The Wonderful Word for This Wednesday is ‘Journey’
Today I want to take you on a journey from the conception of an idea to a piece of art and then art on a product. Hopefully this will demystify any sense that creating these things takes inherent talent!
The Idea
Our church always has some type of graphic or photo that goes with that week’s sermon and is displayed on the walls throughout the morning. Since I struggle to just sit and listen, I usually bring my sketchbook with me to church and will often be inspired by the graphic. One Sunday the graphic was this:
I was struck by the shape of that thingy under the petals (I should know the official name of it but I don’t!) and began doodling in my sketchbook. Don’t worry, I was still listening!
The Doodle / Sketch
As always, I’m going to be vulnerable and show you ALL of the process, so here’s the first doodle I did that day in my sketchbook:
I must have really been listening intently to the paster because I couldn’t even spell ‘beauty’ correctly on this doodle page! But do you see where I circled what I liked and then wrote ‘nope’ on the thing I didn’t like or simply scribbled over it? This is what a real sketchbook looks like.
Sidebar: Am I right in being frustrated when people share their ‘sketchbooks’ on social media and each page is a completed masterpiece? A sketchbook should be for playing and trying things out. Many things don’t work so I have a lot of ugly pages like this, but who cares? It’s just a sketchbook.
Next I took what I liked of the first doodle and turned the page and made this:
Better huh?! AND I even spelled beauty correctly. I often draw a line when I hand letter something so I don’t go slanting it off the page, so that’s what that line is in case you were wondering.
Also, see how I did all that fun line work in that part of the flower that I liked so much? Once I did that I knew I loved these flowers and would take this doodle to the next level.
Digitizing the Doodle / Sketch
Later I took a picture of this second page and uploaded it to my iPad into a program called ‘Procreate’ (this is a drawing app for the iPad) where I digitized my sketch by tracing it in this app. The benefit of this is that I use a different ‘layer’ for each part of the flower and then I can piece new flowers together and create a new composition.
Adobe Illustrator
Once I had all the pieces traced, I uploaded them into Adobe Illustrator, vectorized them, and played with flower parts until I achieved a composition I liked.
Having a vectorized image makes the lines clean and smooth and makes it so the image can be resized to any size without pixilating.
Another thing I can do in Adobe Illustrator is try out different backgrounds behind my design, here are two I played around with :
At this stage I edit and polish until it feels ‘just right’ to me.
Art on Products
Once I get the image or images the way I want, then I can upload the image to my Zazzle store and apply it to products like these:
To see these products and even order one or two (all of the above make great gifts!), please visit my store on Zazzle. Just a tip: It seems easiest to get to what you want by clicking ‘Collections’ in the top menu bar and going from there.
It would be so great if you could browse and click the little heart to show what you liked in the shop. This kind of feedback is incredibly valuable if you have the time to peruse and click!
Wrapping it up
So there’s my process from beginning to end! The hardest part of this process for me is the technology. It’s been a STEEP learning curve for me (and I’ve got a LOT more to learn) but learning how to use Procreate and Adobe Illustrator has opened up this product design door and I’m having SO MUCH FUN designing products.
Where will YOU find inspiration next? And will you have an ugly sketchbook page as well? Hopefully!
Kimberly Snider, Virtuoso, Signing Off
Links to all the things HERE