Living the Creative Life

My friend Kelly has the cutest Etsy shop, Gram's Buttons . She uses buttons from her grandma's button box on every item! Isn't that a fun idea? My mom has a button box and I've always loved looking through it. There's just something fun and magical about old buttons, isn't there?

As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "Do one thing every day that scares you." Today I added my shop to Heartsy (the Groupon for Etsy). Immediately my worry-mind started churning. "What if no one likes my stuff?" "What if EVERYONE likes it and I lose money on the deal?" "What if this is a total scam?" "What if I get too many orders and can't fulfill them all?" As you can see, my scardeness vacilated between self-loathing and just generally psyching myself out. After all, wouldn't too many orders be a good problem to have? Do one thing every day that scares me. Hmm... this definitely qualifies. I think it'll be a good thing though. You can't succeed at something unless you put yourself out there, right?

I've been trying really, really hard to understand Etsy lately. This is apparently the busy time of year and my sales have all but dried up in November and December! I went on the Etsy forums the other day to ask around... maybe this is just a bad year? I was greated by happy partygoers who have been having their best selling year ever. Makes a girl feel loved, I'm telling ya. One seller did attempt to comiserate... she stated that she was a little slow today , and that maybe sales were just drying up for Christmas. I checked her shop... she had sold 41 items so far that day. Forty-one!! In ONE DAY!! That's literally more than I've sold in three years. Sigh... way to rub it in, people. I'm not really feeling your pain here. So... I figured my two options were... pout about it and close up shop --- OR --- figure out what's making these other shops tick and try to implement some of their ideas. I went through the forums to try and soak up some of their re...

As I mentioned the other day , I spent much of the weekend watching Adobe Illustrator tutorials online. One thing I learned (that has absolutely nothing to do with Illustrator), is that there are a lot of duds out there. (Okay, I already knew that). Some of the videos I found had no actual instruction - and a lot of them had loud rock music or some other such distracting and non-instructional element tossed in there for good measure. Some were in a foreign language... which I guess is good for people who speak that language, but not so good for me. Anyway... I thought I'd share some of the better tutorials I found, in case you, like me, were wanting to gain some actual software knowledge without having to wade through all that other junk. Adobe Illustrator -- tuturials worth watching 2 Ways to Create Ribbing Create a Seamless Repeating Vector Pattern How to Create a Zipper Tooth Pattern Brush Vector Swirls, Swooshes, and Florals Create Intricate Patterns Flower Tutorial (no actu...

I'm involved in a great craft giveaway this week! Kristen @ Confessions of a Graphic Design Student is sponsering it. To enter this fabulous contest, see Kristen's blog for details. Take a look at what you could win!

Today began finals week... so of course I've been procrastinating all weekend. I downloaded the free trial for Adobe Illustrator and proceeded to become obsessed with how to draw snowflakes. I guess you could say I was studying design principles hands-on! Lol. Did you know what this guy, Wilson Bentley, photographed over 5000 different snowflakes? He was a farmer around the turn-of-the-(previous)-century who was fascinated by the different shapes they make. Nearly all snowflakes are six-sided (occasionally some are eight-sided), but every one grows differently due to the rate of moisture in the air around them, etc. Pretty amazing! Anyway... I then found a sweet tutorial online for how to hand-draw snowflakes. My brain was having trouble being creative drawing lines into snowflakes in Illustrator, but hand-drawing really seemed to break open my imagination! I was going to upload some of my own drawings, but my scanner was freaking out, so you'll just have to trust ...

I realized I haven't really been posting about school lately. Mainly that's because I've been so busy!! Lol. It's been really fun though, and the first term is almost over. Here's a glance at my final project for Digital Illustration. I have to re-create the poster on the left, largely by using the pen tool in Illustrator. That tool lets you create complex objects by creating a series of lines and arcs. It's a pretty powerful tool, but this project is still going to take forever !!