Before and After

I haven't posted in forever, I know! I have been into all sorts of trouble lately and just haven't had the chance! Well, not real trouble... what would you call a new job in a new state in a town where you know no one? Anyway, at my new job I was asked by my principal to design some student of the month certificates and when I asked for the school seal I was given this...

And my issue I have with this lovely electronic piece of information is that it in fact does not look electronic and you cannot blow it up, and you are restricted by the black background. It looks like a photograph of something embroidered!

So I went ahead and redrew it as a vector image so it can potentially be any size you want it to be and it is transparent.

And then I was interested in colorizing it a bit, so I played with it and did this.

My students said it looks a bit "cartoony" like the Simpsons! Which, I will give them that, it is a very simplistic in its lines, but I was sticking with the original typeface. I suppose the next step would be to do a bit more stylizing to the lines and give this a more "classic" look, but hell, that would only happen if I got paid for this!

I'm off to do some baking, now! My sisters sent me lots of baking tools for my birthday (thanks!) so now I must get to more fun stuff!

More work done today!

I wish I wasn't limited in the size you get to see this in, even clicking on it doesn't make it large enough for you to see the detail I've worked so hard on. Oh well........ I worked on my mysterious girl, but I've still yet to place her secret in her hands, but they are ready and waiting....... soon enough, soon enough. I wish someone would employ me and make this my job....

The beginnings of a bigger project...

This is the beginnings of a bigger project I envisioned a while ago, but I couldn't resist sharing!
Leave some comments, folks, just say hi!

Peony

One of my students told me about how you can load user-created brushes into Photoshop and that got me thinking about the brushes that I use in Illustrator.

I'm a big fan of the pencil brush, but after brief internet research including looking at the link he sent me, I realized I could create my own brush and I did.

I made an art brush of a peony petal and used it to help me draw this peony bud. The sepals are the work of a simple pen drawing, but I used a brush for each of the peony petals and rotated when needed.

This is just the first thing that I tested out today ( I love flowers can you tell?) and I may get the chance to do some more work to it, but I am really supposed to try very hard to do some lesson planning as my real job starts Monday, when I will be teaching FIVE different business classes at a local high school for pretty much the rest of the school year. Needless to say, I really should focus my creativity on trying to make my lessons more interesting and exciting, but drawing and designing keeps creeping into my mind.

BUT I will be channeling some of this creativity into at least one of my classes (yay for Marketing!) as they are "marketing" the summer reading book fair with a theme of "Alice in Wonderland" and I am going to attempt to make them a special Alice themed dessert. Given my latest excursions with sugar cookies and icing, you see where this all stemmed from. So stay posted for some more culinary creativity in the future.



P.S. Leave some comments, folks- don't be shy! Give me some inspiration, challenges of things to create! Thanks for reading to all my regular visitors, you know who you are!

P.P.S. With regard to my sister's jewelry store graphics that I created for the Spring 2009 season and the colors that I researched, they have been in all the magazines I have received as the new color combination. One mag even included a bright blue with the combo which I can appreciate, I might have to use it some how- colors are sometimes inspiring all on their own!

New background!

You may have noticed by new background! Yes, I am so excited I figured it out today. What I did was create my own block in illustrator using the orchids I had drawn before for a pattern for the background which by itself looks like this, uploaded it to Photobucket and then used Dreamweaver to figure out the appropriate code and spot to slip into the html editing section of the blog. Yay! I just love how my black and white orchids float on the background now. So, if you ever want help creating your own custom background, I'm your girl! I'm still learning how to use Dreamweaver, though, and I have a feeling its going to take some time before I could launch anything real, but you know what they say, baby steps-- yay for backgrounds!



P.S. Orchids are my one of my favorite types of flowers!

For Christine...3

Spoke with Christine, said she wanted to go ahead with the new color scheme, she hasn't rolled out the updated look just yet, that's all. So, I took the same stickers, changed the colors and added more variants. Also, I made a "sticker sheet" with a background for ease of viewing (green would not be printed). I kind of like these as poker chips, wouldn't that be a fun girly kind of thing... Hmm...

STICKER SHEET

For Christine...2

My latest commission (as of two hours ago) was to create round stickers for Christine's jewelry business, to use as price tags and what not. I decided to go back to the original color set, not the new season color set I had used in her most recent banner. I'm still on the fence about it. Alas, new stickers. This first one doesn't look good on a white background but since I prefer not to draw unnecessary lines (much better when it comes to printing) it will stay looking a little funny. The second option has more color though. I'll have to wait and see what Christine says.

STICKER
STICKER