Kate Seaver's drawing of medicinal herbs, featured on this year's Common Ground Country Fair poster (and T-shirts, cotton bags and other goods), emits a bright and positive energy that reflects the artist, her farm and the healthful qualities of herbs.

After working as a tattoo artist, she majored in illustration at Maine College of Art (MECA). Her medicinal herbs poster drew on both backgrounds.

“I used Prisma colors, pencils with colors that blend, for the poster design,” Seaver said. “I had used those pencils for designing tattoos, because they blend the way ink would on skin."

Her training at MECA helped, too. Seaver hopes to expand her art by painting “not just the surface of things, but the energy I feel behind them.” She also has plans to use her illustration background to produce educational books and pamphlets about farming and herbs.

Seaver and her husband, John, are MOFGA journeypersons in their second season of market gardening at their MOFGA-certified organic Up-Beet Farm in Porter Village. The couple is working toward producing a sustainable five acres of organic and bio-intensive heirloom vegetables, herbs, cut flowers and seedlings.

The Seavers' grow the herbs (chamomile, sage, yarrow, comfrey, echinacea, nettle, mullein, and feverfew) that inspired, and appear on, the poster.

“Those are the herbs I felt comfortable with,” Seaver said. “They're bright, pretty, alive. The herb garden is very healing.”

The Common Ground Fair will be held in Unity on September 19-21.

For more information, visit mofga.org.