Hi There!
Val Margolin, an artist specializing in digital and traditional hand painted artwork for products. Based in Northern California, her creative studio DesignGirlMagic gives a fun, modern take on retro mid-century style.
Val has always been surrounded by creativity, being raised on the road with musical parents, and that upbringing shaped her into someone who infuses inspiration from travels into her entrepreneurial work. Holding both BFA and BGD degrees from Rhode Island School Of Design, she has experience working directly with clients and can easily marry her artistic process into bespoke artwork while having a knowledge of the technical needs of her clients. She’s looking to take the next steps; getting her work seen and developing art licensing contacts that create commercial projects and collaborations for her DesignGirlMagic brand.
Her artwork is often described as soulful and unique, with modern color palettes and sophisticated textures.
She is comfortable translating creative briefs and trends into collections, working with mood boards and has a daily art practice you can follow along with on Instagram. She’s working on her surface pattern career while participating in proposals for larger public works projects and fundraising events in the SF Bay Area.
Creating complex patterns over patterns and overlapping motifs that interact unexpectedly with each other is her wheelhouse. She’s excited about the possibility of finding the right partnership to help take her brand to the next level.
Experience
With over 20 years as a freelance Graphic Designer, Environmental Designer and Painter, Val holds two degrees from Rhode Island School of Design – BFA (Fine Arts) and BGD (Graphic Design).
Val has used her expertise for a wide array of project categories, such as Exhibit Design, Wayfinding, Branding, Community Building, Community Engagement, and Event Marketing. Recently she’s focused on Surface Pattern Design, Illustration and custom hand painted Murals.
She creates traditionally as well as digitally with ProCreate, Affinity Designer and the Adobe Cloud Suite.
Always learning, Val attends in-person and online workshops and courses regularly in Muraling, Hand Lettering, Surface Pattern Design, Block Printing, Sign Painting, Gouache Portraiture, Procreate, Digital Typography, Font & Typography Development and many more.
In her free time (while raising two teens and a cat), Val knits lovely hats, loves gin martinis and runs one of the largest and longest running unofficial Prince fan communities with her husband.
Artist Statement
Val Margolin is an illustrator and graphic designer from Detroit Michigan, currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Holding both a BFA (Fine Arts) and BGD (Graphic Design) from Rhode Island School of Design, her work is bold, quirky and thoughtfully considered. Usually incorporating graphic techniques and influences from her travels abroad, her love of learning creates a multicultural mix of mark-making and organic gestures. Newly focusing on surface design, illustration and large scale murals, her work has been featured in the Let’s Glow SF projection mapping event and as part of the SF Creative Corps Paint The Void Artist Mural Project. A children’s book encouraging creative imagination based on her childhood with her musical parents is in the works.