Valentine's Day - Vintage Reimagined

This time I expressed my passion for vectorizing vintage images on an old Valentine.

I may have over-designed my version, seen in the lower of the two images below, but I wanted something bright and bold.

 Mission accomplished.

Vintage Image Birthday Card

My last post showed my before and after of lady from a fashion plate that's in the public domain.

I spent a weekend turning her and a few others into birthday cards.

Again, I have used my own patterns for the dresses, backgrounds and upholstery, and used a secret recipe to rough it all up.

This is what I'm doing with my life.

Old Vintage Fashion Plates

For recreation, I design all kinds of things just for fun, knowing they likely will never be a product.

I recently came across some fashion plates from the early 1900's that were fairly high res, AND in the public domain, I downloaded several dozens of them. (You never know when they might figure into a design project.)

But, they also fed right into my ongoing search to find things to apply my repeating patterns to. So, I opened a fashion plate in Photoshop, extracted the black outline, copy and pasted it into Ai, and used Live Trace on it. Live Trace almost always needs quite a bit of cleanup to get rid of its distinctive weirdness, and this time was no exception.

But when I was done, I filled in all the negative spaces, and viola! 

Here are two samples of the 5 I did, showing the before and after.

The Research is In!

Just for fun ...

New Etsy Store - Tracy Miller Prints

I finally committed to sitting here until my new Etsy Store was launched. As usual, I had to keep going back and tweaking things, but it's done!

Now I have a place to put all those retro looking images that I love creating.

The Four Seasons - A Set of Four Ready to Frame Prints Coming Soon

I'll continue to add vintage-effects cars to a collection before I launch my new Etsy store.

But I'm taking a break from the cars  with a series of children, starting with the four seasons and some sweet little girls.

I would again like to thank Dustin of RetroSupplyCo. at Creative Market for his brilliant Photoshop expertise. He makes me look like a genius.

Here's Winter:

More Vintage Effects - Advertisements

With all the great inspiration I get from the nicely priced downloads at Creative Market, I just can't stop creating images using them!

This ad I created so encompasses all my true loves: old advertisements, vector, vintage effects in Photoshop and ... self-promotion!

Is it sad or commendable that I spend part of my weekends playing with this kinda thing?

NEW Vintage Antique Auto Prints

I'm not a car person at all, but I LOVE the look of old cars.

Little by little, I've created quite a collection of car drawings, and have just about perfected a process that makes my printable car images appear vintage in a modern kind of grunge way.

There will be an Etsy store coming as soon as I've perfected the printing and shipping part.