Tag: print

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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

To fill my shop, or not to fill my shop

Jessica Smith

I’ve had an Etsy shop (spoiler alert, it’s empty) for a while now that has changed as my interests have morphed. When I was in college, I was into making jewelry, so I started an online store to sell my jewelry and take custom orders (it wasn’t through Etsy, but the site no longer exists anyway). Now that I have a house and am far more interested in home improvement projects and other sorts of crafts, I rarely make jewelry. So when my jewelry listing expired, I didn’t renew them.

Nowadays, my interests fall under design: interior design/decorating and graphic design. It’s actually a little surprising to me that I was ever super into making jewelry since I wear almost none myself… but I digress. I do a good deal of graphic design at work and just got a drawing tablet from my hubby for Christmas that I’m pretty excited to learn how to use. So now I am toying the idea of filling my Etsy shop with some of the prints I’ve designed. I even went so far as to create a bunch of prints last year that I planned on listing. BUT, I’m super indecisive — or am I? … I can’t decide — and I can’t decide if it would be better to sell my prints as a PDF that a buyer could download and print on their own, or have them printed out and mail them to customers.

That’s my dilemma. There are pros and cons to each, but I welcome any thoughts! Do you own a shop where you sell prints? Do you sell them electronically or physical copies? If you are interested in buying a print (not necessarily from me — from anyone!), would you prefer they mail you one and you pay more, or to get the file and print it yourself?

OK, enough of me thinking out loud/in writing. Here’s are a few of the prints I created last year. I think they’d be adorable in a nursery. I can customize the background colors and swap out the animal name with a baby’s name.

The fox is my favorite.

Fox_asmithofalltrades

Bear_asmithofalltrades

Trex_asmithofalltrades

I really love this little whale, too!

Whale_asmithofalltrades

I’m excited to start using my drawing tablet to create even more fun prints. I hear it takes a long time to get used to it, but I’m up for the challenge.