The Minnesota Lottery partnered with City Pages to find a local artist to repurpose scratch tickets into an original piece of artwork for the Stone Arch Bridge Festival. Minnesota-based illustrator, hand letterer and designer Jay Roeder was chosen after a public art contest to create an original piece of artwork with the theme “Minnesota Summer Jackpot.”
Roeder specializes in a form of illustration called hand lettering. “In 2017 I authored my first book, 100 Days of Lettering, which basically guides people on how to hand letter. Earlier this year I released a follow-up title to that called Lettering Alphabets & Artwork. I’m going to be kicking off a third book, also on hand lettering, soon.”
This project was a departure from Roeder’s usual work. “I do a lot of magazine covers and fun little passion projects. One of the first big projects I got was Nike and that was a little nerve wracking. From there on it’s been a lot of fun projects, I do murals, I do all kinds of stuff.”
After living in Connecticut for 15 years, Roeder recently returned to Minnesota. “Now that I’ve been back for a year, I’ve just got so much passion for Minnesota. I feel like most Minnesotans do and you don’t realize it until you leave and come back, how much culture is in this area. When I saw the City Pages and Minnesota Lottery contest, I thought it was a great opportunity.”
Roeder decided to create a “Life at the Lake” mosaic. “I just feel like if there is anything that is synonymous with Minnesota culture, it’s obviously lakes,” he said.
“The entire thing is made up of lottery tickets. That’s one of the things I think is really cool about this, the character of each ticket coming forward. I like that you can see some of the writing from the tickets and the dollar symbols and the lottery messaging. I even incorporated a loon in the water and a tent and fire on one of the banks. I wanted to get my lettering in there too because that’s kind of what I do.”
The mosaic took quite a bit of time to create. “It probably took between 20 and 30 hours. When you look at something like that I think a lot of people don’t understand the kind of time that goes into it, especially for some of the more intricate areas.”
Normally he draws all of his artwork by hand with pen and paper or on a tablet, so creating a mosaic out of scratch tickets was a fun new challenge for him. “It was fun to see this come to life. This was actually my first mosaic. I would love to do more of these.”