Michiko Stehrenberger
specializes in creating illustration and character design for fashion
and entertainment clients such as MTV, Britney Spears, Steve Madden
shoes, Playstation, Coca Cola, Sony Pictures, and others.
After earning her BFA with honors in Illustration
from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Michiko spent 11
years running her own design studio in New York City. During this time
her work has received awards and recognition from the Society of
Illustrators, the Art Directors Club, Communication Arts, the ANDY
advertising awards and the Society of Newspaper Designers, as well as
overseas in Tokyo’s Step-by-Step, WebHits and SAN editions, and in Berlin’s international character
design compendium titled PictoPlasmaII.
Her ongoing pet project, the series of stylized
pinup/action heroine characters entitled BimBionic® {Perfect Girls for an
Imperfect World®} have appeared on
MaxRacks free postcards nationwide since 1995 and have attracted an
unusually loyal collectorship base around the world.
Commercial projects range from ad campaigns and
logo designs for small businesses like a specialty cheesecake company
and a watermelon and produce distributor, to characters featured as
packaging art for a perfume line in Greece, to prop appearances in key
scenes of the teen comedy American Pie 2 and as the opening credits of the Sony Pictures release
Autofocus
starring Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe. BimBionic continues to evolve artistically through a series
of experimental books, gallery works and apparel graphics to be
released later this year.
In the late 1990s, Steve Madden shoes launched its
national campaign with the
characters prominently featured in full
page advertisements in TeenPeople, Elle and Cosmo magazines, and one of Tokyo’s largest media
companies sponsored a press tour which included a series of live radio
interviews, industry panels, and a one-woman gallery exhibit. Her other
humorous characters are featured in the teen sex-education book Smart
Sex (co-published by MTV and Simon & Schuster) and on dressing room
murals at Viacom’s corporate headquarters in Times Square.
Other projects include original characters
designed for children’s books and educational games in
collaboration with Wizards of the Coast/HASBRO,
CD-ROM games for
Mattel/Intel, and 3-dimensional figures and animated characters for
‘smart-toy’ developers Zowie and LEGO have been made into a
toy playset for girls 4-8 years retailing at Toys ‘R Us.
New concepts are being prototyped into unusual
dolls, handbags, storybooks, ArtBox night-lights and other crossover
gift items for teen and women’s audiences, such as her upcoming Ex-Boyfriend Dolls® and Frankenpets.®
Michiko’s recent experiences with copyright
protection, in a case against
the second largest tobacco company (which used one
of her images in an ad campaign to target teen audiences without her
knowledge or permission) have
led her into a more proactive educational role
within the visual arts community.
She has since been has been invited to contribute
an article on the more controversial aspects of the case to the New
York Bar Association’s Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law
Journal. She has also been featured as a guest lecturer and workshop
leader at Mexico City’s groundbreaking animation institute Eunoia, at Santa Barbara’s
Westmont College, and at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New
York.
Most recently she’s been sponsored by the
Oahu Department of Health, the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s
Arts, Womens’ Studies and Law programs, and Seattle’s
Public Health Department’s projects for ArtPatch.
Michiko can be reached at gallery @ michiko.com and through
her website at www.michiko.com.
Comments and ideas for collaboration are always
welcome!
