Illustrated Cards

I had a bit of a revelation last week, after years of making cards for the first time I made entirely printed cards. It seems insane that I never did it before, I saw other people doing it but never made the connection in my brain to do it myself, which is silly considering how much I like drawing. I think it was all the drawings I've been doing for the canvas bags that spurred on the idea.

I did a bunch of pencil sketches, I have a graphic pad but nothing beats drawing on paper with a pencil. I then scanned them in and set about colouring in the drawings. (To do this in Photoshop go to layer options for your drawing layer, in the drop down menu choose multiply. This makes the layer see through so all you can see is the drawing but not the white, make a new layer behind this and colour on this layer, it's like using sheets of ascetate). I chose to put them on a sparing white background and let the drawings speak for themselves. I may experiment with other layouts down the line, but at the moment I like this aesthetic.

I had tonnes of 5x5" blank cards left over from Christmas, and I brought these to the printer but he was unable to use them. Instead he printed on card and I folded them myself afterwards. I was able to use the envelopes from these packs. Down the line I'll have to source envelopes to make it more cost effective than buying card packs just for the envelopes.

I found at the stall some people were really put off by a €4 price tag for a handmade card so that's why these printed cards are great, I'm charging €2.50 each or 5 for €10. I'll also list them in my Etsy shop as they can be reproduced easily so it's worth the effort to take photos and write listings for them. I'll also be making a range of As Gaeilge cards too, as the collaged ones have been incredibly popular.

To see the whole collection so far just head over to this Facebook album.

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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Drawing Evolution

 Here is another design that I've been working on for my series of canvas bags. Since I thought of the idea of making bags a couple of weeks ago I knew I wanted to do my own Lisbeth Salander( The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). I enjoyed posting last weeks evolution of Frankenstein's Monster so I thought I would do the same for this.

Initially I drew the line drawing in pencil and scanned it in before shading it in with graphite pencil. The third image shows the two of these images put together in Photoshop, making the outline darker. Fir this project all colouring is done on the computer, similar to the way to the way the a lot of comic book artists work. I added layers of colour using textured brushed, building up an interesting background. I wanted to go for a ruddy and army green palette rather that the expected grey and black.

I'm happy with the result, but the purest draftsman in me kinda prefers the simple line drawing. I learned this from the work that I did last week, that's why I scanned in the image after this first stage. I might go back and do another more simplistic version, as a learning exercise, to see what result I get. Having said that, I'm still drawn to the final image, I like the colours and textures that I was able to get in the background.

What do you think?

Update: After a few hours I went back and played with the colours a bit. I think I liked the background too much to allow myself to see that it was making the piece too busy. I knocked back the saturation and made it much more monochromatic, meaning that Lisbeth pops out more.

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