Happy Thanksgiving to All of You With ...

... plant-based diets!

We're having the vegan works:

Stuffing and gravy with seitan roast, green bean casserole with French fried onions topping, sweet potatoes,  mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and Mom's famous refrigerator potato rolls.

AND MORE,  depending on what everyone else brings.

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.

Digital Scrapbook Paper

I've got SO many design collections, many of which go to Modern Yardage.

But, they're also perfect for scrapbook papers, and Etsy is the perfect place to sell them in digital format. Once the listing is posted, Etsy does all the work.

There's some overhead on my end, of course, formatting it all for the listings, but now that I have a process in place, I should be able to work my way through my collections.

Television Ad - Vivid Vision?

I love this Vivid Vision ad that's in black and white! Or sepid rather than black, really. 

Not exactly vivid.

I did my own version, keeping the same off whites and off blacks.

Another Old Advertisement

I can't help it.

She Looks Like Blythe ... My New Paper Doll

I have an actual Blythe doll - her name is Ever Wild - and have even developed some clothing patterns for her that are for sale at one of my Etsy stores.

During this holiday season, I've had a few slow work days, which means I've had time to catch up with some half-finished projects.

My Blythe-like paper doll is one. It's done!

I originally was going to do several pages with lots of outfits and accessories, but I decided to pare it pare it down to just one 11.5" x 17.5" sheet.

Once I've received the first printing and approved it, I'll add it to the other prints I have for sale at my other Etsy store.

Optical Illusions

While researching trends for a client, I came across some optical illusion designs and sort of got caught up in them for an afternoon and made some repeats.

And I got a little queasy looking at them!

View at your own risk!