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Home sweet home

Jessica Smith

I cannot believe I forgot to share the darling illustration I created of my house. I made this last month after working on a similar project for work, and I just adore it.

HOME-SWEET-HOME

How stinkin’ cute, right?

I designed this one of my building at work for a giant poster right when you walk in the building.

VMH

I think they are so charming. I am tossing up the idea of selling them on my shop — not that folks want to buy an image of my house (creepy!), but I could do theirs! So cute.

Speaking of designing things, I have exciting news! At the end of the summer I am going back to school to get my master’s degree in publications design. I am pretty freakin’ excited about it. Also terrified because, you know… homework. Haven’t done that in five years. But on the whole, I’m pumped for all of the awesome things I’m about to learn. In fact, I’ve started dreaming in Photoshop and inDesign — anyone else do that? It’s like I am editing my dreams. Strange, but cool.

Speaking of my sweet home, my pride and joy, my garden, is doing phenomenal. this season. Last night I made my first batch of pizza sauce from some 50+ tomatoes I picked over the weekend.

tometers

I also and the proud grower of a watermelon! Brian wants to pick it so badly, but I think it needs a few more days. I have never been so pumped to have grown something in my life haha.Watermleon

In other news, B and I just got back from a weekend trip to Buffalo, NY. My family had a family reunion and we had a great time.

I’ve got a few furniture projects I want to finish before the summer is over and I get crazy busy with school — a dresser and two nightstands to be exact. Here’s hoping I can find the time and cool weather to tackle each project!

Graphic Design

Doggy Silhouette

Jessica Smith

Remmy is the funniest dog on this earth, I swear. He has been cracking me up lately with his love affair with the snow. We had about 8 inches on the ground, causing my crazy dog to go even crazier the second his paws touched the stuff. He bounded through snow like he may never see it again, taking breaks only to chomp down large bites of frozen goodness.

We were trapped inside most of last Thursday because of the snowstorm, but I made sure to take the pup out for a walk trudge through the fresh snow since he loves it so much. We walked about a mile, which was exhausting with no path cleared out. And man did Remmy enjoy every second of it.

I call Remmy my shadow dog because he is always by my side in the house. Since we were stuck indoors a lot of last week, my little shadow dog was my inspiration for a new print.

I found a photo of him from last spring and created a doggy silhouette using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I had a little bit of practice with this technique at work a few weeks ago, and am happy to say I’m getting pretty good at it! Here’s the print I came up with for Rem’s silhouette.

Remmy Silhouette

I excitedly emailed this to Brian, who like it but told me right away that Rem’s face was too short — turns out he was right and I had used a photo with the pup’s head turned a little away. Good work, huh? I found another photo with Rem at a true profile, but his tongue was hanging out. So…. I took the nose from one and compiled it with the nose from the other to create this version, which I think looks great. I also tweaked other parts of the design, as you’ll see.

Remmy Silhouette_final

I took off the outline from the oval and recreated the banner in illustrator to have no outlines, too. I also added in the new silhouette and changed all blacks to a super dark gray (95% black). I like the gray better than the stark contrast of the 100% black.

I’ve always liked cameos and I like that silhouettes are pretty much the 2D version of a cameo. But I don’t like my own silhouette (probably a strange thing to not like, but whatever). Remmy, on the other hand, is cute no matter which angle you look at him — the perks of being a dog!

What do you think? Would you want a doggy silhouette of your pup?

Graphic Design

Family Cookbook

Jessica Smith

I forgot to share the best gift that I made for my family this Christmas! I made my mom, stepmom, sisters and grandma a family cookbook of all of our dessert recipes. It took me hours and hours and hours. I also had to bake more than I care to so I could take photos — but it was all worth it.

Cookbook

I designed the book from cover to cover using Adobe InDesign. I designed the cover using a lot of the last names in our family as an interesting graphic element.

Once all of the pages were complete, I uploaded them to Shutterfly as images and put them into their blank photo book template — they call it Digiscrap. It shows a step by step guide on how to upload your own custom template onto a blank photo book.

The only downside to the blank template was a lack of measurements. For example, I made a jpg for the spine to fit into their template, but that spine wrapped around the whole book, so the words are partially on the cover (if you look at the first photo you can see what I mean). It would be great if they suggested art bounds and text bounds for the covers and pages. Not a big deal, but something to keep in mind if you ever design your own and use Shutterfly to print it.

Cookbook pages

Other than the spine mishap, the book is gorgeous. I’ve used Shutterfly before for photo books and they don’t disappoint. I love how the photos printed, which I was a bit nervous about because I am in no way close to being a professional photographer.

snowball

The recipes in the book go way back — we have one from my great-great-great grandma — and I even included pro tips from family members who are known for each recipe.

Cookies Page

Ever make a cookbook of your own? Did you use a template or design your own?

I am really glad I designed mine myself. I learned a lot through the process. I would definitely do things a bit differently next time, which will be next Christmas when I tackle the family entrée and side recipes! We make such yummy food in our family, I didn’t have time to fit it all in one book.

I can’t believe I forgot to share it — I’m so proud of it.