Weekend Update: Wedding Fun!

I had a very eventful weekend! Bachelorette Party on Friday, Trivia on Saturday, Wedding on Sunday!
Here's a few pics from the weekend (I still haven't gotten a hang of my phone camera, everything turns out really grainy... anyone got any tips?):

Holly, The Bride

My friend Rachel and I at the "Sips n Strokes" Pre-party.  And I just want yall to know that I tried to iron my pretty new dress before putting it on, and apparently it is not an iron-friendly fabric, and it completely ruined my dress, but I wore it anyway.  I'm guessing no one noticed because it's black, but I don't know that I can ever wear it again.  BOOOO.  At least it was only $20 at TJMaxx!

Conor & I at the wedding

With the Bride

And I finally finished my niece's bookbag! I shared the beginning of the process here, and last night I stitched around the doggie, in the white space I left myself between the artwork and the pink border, and I stitched beads on as a necklace and bejeweled the crown.  I think she looks cute! Then, to keep the threads on the inside from getting caught on pencils and such, I used fabric glue to attach a piece of fabric to the inside of the pocket that covered all the loose threads, and hopefully that will keep the beads from getting loose and falling off also.

Balancing Wooden Wine Holders - Building Process

As I mentioned last week, Saturday I went to help my bride-to-be friend Holly with her DIY bridesmaids’ gifts: balancing wine bottle holders! I got there at 11 and we started setting everything up: putting a new blade on the bandsaw, getting the planer out of the box, deciding on a plan… and the plan was: “oh, we can whip these out in no time!”  Too bad whenever you think a project won’t take long, it always ends up taking 12 times as long as you thought.  So while I don’t have any pictures of the finished product yet, I do have some how-to steps for starting the project.  

Holly got a 3” thick piece of mahogany.  We borrowed our friend Rachel’s “baby bandsaw” and we were pretty worried about having to cut through such a thick piece of wood with the baby bandsaw, and Holly wanted to use the planer she got for Christmas, so we planed the wood down to about 2.5”.  I had never used a planer, and it was really cool.  You slide the wood through and it shaves 1/16 of an inch off the top of the wood every time it goes through, and makes a huge pile of wood shavings (which reminded me of this regretsy post about "sawdust to throw at weddings"; we could have totally made some money, or thrown them on the ground at holly’s wedding this weekend! Haha).

So, then we cut the huge piece of mahogany into smaller sections to make them easier to maneuver, and used Super 77 spray adhesive to attach the printed out pattern to the wood.  You can download the pattern for the balancing wine holders here.  Ned (Holly’s fiancé) used a holesaw drill bit to drill the hole first (so we had a flat surface to drill the hole instead of trying to drill on a rounded surface after cutting the piece out.) 

 

Holly cut out the pieces with the bandsaw, then we started trying to sand them.  By hand.  It. Was. Awful.  And it also made us realize we would never get them done if we didn’t have some power tools.   

So we busted out a hand sander… the kind that vibrates and makes your hand feel like it is going to fall off after you’ve held onto it for 5 minutes… and started using that, and it worked a lot better.  But not good enough.  So that warranted a trip to Home Depot for a belt sander.   If you’ve never used a belt sander, those bad boys are a little scary.  My first experience with a belt sander was when we were making shapes out of foam in college as an intro to model making, and if you weren’t careful, the sander would rip the foam out of your hands and throw it across the room.  The belt sander worked pretty well, and we got about 4 wine holders sanded with the 80 grit sandpaper, and they were looking good! Too bad you then had to sand them with 100 grit, then 150, then 200, and possibly even finer grit than that, before they can be oiled.  When sanding something, you start with a rougher paper to get out the big imperfections, then you have to keep going smoother to get your wood smoother.  It’s a long, drawn out, tedious process, and that’s why projects always take 12 times longer than you think they will!

I left at about 6:30 and that was the status of the project.  The wedding is Sunday and Holly still doesn’t have them finished, so hopefully she’ll be able to find some time to work on them this week and get them done by the wedding! I’ll post finished pics if I can get them!

supplies suppliers

i know when i was starting my shop, i had so many questions that i wished i could ask other digital artists, but i was way too shy to ask them.  i wanted to know what kind of printer they used and what they thought of it, where they got envelopes and clear sleeves and chipboard and other supplies.  so here is what i use and where i get it from, and how much it costs.

Clockwise from top right:
1. I usually get my ink from Epson online, unless I run out in the middle of a job and I need ink really quickly, in which case I will go to Office Depot (it's only $1-$2 more).  Ink is $18.99 for each cartridge, and I probably buy about 3 cartridges per month.  my printer uses 6 inks (CMYK plus a light cyan and a light magenta).
2. My printer is the Epson Stylus Photo 1400 Ink Jet Printer.  I like it pretty well, I haven't had any major issues with it, no print heads clogging or anything, and I've had it for almost a year.  It's a large format printer, so I can print up to 13"x19".  Some of the more expensive printers have a light black ink, and I think that might be a better option for someone who prints a lot of grays, because my grays sometimes come out looking purple.  My printer was $300 with an $80 rebate.  I'm ashamed to say that I waited to long to do the rebate online, and I wasn't able to get it, so I actually paid the $300.  I'm an idiot, I know. 
3. I get my Flat Mailers from packagingprice.com.  I get the brown kraft color envelopes for my larger prints (I have one large enough for 11x14's (about $36 for 100), and one big enough for 13x19s.)  I get the white self-sealing mailers for my 8x10 prints, $29.60 for a case of 100, and I think I've only had one issue where one showed up bent, and I use USPS first class mail.
I started out unprepared and would go to CVS to buy envelopes when I made a sale, and that is a BAD IDEA, they are like $3.00 each or something.  Also, I went to Office Depot to buy mailing tubes for posters and they were like  $7 each... then I found some at Kroger for 50 cents each.  PackagingPrice.com also has mailing tubes in pretty colors, they are $36.50 for a case of 50.
4. For my larger envelopes, there are tabs to close the top but I want to make sure they can't be opened by a random person, so I got some cute woodgrain printed tape from tapeswell.  It was about $10 for the roll. I love the look of it, the only thing I wish was that the pattern was ongoing and didn't reset every 6 or so inches.
5. I get my clear envelopes from cistamps.com.  I have 8x10, 5x7, 9x14, and 11x14.  8x10 is $14 per 100 envelopes.  When I have a print larger than that, I will cut the seam off the left side of one and off the right side of another, then overlap them.
6. I get my large format paper from Epson.  I use the Ultra Premium Presentation Matte Paper, $51.50 for 50 sheets, and anything I print over 8x10 gets printed on that paper then I cut it down to size with an X-Acto Knife.  
7. I get my 8.5x11 paper from Red River Paper.  It is called Aurora Art White, it is 100% cotton rag with a 13.5 mil thickness, and it has a slight texture.  It is really pretty and absorbs the colors really well to make them bright.  I used to print on a slightly semigloss paper, and it left the ink on top of the paper instead of absorbing it, and the colors would look washed out and not as solid as a result.  I really like this paper.  the only problem I have is that my printer will not pull in one sheet at a time if I put several pieces in the queue, so I have to sit there and put in one sheet of paper at a time.

Also I put a sheet or two of chipboard in my packages to prevent bending, and I get it from uline.  I got a large pack of 190 sheets of 18"x24" for $52, and I cut them down to size.  This is something that is really annoying and in the future I'll probably try to find 8x10's so I am not constantly having to cut chipboard for every order.  Or I could take some to a printer with one of the big automatic cutters, and get them to cut a bunch of 8x10's for me, if I ever quit being too proud to ask for help.

And in case you're wondering, I also put a thank you card and a business card (both of which I print myself)  in all my packages.

So, hopefully for anyone that is looking for information on supplies this was helpful.  Starting out on etsy as a digital printer is easy because you can just put the picture of your artwork online without having actually printed it, then when you finally start making sales you run around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to figure out how you're supposed to ship something.

And don't be like me and be too shy to ask other artists for their help or their opinions, I'd be more than happy to answer any questions anyone might have!

The Process - From Concept to Final Product

I've really enjoyed reading some process posts by other designers, and learning what goes into their craft.
I think the first one I read was by Jan of Daisy Janie, where she posted about how her doodles transform into fabric designs.  She also linked to Jessica Swift, who showed how she turns an illustration into a colored print using photoshop, and to Stephanie Corfee, who showed how her doodles become prints. 

So, I've decided to show what goes into my artwork.  I mostly use Adobe Illustrator.  The main difference between Photoshop and Illustrator is that Photoshop creates artwork with pixels, Illustrator creates artwork with vectors.  So if you draw a line in Photoshop and you zoom in really close, you'll be able to see the different pixels, but if you create a line with Illustrator, no matter how much you zoom in, the line looks the same - crisp and straight and not blurry.  With illustrator, when you create a shape, you can make it infinitely larger with no blurring or separating, whereas with a picture, for instance, which is made up of pixels, if you make it larger than its set resolution, you will begin seeing blurriness and if you keep zooming you will see each separate color pixel.

Anyway, enough about that, on to the process!

I start out with a concept in my head, and a rough idea of how I want things laid out.  Then sometimes I might go straight to Illustrator to start drawing shapes, but in this case I was at my day job and when I get bored I doodle on notebook paper.  I am by no means a good drawer.  I even had to take some sketching classes in college, and it just takes too long to do good sketches for me- I don't want to bust out a ruler and the little curvy ruler thing they made us buy.  The only thing I was good at that was drawing-related was charcoal drawings, and the way I made them look cool was by making everything look really blurry so you could tell what it was from far away but up close it was just some blobs.  So basically, precise drawing is not for me.

I get so off-topic when I write.  But its also the way I tell stories, so imagine how my family/friends feel when they just want me to get to the point.

Anyway, so I make a drawing, and that's basically just a reference for me to start from.  I then go into Illustrator and start drawing.  For this piece, I liked the way my handwritten words looked, and I knew I wouldn't be able to replicate it with a commercial font, so I decided to draw my letters using the pen tool.

So after I played around with the thickness of the letters,  I drew my rainbow and started playing around with fonts and the placement and colors of my "over the rainbow".

Then I made the rest of the letters and played with the sizes to make everything fit in there.

Then I started playing with colors to see if I wanted a background design or just a plain color. I thought yellow would be a good color since it's like the sun, or a sky blue.  (that green line down the middle is my guide for making sure my 'sunbeams" were in the middle.

I'm thinking I like the blue more than the yellow.  And then I decide since it's supposed to be a sky, maybe I should add some cute swirly clouds to the background, so I drew one and took a pic with my phone.

And this would have been a million times easier if I had drawn on plain white paper, because then I could have just used the "live trace" function and Illustrator would have done this for me, but next I used the pen tool in Illustrator to redraw the clouds.

Then I placed the clouds in the background of the image and moved them around a bit and resized them until I thought they looked good, and I also had to work on how the script font flowed together.  When you type on a path (in this case I used a curved line that matched the shape of the rainbow), it rotates the letters, so you need to change the font to outlines and reshape the tails of the letters so they connect smoothly.  Here you can see how they weren't smooth:

And after fixing a few of my drawn letters that I wasn't happy with, I now have a finished print!  To go from an illustrator file to a jpg, I save it as a pdf, then "place" in photoshop, then do File/Save for Web and save it as a high quality jpg.  And voila!

I also decided I think it might need a little less busy-ness going on, so I made a white version also:

Print available in the shop here: http://www.etsy.com/listing/76516510/8x10-print-birds-fly-over-the-rainbow

I'd love to see some other process posts, no matter what your craft is! Please post to any process posts you find in the comments!