More Christmas Cards, and a Winner!

A winner has been selected randomly for the Polyrillustration 4th Birthday Moleskine-shaped Giveaway - congratulations to Heather B! Lucky lucky. I like free things.

~

Secondly, I've been asked to design a couple of Loli-themed Christmas cards for someone. As I really enjoyed designing my "regular" Christmas cards, I was very happy to take on the job:

My personal favourite has to be the second. The watercolour was very well behaved and I love the gag.  Loli or not I'm sure everyone can identify with Santa Baby on some level.

I've got some great third-year stuff to show so stay tuned!

Cards for Sale

Although I thought I couldn't get them printed in time for the Vyner Studio exhibition, here they are - greetings cards featuring my paintings and a couple of my Loli-themed drawings! There's 4 of each design, so if you'd like one get hold of me ASAP (they're £1.50 each)! I will do reprints if I have the demand for them. Thanks muchly to MOO for being very speedy, especially as I'd put in an order for 100 business cards at the same time (they're perched happily on my windowsill). Well worth the cash.

They're Here! Business Cards!

Well, they've been here for a little while, now - but now I have some time to review them! The business cards I received from MOO.com are here, and I've spent a lot of time examining them ...

I sent three designs off to them - 50 cards each, and they made it to me in a matter of days (put it this way - my expected delivery date is still four days away, and I've had these in my grubby little hands for just under a week). The online "designer" was fairly easy to use, although I'd not found the template I was meant to have used as a guideline. Because of that, some of my cards turned out a little differently than I expected (although nothing major). I've saved the template for future reference, as I wouldn't mind going with MOO again - my designs will need tweaking if I do, though.

This one is my favourite of the three. It accurately represents my style, my love of doodles and my site (in other words, this blog), while looking fairly stylish. The design background is slightly off-white, which I think has worked nicely. On a few of the cards, though, there is a small white line around the edge - a small printing error. Not too noticeable, though.

There's a small blue line below Elizallustration's face, but it's actually quite grown on me. I love the contrast of the red, white and blue, and I was right to go with the blue background. The text on the back is slightly off-centre, but that's me being a bit of a perfectionist. The text is otherwise nice and readable (something I was a bit worried about, with a portrait-orientation card). 

Elizaillustrationdoodlething's face reaches the bottom of the card. Having these printed also helps me find impurities in the drawing (such as scanner/ink marks), to remove them for future reprints.


All in all, I'm happy with these bad boys - they're not bad for first-time cards, and I wouldn't mind going with MOO again - I'd just have to watch the template and bleed.

Professional Practise - Introductory Media

(It's a good thing I've tinkered with Wordpress, because I think Blogger's new "look" is extremely similar.)

My deadline for Professional Practise is tomorrow. This is probably going to be an all-nighter - usually is the night before I'm due to turn in a unit (or, my version of an all-nighter, which is live off coffee and still crash at 3AM, gibbering nonsense). This involves a video explaining how I plan to make it in the Illustration industry, and a file full of resources that will help me along the way. I learn by example, so this unit was hard when it came to knowing what kind of things they want to be turned in - being shown examples of the videos was easy. Being shown examples of the resource files is a bit moot, as they were left behind, meaning that their owners didn't find them useful. Erk. Admittedly, although I loved the talks and symposiums this unit had to offer and it put me in touch with some amazing illustrators, I've not been a fan of composing a hard-copy file. I'm a person who collects, and often it doesn't make a lot of sense (or any sense) to someone looking in - so most of my collection of useful articles/e-mail conversations has been digitally kept.

Anyway. Introductory media!

I'm not scared you'll phone me. I just don't want to out-prank you.

This is my first business card design - I went off my Twitter/Facebook icon design, and found that the brown is a bit overpowering when it comes to this kind of composition. I love the speech bubbles and peeping-Elizabeth head, though (I'm 5ft 1, so there's plenty of peeping happening in person, and "were you looking for me?" worked a lot better than originally anticipated, given it's a business card to refer back to!).

So I changed it to blue (this is the second speech-bubble design). A personal piece I did nearly a year ago was shown to work well with a digitally-added blue background, and it suits the card a lot better. After quizzing my friends and fellow illustrators over Facebook, they agreed. Good stuff! I'm going to add a red telephone just below the speech bubble on the back, to balance things out, but then I'll have a design ready to send! Good stuff!

I'm not scared you'll contact my references - eh, maybe I am deep down inside.

And here is my CV. In the upper-right corner, it mentions a free paper doll - the template for it comes on a separate sheet of paper, with some enclosed paper fasteners. Here it is put together.

Check out that slightly manic grin, ey? I have a feeling I'll be wearing that very same expression tomorrow ...

(Sweet dreams.)