It’s been a while since I’ve designed a new collection of cards. This seasons collection is all about animals: dogs, birds and cutesy animals. For the very first time I’ve designed a birthday card selection for children- I’m really pleased with the way they’ve turned out.
They’ll be up in my Etsy shop very soon, so watch this space!
Happy Saturday everyone! We made it through the week! I hope you’re all having a chilled out weekend, or if you’re me, looking up Christmas presents (love doing it right at the last minute). It’s great just to have the weekend to myself as the last couple of weeks have been proper full on, it’s amazing what a couple of days of doing nothing can do for you. I was completely burnt out at work this week due to stress and anxiety. It was pretty unpleasant as I was completely overwhelmed and exhausted by everything, I couldn’t even focus in the morning so I had to go home. It just goes to show that it’s so important to be mindful: you need to take care of yourself, listen to your body and take time over things. In light of this, I’m going to take it easy either by cutting my hours there and start to think about myself more. I follow quite a lot of artists on Instagram and I’ve seen some rather poignant posts about self-care: nourishing your body and mind and slowing down.
In other news, I’m taking part in Blue House Yard’s Christmas Market this year. I did it last year and it was really good- I met loads of people throughout the day and it’s lovely just to chat to people: some who live locally or those passing by. Either way, I stepped up my game this afternoon and designed two new Christmas cards (see below) and redesigned a couple of old ones from a few years ago. There’ll be two collections of cards this year, which I’ve never done before, but I thought it’d be nice to offer some more designs to customers or if they wanted to buy some separately then they can.
More details about the market can be found either on my Facebook page or alternatively you can visit their Facebook page here as well.
Have a great weekend everyone and look after yourself.
Hello all and I hope you’ve had a wonderful start to the New Year! Sorry for the lack of updates, but I’ve recently started a new job at an autism school as a learning support assistant. I’m still trying to find my feet in terms of working one to one with some of the children and knowing the daily routine. But I’m enjoying it so far so let’s see how everything goes in the next few months.
I’d like to share with you all some latest work for Advocate Art. I was asked to create a series of images: one for a special occasion, which I chose to do ‘thank you’ cards and the other one was to develop a lion character for a few occasions. It really pushed me to think more creatively and to produce work for a commercial market. So the work is sort of different to my personal work, however, it’s been a good experience to be able to make work for a larger audience.
With these ones, I initially had a character already in place and Advocate Art wanted me to take the lion character on further and to develop new images for Christmas and birthdays. This was aimed at adults with a humorous side to it. Hence the funny poses and facial expressions, which was all slightly new to me! I drew up mock up thumbnails and sent them over to Advocate Art for them to be approved before colouring them in digitally using Photoshop. It took several sketches to work out the poses so I spent a lot of time figuring that out.
As for the ‘thank you cards’, the process was pretty much the same. I always start drawing out my ideas in my sketchbook and once I’m happy with the initial drawing I’ll then colour it in either in Photoshop or Illustrator.
After feedback from Advocate Art I’ll make a few changes and then off it goes again!
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post! I normally don’t write how I work (mainly because I’m lazy…!), or I don’t have the time to take photos of the process.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend and I’ll keep you all posted on more new work coming up in the next few weeks!
I’ve been busy with some new work over the past couple of days. I’m making new cards and prints for Dave’s shop (for Christmas) so I’m trying to get everything done as soon as possible. Since I’ve stopped looking for full-time work I feel a lot more relaxed now, hence being more productive with illustration. Doing something different and experiencing new things each day has been motivating, inspiring and has pushed my creativity and energy into making new pieces of work.
At the moment, I’ve been using SketchBook Express, which isn’t as good as Photoshop in my opinion, but it’s free so for now I’ll just have to put up with it! I’ve also resorted to using Pages to print my cards out… yup, improvising to the max here! There’s been a few wee obstacles in the way but I’ve managed to overcome them.
In other news, I’ll be volunteering at The Nesbitt Centre in Sheung Wan twice a week as I need more experience working with adults with learning disabilities and communication difficulties. I’m currently applying for a place at City University London!
So the next few months I’ll be keeping myself busy with lots of things!
