Creating a Collection

Hi folks.  Many of you know that I have a toe in the licensing world with my artwork on Judaica products, greeting cards, and other surfaces.  When you're pitching your artwork for licensing, it's  important to show prospective licensors how your art will look on their products.  Although I do all of my drawing and painting on paper or canvas, I learned Photoshop to be able to make parts of my images into repeats, and "mock-up" products with my artwork.

Here are two recent instances where I did this, and also created "Sell Sheets" to show my work.

Below is a page from my art journal, where I outlined and doodled in pen and filled in with watercolor. Here's how it looked in black and white, and then painted.  

Art directors see a lot of art, so if you can lay it out on potential products, you'll have an edge.  Here's my example:

As you can see, I created a background for my design, showed it in a square, in a round, on some oven mitts, on an apron, a coffee cup, coordinating designs, and a border.  All from one art journal page!

Highly textured mixed media art is a little more challenging, but here's an example of one I just finished.  

The original, is a spread in my art journal (featuring my Hebrew Calligraphy & Hamsa Stencil  and the Peacock from January 2014 Stencil Club, as well as Mary Nasser's Compass stamp from RubberMoon and Pam Carriker's Cordelia Stamp) :  

and here's the Sell Sheet: 

  

Because I don't envision this design on as many products, I only show it in different variations, an allover pattern, and a few mock-ups.   It's important to only show your design on appropriate products - don't just place them on everything (for example, there's no reason to mock up a banana design on a coffee cup!).

Here's a great blog post about creating a Sell Sheet.  Thank you Natalie Timmons for generously sharing your experience and knowledge.  A great resource for learning Photoshop is Lynda.com.  And Phyliss Dobbs created great templates for mock ups, which you can purchase and download. 

Here's a video of me painting a face.  It's not the woman in this piece, but I hope you find it helpful anyway!  You can see other examples on my YouTube channel.    I hope you'll become a subscriber!



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Mashup Wednesday

This is what my studio looks like mid creation -- paint everywhere, pens flying, bits of paper, dirty brushes...  And then I clean up, and try to restore the space to a semblance of order.  I decided that one way to "clean up" is to force myself to actually use whatever is remaining on my desk, rather than putting it away and just forgetting about it.  What would happen if I throw it all together and see what comes out?  So yesterday, I had what I'm going to call a "Mashup Wednesday."  

Here's what was on my desk and spilling out of my scrap box:  I casually arranged it on a two page spread in my journal:

 

Seeing this all together -- the greys, greens and pink, reminded me of a picture of three bottles that I had cut out of a magazine and hadn't found a way to use.  Here's part of the picture.  The colors are not ones I would usually combine: 

 

After taking a picture of my "composition," I removed the scraps from my page and scraped paint and gesso around with a credit card using Americana Foliage Green, Plaid Folk Art Hot Pink, and Accent Country Colors Liberty Blue.  I was inspired by this video by Roben-Marie, and this one by Nathalie Kalbach,  both of which were featured in this Web Round Up post yesterday from Balzer Designs:

 

After scraping and painting, I glued down my scraps approximating the original layout and a put a secret journaling flap in the middle:

 

I added some pieces of old book pages and tried to figure out what to do with some green dots I cut out of a tag I had painted last week:

 

It felt like it needed more graphics - so I added some flowers, a silhouette, and more boldly colored scraps:

 

 But now I had hardly any light spaces for writing, so I made some "clouds" out of torn envelopes for journaling:

 

I realized that my "secret" journaling flap wasn't so secret if it had a had "See Inside" arrow pointing right to it, so I added "do not" to the arrow (Sam, this means you!).  I also added the tops of the bottles on the top left of the right side of the page:

 

Sadly, the cute kitten and the rams faces disappeared, but I know they are there.  My next reaction was to add more flowers:

 and leaves and doodles, and Julie's punchinella stencil, and some writing, and voila, a page was born.  Don't know what the left hand side will be yet, but I'll share it when it's done. Outlining the bottles and adding stitching to the silhouette really made them pop.  Thanks Ronda for that tip!

 

I couldn't resist altering it a bit in Photoshop to make a birthday card:

 

It's so true that we need the company of others, as well as time to ourselves, to find balance.  Finding the perfect blend of stillness and activity, interacting outwardly and looking inwardly, the union of opposites, make for a balanced and happy life.  

My "takeaways" from my Mashup Wednesday:

1.  using up is a good way to clean up;

2.  using whatever's in front of you is a great way to discover color combinations outside of the usual repetoire;

3.  letting the materials make the plan is kind of fun;

4.  the "end product" often doesn't look like the beginning and that's fine.

If you decide to do a Mashup day, please let me know and leave a link to your work.  I'd love to see it.

UPDATE -- Forgiveness is obviously very much on my mind.  Here's a great (very short) video about it.  Don't know why Lama Marut is frozen in such a funny pose, but the video is very good!

Thank you so much for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Growing Things

Today I finished inspirational words.  As a greeting card designer, I am always working on seasonal designs 6 months ahead - and so I'm beginning work on Christmas!  Sometimes it's hard to be motivated for Christmas in the spring, or Valentine's Day in the summer, but in other ways, it's nice to think about blessings and love any time of year...  So this was done with pitt pens and Sakura glaze pens.  Then, in photoshop, I overlayed it on a watercolor wash I did separately that I have saved to use as a background.  I added a glow around the words and doodles to make them pop a little.  I'm happy with how it turned out. 

Yesterday I stopped at Michael's on the way home to exchange a tape runner, and, of course, couldn't resist buying some stamps and stencils to play with.  So here's the beginning of a new journal spread, using some of my new toys.  I gessoed the pages first, and then scraped orange and red acrylic paint around with the side of an expired credit card.  I used a baby wipe to clean some of the paint away over Balzer Designs' chicken wire stencil.  Then I stamped the four leaf flowers using gesso to give texture.  I glued some old India stamps along the right edge, and used another stamp to do the circles on the bottom right.  I added some oil pastel streaks on the right side too.

I had paint left over, and so, again inspired by Julie Fei Fan Balzer, I stamped some more on some scraps from old manilla files I cut up and kept to use as tags.  I let paint drip around them as well, and did some splattering!  I know these will come in handy for something.
Cheers!
 
PS:  Here is what I did with the right hand half of the journal spread:

Love What You Do

So today, what I really want to do is work on a new holiday design I started yesterday.  Instead, what I have to do is revise candle boxes I worked on in March.  Sometimes I get frustrated with these packaging revisions - they're very technical and have to correspond to specific die lines, etc.  But then I remind myself that it's all art!  I am so lucky to get to do what I love. So it's important to love whatever I do.  Great quote came my way today:  "Feelings are like waves.  We can't stop them from coming but we can choose which ones to surf."  So I'm gonna get my joy on and fix that candle box! Thanks for visiting!