AEM day 22

We Make is exactly 2 weeks away!! Need to pull together my Christmas range then get printing.

AEM day 10

So just how packs of these gift tags will I need to sell to buy me a new camera? Too many I fear lol.

I've been busy proof reading and website coding and printing promo cards so managed to sneak these little pretties in. Off to punch holes and add ribbons now.

Christmas cards AEM day 6

I miss my camera :( oh well here are my christmas cards at long last! Tomorrow - books.

AEM day 2

Oops well that's a good start, do Art Every Day month and miss the 2nd one! Oh well, must try harder! These are pretty butterfly cards made up and ready to be listed (as shown in the previous post). Hopefully I will remember tomorrow's!

Print shop

Been doing a fair bit of printing this week, not least because I have been ill and not up to much else. Three year olds that go to playgroup seem to be riddled with germs this time of year! But not one to be beaten by a bit of flu I have churned out the latest set of cards for Sudocard....

a small tonnage of business cards for our soon-to-be-launched UK Handmade....

as well as calendars and gift tags for my own Chalk Hill shop.

Not bad going for someone who is supposed to be in bed resting :D

Valentine

Busy preparing for valentines day, making the cards, preparing my websites, generally getting organised!

Postcards

Postcard sets for etsy, will also be adding these to Chalk Hill too at some point if they sell well.

Finished

Cards are all printed, photographed and being listed as we speak, available on Etsy and Chalk Hill Studio.

New Cards....

.... are all made but will photograph them and list them in the shop on Monday, was going to do it today but we went to the beach instead :0)

Cards and sea ceramic

Today's crafting 365 task is printing off more cards, both for etsy and Chalk Hill, and trying to get well stocked up before the wedding orders pick up and Christmas arrives.

In the post this morning arrived an enevelope stuffed full of these gorgeous ceramic pebbles all the way from Scotland via Stephanie's etsy shop (yes I've gone etsy mad lately but it's so wonderful over there!), so there's another project to add to my huge to do list!

Daisies

I'm slowly but surely plugging away at my loooong long list of things I need to get done before I retire, one of them being to put into reality the 1001 ideas that lurk in my sketchbook and get them on the website where they might actually earn me some money! So here is a sneaky peak at one of them for the kiddy section - it needs refining a bit as the middles of the flowers shouldn't have been that orange or that big, but it's already sparking off ideas for a range of things aside from cards... watch this space! (Oh and if you want to see how I did this check it out here.)

Ta-daaa!

Just goes to show what you can do when you put your mind to it; after my cup of tea this morning I decided to finish the baby card designs that have been hiding in the bottom of a big box waiting to be finished. I first did these a good few years ago when I started the card business and have been very good sellers but I wanted to freshen them up for the new website. So I have made up new cards, taken photographs (although they will need re-doing when the light gets better) and details are up on the site. (I hate that bit as although easy it is a fiddle and time consuming). A good day's work, go and see!

Illustration Friday - Gravity

A while ago I posted this card design but felt something was missing. Appropriately enough I decided this morning to add a bright orange balloon any little birthday girl would be proud of!

Chalk Hill Studio

Well after much faffing and to-ing and fro-ing and 'shall I?' or 'shan't I?' I decided to change the name of my ocellus website. I never really liked Ocellus Art and Design when I chose it at two in the morning six years ago now, but it was the best I could come up with at the time, and I thought the scientific sounding name might make me sound very serious and get me lots of grown up design work. Which to a point it did. But no one could pronounce or spell it properly, nor did it really cover the art side of what I was doing. So this year I finally felt with the way I have progressed and grown in the last year or so it was time for a change.

Not as easy as it sounds though. Most of the decent names have already been thought of and I needed something that was somehow connected to me, so I went back to the butterfly theme I had with ocellus and remembered the little chalk hill blue butterflies we saw in their hundreds over the summer, something I haven't seen since I was a kid. Cambridge has a large area of chalk downs where these tiny little beauties live, plus I originate from the cotswolds which is largely chalk and limestone too. And so became Chalk Hill Studio. I have already set up a blog in its name so all my business news and cardy stuff will go there. This blog will stay as it is with all my personal and arty ramblings and as for Whispers? Not sure. See how much time I have spare. Not a lot has really changed from before, just feels a bit more unified and reflects where I am now. Feels like home.

Anyway I have put some more greeting cards on there, as well as a few valentine ones. The wedding stationery is still work in progress. Go and check it out!

Butterflies

New Card Design

It's not finished but this is what I designed the pattern below for. I'm not naturally good at cartoony styles but I've been drawing this little girl in various forms for months now and I think I'm getting a style I'm comfortable with. Drawing the hands and face have been the biggest challenge! The one line drawing excercises have done a lot to help by removing my need to draw what I know them to look like, let the drawing work on its own merit. Does that make sense? Probably not but I've got a head full of cotton wool. Time to watch some trashy tv and chill.

Valentine

New tutorial here. Enjoy!

Pattern heaven

I've loved patterns from an early age. Mum would by those mathematic pattern books that were big in the 70's (I've since discovered the science museum still makes them) and I would sit and colour them in for hours and hours - clever mum, anything to get me from under her feet! At college I even considered textile and fashion as a career path but my other love of books and lettering won over and I chose graphic design and illustration instead. I still bought a load of pattern source books which have proved useful here and there but now that I have finally figured out how to create patterns on my computer they are coming into their own and are the main source of inspiration for my new wedding designs. No more being at the mercy of suppliers who decide to stop stocking a line of paper half way through an order and I can guarantee mine are 100% original! By the way did I tell you I was a contol freak?

New Wedding Designs

Here's a sneaky peak at one of the new wedding designs I was working on yesterday. I'd got into a bit of a slump with the wedding designs last year, didn't like what I was doing but couldn't come up with anything new that was 'mine'. So I've started again this time with a bit more enthusiasm and inspiration; there's more emphasis on drawing and I'm designing my own patterns, basically I'm concentrating the things I like and enjoy doing and am good at. Calligraphy and type are back in with vengence this year, something I've always loved even when it wasn't fashionable so that has spurred me on to experiment with those in a new way too.

Art Cards

As requested I have put greeting card versions of my prints into the shop too. There are lots more to go on at some point so please ask if you want something that's not there yet!