Design

This is my homage to spring! We are supposed to get some warmer weather this weekend so I’m really excited. And because it’s now officially spring here, I’ve updated my banner image (hehe, it looks a bit funny having the illustration twice!) :o) Click here to rate this illustration!

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Now Available as an art print or greeting card!

Thanks for all your great feedback on my business cards. I’ve tried to take all your ideas into consideration and revised my cards. Now I’m nervous you’ll think I ruined it!! Don’t worry - I still have the first version saved :D  So does this work better? I’ve added more color (which most of you suggested), and I like Dee’s suggestion of having the bird looking under his legs in a different color, sort of representing me and my unique style. I’ve made him red and alway made my website red to relate the two together. What do y’all think?

I always have the absolute hardest time designing for myself! I’ve been playing around with new business card ideas for a while now and can’t seem to settle on anything. I want something clean, simple, fun, and of course, representative of my style. I thought I might get some feedback from all of your before I drive myself crazy! Let me know what you think of this design. Any suggestions would be hugely appreciated!

I’m excited to announce that you can now purchase the rubber stamp collection I designed for Sugar Nellie at Funky Kits! These cute designs are hot out of the oven and waiting for a good home :) I can’t wait to see what all the stampers out there will create! Feel free to send me a photo of your creation and I’ll post it on my blog.

Karen from Sugar Nellie approached me a couple weeks ago to create some illustrations for her rubber stamp collection. Sugar Nellie is a UK based rubber stamp company. These stamps are often used in card making but can also be used for scrap booking or other paper crafts.

There are some incredible card-makers out there, making absolutely beautiful cards with these stamps! I met a couple of wonderful artists while working on this project - check out their blogs to see some of their lovely work: Erica at Scrapalicious and Claudia at Pretty Pressings (both these ladies have also kindly asked to use one of my illustrations in their banner!)

The challenge in creating these stamps was to take my sketchy style and convert it to solid black and white lines. I made a few attempts in Photoshop but ended up having to bring my illustrations into Illustrator in order to get the type of line quality needed to make rubber stamps. I was worried about losing my style in Illustrator, as it’s vector based and doesn’t give the same light/sketchy feel that can be achieved in Photoshop. I played around with different lines and techniques and ended up with a vector version of my style that I’m really happy with!

The collection of 9 stamps is based on my characters, ‘Simon and Lola’. There are also a couple animal friends in the collection - I love illustrating animals and couldn’t leave them out! The collection should be available in a couple weeks at Funky Kits. I’ve included a sneak peak of three of the stamps (they must be watermarked rather intensely in order to prevent people from simply printing them out for their cards… tisk tisk)!

I’m so excited about this collection and hope the stampers out there love it as much as I do :)

As with many other creative individuals, I love change. My plan for this website is to change the design seasonally. I love the changing seasons and will update my site at the beginning of each new season. Especially here in Canada, the changing seasons are so beautiful, and they’re such an inspiration in my artwork. The design won’t change completely (so you’ll still know where you are!), I just plan to change the main illustration and text/accent colours to match. So it’ll be more of a ’seasonal facelift’ rather than a complete redesign :)

I’d love to hear your thoughts on my website design and general usability. Is it easy to get around? Are there features I should add? Elements that are unnecessary? It would be great to get your feedback and I’ll make an effort to incorporate all your great ideas!