Product Sighting - in My Livingroom

It always a treat to see your design on a finished product.

In the past several months I've been converting my designs to needlepoint grids for Needlepaint.com , work that I have become addicted to.

They do fantastic work creating custom canvases for pillows, Christmas stockings, belts and even dog collars.

Look at the finished pillow they created for me from my original design! Gorgeous!

Gosh, She's Got Range!

I've worked on designs the last week or so to answer requests. Fingers crossed that something sells!

Hourly Work

In my daily and ongoing quest to make a living as a graphic designer, I take on many and varied jobs which pay hourly.

This week, I've been "vectorizing" vintage labels for Charles of Helmar Brewing Art and History.

He's an artist who creates super cool faux baseball ephemera. When you seen one of his baseball cards, for example, you'd never guess that it is actually a new product. His super secret method of distressing the items really does the trick.

He's got hundreds of followers who collect his stuff, and he is often commissioned to do custom pieces.

I spent a week once clipping heads of baseball players from the backgrounds. It's not glamorous work, but I look at it this way:  I'm not waiting tables.

Here's a sample of what I've been working on this week. These are two old cigar box labels.

I can't wait to see what he does with them.

Antique Stuff

Once you learn how to clip out images in Photoshop and then create repeats, all you need is time.

This is a jpg of a hi res repeat I did a while back.

Appears I've got the know how AND plenty of time.

The Marriage of Vector and Raster

Sometimes I'll come across the most gorgeous vintage print of flowers, and it's a high res enough jpg to clip and use in a design. But design what?

The first answer for me is to make a repeat. That's easy since I've got my super cool secret way of making a PERFECT repeat with a raster image.

I've also been creating a library of vector grunge/distress repeats, and when you layer them all together, you get something like this below. Well, at least I get something like this. I know it's not quite right, but I'm slowly but surely cracking this tough nut.

Abundance

I got out early this morning, the day before Thanksgiving day, to shop.  Along with my usual weekly groceries, I bought the extra ingredients for what I'd be making and taking to a family gathering.

While pulling it all out of the bags when I got home, the beauty of the abundance was powerful.  I felt joy at the site of the humble items: organic pears, a can of pumpkin, a bag of Pepperidge Farm stuffing, packages of yeast, Trader Joe's soy creamer ... and all the other myriad fruits, vegetables and grains that sustain me or treat me to something special.

I felt grateful, but not just this morning. Whether or not I "feel" it, I still say it many times daily, "Thank you."

Learning New Skills Can Be Fun

When I first started creating patterns and cracked the code for the perfect repeat, I thought that these patterns would be my ticket to making a living.

Wrong.

But as I have striven to pay my bills as a  graphic designer, I've had the good fortune to learn a ton of new skills on the job.

One of these skills came rather recently when I started designing for Needlepaint.com. This entails designing a pillow, Christmas stocking, or belt that I then convert into a grid for a needlepoint canvas.

It is basically pixel art, which harkens back to the early days of video games.

I kinda love this conversion of a design into a grid and even find it addictive.

Below is a photo of a fox that I made a simple vector drawing of. Below that is the pixelated version, with one pixel equaling a stitch.

Below that is an enlarged view.

Huh. Who knew?