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I decided to add a new image to the mix! It’s the image from my Bozeman Ukulele Cabaret poster with one of my favorite vintage fabric sprig patterns as a background fill.
I had a ton of fun messing with the colors. I kinda like the purple one, but I like the original, gold colored ukulele, too. Which color combination would you pick?
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Like this:
Our local Community Food Co-op is going to start carrying some of my vintage fabric illustrations on cards in March. I picked six images that had sold well in test runs, and tried to make the colors work together so they’ll look cohesive on the rack. David suggested a birthday card, so I added one to the mix. I’m not sure I’ve exactly hit pay dirt with the images, but I think there might be a niche at craftsy places and fabric stores. Meanwhile, thanks to the nice people at the Co-op, I can try them out in a retail setting and see what happens.
We are just working through the issues of printing at small quantities. Right now it’s quite the cottage industry, involving using 50% off coupons to buy the blank cards at a craft store, printing the card backs on my Canon printer, and printing the full color images on 4×6 photo paper obtained at drastically reduced prices by means of highly advanced couponology. All this, so that it doesn’t actually COST me money to sell them at a wholesale price.
I wouldn’t have thought of those clear sleeves that cards are sold in as an exotic item, but they cannot be purchased in Bozeman, Montana for love or money. One local printer offered to order some from their supplier for $35 per 100, but with a little help from my unpaid, live-in purchasing assistant, I was able to get them for exactly 1/10th of that price. So, ha! Take that, blood-sucking local printer, you’ll have to bleed that $31.50 out of some other artist!
On a positive note, if you are looking for a printer in Montana with reasonable prices, I have had good luck with Printing Center USA, located in Great Falls. They’re easy to deal with, they seem to have the most consistently low prices and I love their online quoting system.
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I started thinking about Christmas cards today (none to soon) and decided to sit down and try a fabric illustration with a semi Christmas theme. I thought I’d try to draw a pretty deer. The picture I ended up with doesn’t look particularly Christmassy, but I had fun and really enjoyed some of the colors I ended up with. I decided to put the art on some products like coffee mugs, necklaces and trivets at CafePress. Click here to find them.
my first card series
This weekend I’m going to test out some of my fabric illustrations at Bozeman’s Saturday Farmer’s Market. My friend, Carmel (who makes awesome jewelry!) said she’d share her booth with me if I’d like to do some fund raising for my Walk to Defeat ALS effort. So I made up some cards and I’ll donate the proceeds from this weekend to our Walk to Defeat ALS team, Steve’s Wobbly Knees!
Hopefully I’ll get some feedback on which cards (if any) people like: My own tastes tend to be pretty weird!
I’m gradually putting these up on my Etsy store. I would love to hear some topic suggestions, if you have any ideas for me!
This started innocently enough. I thought I’d try messing around using some vintage fabric scraps in illustrations, just to see what would happen. But I also have a mercenary streak. Eventually, I’d kind of like this to lead to something that somebody might want to buy.
Enter the cowboy boot. I live in Montana. And if you live in Montana, the conventional wisdom has been, if you want to sell something, put a damn cowboy boot on it. Ye olde western flair. The cowboy boot, the hat, the bison, the elk. I actually hate that stuff. I really do. (I mean, I don’t have anything against cowboy boots or elk, but you get pretty sick of everybody having to be all western all the time around here. It can get pretty phony.) But… I thought I’d try a few illustrations that have take-home appeal for Montana visitors anyway, because what hell, it’s only fabric illustration.
But then I started having FUN. And then came the bunnies.
Like this:
I’ve been experimenting with my vintage fabric scraps again, this time by tracing old photos with my Cintiq and the blob brush in Illustrator, then using fabric scans as fills in Photoshop.
I thought they might be cute as greeting cards, or maybe gift tags?
Okay, I actually did one other very small creative-ish thing over the holidays, which involved messing around with my passel o’ vintage fabric scraps and my Cintiq (now in off to the Cintiq repair shop, by the way — the screen kept crapping out whenever I restarted my computer!).
I used this cutesy birdie art on some note cards and bookmarks. It was fun playing around with the colors using the selective color adjustment in Photoshop.
Why, when it’s 8 degrees outside, am I drawing wiener dogs, romping among the flowers? This is another vintage fabric illustration experiment, using my cintiq. The collars are a little clunky looking, but not when I put GLITTER on them in the printed version! Glitter makes everything real good.
A Grand Adventure - Vintage Fabric Illustration
I’m trying out some ideas for holiday cards but I can’t decide which I like best. Too cutesy? Too negative? Not negative enough?
