs & layout, logos & identity packages, traditional-print ready pieces, web-ready icons and designs, t-shirt designs, and much more. If you like what you see here, then odds are that we can handle just about any type of design & illustration needs you might have. Feel free to shoot us a convo!
Each of us come from a family of creative makers so handmade is something that we not only grew up with, whether it be foods or the arts, but something that we both treasure and delight in every day. Finding ways to explore and express these interests and passions is what makes waking each morning up so easy!
We love what we do, every single day and we hope that shows in our shop. But most importantly? We like fun.
Cheers!
xo
Allison & Craig
