Alphabet Project concept ‘both freeing and challenging’

“I love the look on someone’s face when I finish a job for them and it’s everything they visualized. Also, being able to pull of something that someone else visualized is a challenge because most of the time I’m sure they don’t even know what they want, initially. This project, for me, has been an exercise in creative freedom.”

Veldman was one of the 26 local artists selected from the scores of applicants. She was randomly assigned the letter Y. It was a shape and a phonetic symbol loaded in possibilities. It is sometimes a vowel, sometimes not. It is a dominant letter in the completion of a word, and often changes and defines the tense of given word. It is also a letter many words rely on to begin. It is, symbolically speaking, a very urbane letter, a very constructive letter.

“I wanted to take this opportunity to use techniques that I don’t often get to use in my daily life,” Veldman said. “As a graphic designer, I don’t always have the freedom to do whatever I want with a project. This was my opportunity to express my own personal tastes without worrying about fitting into the confines of someone else’s. I knew immediately that I wanted to use a darker palette. I don’t get to do that as often as I’d like in my job. I love dark colours but I think many people are afraid to use them and associate them with negative tones. The idea of using just a single letter as a concept is both freeing and challenging. A single letter can be associated with so much that it’s hard to encompass all of your thoughts and ideas into one single image. I thought using typography was a natural course of action. It ties together the idea of print media and the versatility of the letter Y. Honestly, the cityscape in the background was a happy accident.”

Veldman herself could be described as a prototypical modern urban artist. The computer is a primary art tool in her world. She is often working late into the wee hours on her personal stuff, and she does so listening to everything from K-pop music to metal. Her favourite creative setting is not the kitchen table, as it is for many home artists, it is the games room she and her husband have in their home. Veldman is an avid gamer (Mass Effect and Dragon Age are her favourite franchises, and her goto television viewing happens with The Walking Dead), she was a hungry eater of the sights and sounds at Northern FanCon and her images reflect the cutting edge styles of cartooning and comics.

Now she’s part of the cutting edge of Prince George culture, as one of the baker’s doubledozen immortalized in consecutive segments by the city’s paper of record on the occasion of their 100th anniversary. She has always been driven to tell stories and represent complex ideas in succinct fashion. Although all the answers to Heidi Veldman are still open to interpretation, with this digital painting positioned near the end of the alphabet, we know the question of Heidi Veldman is a resounding Y.