Illustrating Depth Counseling: creating distinctive artwork for a psychotherapy blog

Over the course of the past few months, my client Depth Counseling has been stepping up its blog game. Founded (and branded by yes.I.said) a few years ago in Chicago, the group practice has quickly established a reputation as an intellectually rigorous outfit that stands out for its psychoanalytic approach to mental health care. The folks at Depth use their website and blog to communicate a number of their core values:

Education and discourse: Depth demonstrates its curiosity and commitment to research and education through its blog content, which comprises interviews with and articles by member therapists, promotion and registration info for its first in a series of public lectures, and other announcements and links to relevant external content. Other pages on the website serve to recruit pre-licensed professionals for their robust internship program.

Equity for marginalized populations: Throughout its website, Depth Counseling goes to great lengths to highlight their attention to equity for people of all races, sexual orientations, gender identities, body shapes, and beliefs. On their hiring page, they have a dedicated call for applicants who specialize in racism, race-related trauma, and racial identity. When it came out that Chicago police had abused and humiliated Anjanette Young, a black female licensed clinical social worker, they used their website’s announcement bar and a blog post to deliver messaging that calls for restorative justice for Young and affirms that they “are re-envisioning group practice so that [they] can dismantle oppressive systems and practices in psychoanalysis and in [their] community more broadly.” The aforementioned lecture they are presenting on March 5th is a discussion of race, power, and language in psychoanalysis.

Going beyond stock: amplifying the brand with custom imagery

For small businesses, exigencies of time and resources often relegate blogging to a DIY, dash-and-done effort; I’m lucky to work with a client who recognizes the benefit of spending a few extra marketing dollars for a professional to sculpt and finalize their blog posts. Depth recognizes its posts as opportunities to both articulate its values and strengthen the business’s visual branding. (They are also textbook tools for strengthening a website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization)—but that is a topic for another post.)

Each of the illustrations in this post is based on royalty-free imagery I purchased or downloaded from a free service. Rather than posting these images unaltered, I take the opportunity to customize them with digital collage and painting techniques. After I deem the compositions complete, I tune the colors to match the brand and give a sense of consistency across the whole blog.

Where do I get royalty-free images for my blog?

These days, there is a plethora of websites offering an endless supply of professional quality, royalty-free photographs for personal and commercial use. Some great ones are: Pexels, Unsplash, and Pixabay. For antique, public domain, or off-the-beaten-path imagery, Flickr hosts countless images published under Creative Commons licenses. These can be used as-is or with modification with proper attribution, depending on the CC license. To find them, just filter your search in the upper-left corner where it says ‘Any license.’

I have subscriptions some other sites more geared to professionals. They offer a certain number of downloads a month or unlimited downloads for a monthly or yearly fee. While iStock is probably the most popular of such sites, I have found Dreamstime and Envato Elements to be more economical and rewarding resources.

Balancing aesthetics and economy

Even though Depth is clever enough to spend some coin on custom work, their resources are not infinite, and I only have an hour or two to illustrate, design, optimize, and publish a single blog post. As a result, my process is very intuitive, improvisational—and fun. With some variation, my process is as follows: I open the stock source materials—usually in Photoshop—and create a rough collage or composition. I’ll then digitally paint over and around the image using my XP-Pen Artist Pro 15.6 pen tablet. After final color correction, I optimize the image to reduce its file size to below 100kb, then I pop it straight into the article.

It’s been quite satisfying to continue to work with Depth Counseling on these projects, and I’d jump at the opportunity to do more such work. If you’re looking for someone to help you elevate your blogging, don’t hesitate to contact me for a free consultation and quote.

“I especially appreciate how your original artwork and photography gives our website a unique and consistent feel/brand. It’s grown into such a spectacular site!”

— A therapist and blogger at Depth Counseling

“Thanks for the beautiful work you do with these. I love your work and it makes it very appealing to publish on the blog. ”

— Another Depth therapist/blogger

“The artwork you created is BEAUTIFUL. I was blown away and so moved by the pieces you created to depict the words I had written. I got emotional and nearly had tears in my eyes over one of the pieces because of the care and detail you took to illustrate the importance of the words on the page. Thank you for taking such care with the art you create.”

— A third contributor to the blog

Narcissism: Self-Love

This article discusses the positive aspects and origins of self-love. I reflected a stock image of a woman touching up her makeup in a mirror, and traced the contours of her face with light and dark strokes. A rough bar of digital paint depicts some flow or connection between reflector and reflected. The rough watercolor texture and photo filter align the image with brand colors and other images on the blog.

From “Narcissism: Heinz Kohut's Thoughts on Self-Love” by Jessica Ngiam:

“Have you been called a narcissist? Do you think that someone in your life may be a narcissist? What if someone told you that narcissism plays a valuable role in your feeling lovable, confident, and whole, and in your overall functioning in life?”

Narcissism: Selfobject Other

Heinz Kohut’s selfobject other is someone from whom a child maps their emotional and behavioral regulation (e.g., a parent or caregiver). The child experiences this figure as an extension of herself. I painted over the faces of the woman and girl in a vintage portrait with a rough, low-poly-style to indicate the relationship between self and selfobject other, then adjusted the colors for consistency.

From “Narcissism: Heinz Kohut's Thoughts on Self-Love” by Jessica Ngiam:

“According to Kohut, development of the self begins in infancy. Healthy development, Kohut believed, was a product of what he referred to as “selfobject experiences.” […] Just as babies need nutrients from food for physical development, they need affection and connection from others for emotional survival and their developing selves. In early life, the selfobject other—typically the parent or caregiver—is experienced as part of oneself rather than a separate person. […] Put another way, the selfobject other serves as an emotional regulatory function in early life.”

Speak/Hear

Depth is using this image to promote an upcoming Zoom lecture that will explore race, power and language. I downloaded a dozen or so images of folks of all races and assembled them into a rough collage, then applied a black and white adjustment layer in photoshop to improve consistency of values between the disparate images. I painted over the collage to obscure most (but not all) of the hard lines, and to highlight the eyes and ears of the subjects.

From a post publicizing “Race and Power in the Psychoanalytic Consulting Room.”

“In this live illustration of how psychoanalysts learn and develop theory from clinical cases, one analyst, Gregory Rizzolo, a faculty member of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and the Institute for Clinical Social Work, will present the case of a patient he saw for years of intensive, multiple-times-per-week treatment. The patient, who grew up with a deceased mother and incarcerated father, had come to romanticize the analytic situation as a place to find connection and empowerment through words.”

Anjanette Young, LCSW

As I mentioned in the introduction to this article, Anjanette Young is a LCSW in Chicago who was horribly mistreated by Chicago police officers in a case of mistaken identity. I used a shot of Young at a press conference as the basis for an almost entirely painted portrait. My goal was to remove her from her chaotic surroundings in the source photo to emphasize the anguish in her eyes.

From “A Statement on Anjanette Young, LCSW”

“We acknowledge that we, Depth Counseling, were ourselves silent on the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless others this summer, and failed there to raise our voices against the systemic racism plaguing BIPOC. While some group members believed we ought to issue a statement, others felt we would be hypocritical to do so without first addressing the lack of diversity on our staff. The consequence of our internal conflict was silence at a time when our voices were most needed.”

Does Body Shaming Affect Me?

When creating this image for a post publicizing a Depth therapist’s podcast appearance discussing body shame, I wanted to avoid depicting any body parts. I found this cheeky pear/measuring tape image and placed it on one side of the frame; on the other I drew some hasty white rectangles that I imagined to be comparing themselves to one another, obscured in part by a darker blot. The white lines of the rectangles are echoed in an arrow that swoops around the top of the pear, seeming to constrict it as it evaluates it.

Promoting Depth member Jenna E. White’s discussion of body shame on podcast Polemic Nation:

“Javier Luna, the creator of the podcast “Polemic Nation,” recently sat down with Jenna White, LCPC to discuss her blog post about body shame, the culture of body shaming and how its micro and macro aggressions directly affect our perceptions of our bodies. Together they explore questions like: Does body shame affect me? Am I body shaming others? What should I do if I feel ashamed of my body? Why is weight-loss complicated? Why is “thin” considered synonymous with “healthy”? And how do I talk to my kids about their bodies?“

Confessions of a Teletherapy Clinician

After a not-quite-on-point first attempt (see below), Depth provided the following prompt: "[could we make it] something about the psychoanalytic couch, deconstructing the couches centrality, the telephone, and the appearance of the computer?” I darkened a photo of a therapist taking notes so she appears to be a silhouette; behind her, silhouettes of patients appear in rectangles intended to resemble Zoom chat screens. Behind all of that, I assembled a ground of inverted couches.

From “Confessions of a Teletherapy Clinician” by Flora E. Lazar, PhD LCSW:

“In their eagerness to return to a semblance of normality after COVID, many psychoanalytic clinicians have treated teletherapy as a crisis improvisation not unlike factory women did in World War II. Flora Lazar offers a candid assessment of the benefits of teletherapy and argues that the benefits of these adaptations may have long-term benefits to psychoanalysis—benefits that may result in some of the most serious challenges to date about the use of the iconic psychoanalytic couch.“

Confessions of a Teletherapy Clinician (early draft)

This image depicts a therapist and her patient, heads replaced by outsized laptops. A wall of painted lines separates them, dividing the arrows that perhaps indicate unfettered communication. When it came to representing the sentiments expressed in the article this image missed the mark. In their feedback before the revision above, Depth went on to say: “The current lead image misses the tone of the article in a subtle way: it seems to point at the existential dilemma of a world in which we think and communicate through our computers, and in a sense have become computers. But the article is saying that Telehealth is actually a good thing and more humanizing in many instances than the couch.”

Tele/presence

This appears later in the same article. To simply depict the physical absence of the patient on the therapist’s couch, I used Photoshop’s smart selection tools to key out the silhouette of the patient, maintaining some realistic dimensional lighting near the right side of his face and neck. I painted within that selection, giving the silhouette the organic, hand-made look of the rest of the images.

From “Confessions of a Teletherapy Clinician” by Flora E. Lazar, PhD LCSW:

“On any given day, when I open my email, I typically find no less than a half dozen invitations to consider how the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the fundamental features of the psychoanalytic landscape. In early April, as clinicians were urged to do the previously unthinkable—migrate to teletherapy—the mental health Cassandras launched into a bout of hand-wringing about the deprivations that this would produce in psychoanalytically-informed treatment.”

DSM-III: Depathologizing Homosexuality

For the hero image of this article, which discusses a recent apology by the American Psychoanalytic Association for its damaging beliefs and practices regarding homosexuals, I referenced an earlier reform: the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973. I used a scan of a relevant page from the DSM as a background texture. Other prominent elements include: a painted and distorted pride rainbow, a photo of a homoerotic graffito, and a conspicuous pink triangle.

From “Dealing with Identity: Transforming Apologies into Progress” by Flora E. Lazar, Phd LCSW:

“Last year, part way through a case presentation in a very stimulating class at one of the local psychoanalytic institutes, the instructor launched into his transference interpretation of an analytic patient’s passive longings for the analyst and went on to characterize them as homosexual. Taken aback by this characterization in view of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s (APsaA) recent apology to the LGBTQ community for the damage its theories and institutions had done to this community, I raised my hand and asked who had characterized passive longings as homosexual, the patient or the analyst.”