Evolution of a Business Card

One of the best things about my job is when I can work with a client to create an end product that they didn’t necessarily even imagine at the beginning. Recently I finished a job of creating business cards for a personal shopper.

I started by offering 3 different directions that we could go, based on several graphic styles my client likes:

Chinoisie direction

Laurel wreath direction

Calligraphic line direction

A bunch of stylish clothes all mishy-mashed together in line drawing

Gisella chose the calligraphic line direction. So from there, she asked for some slight revisions of the shapes of letters, and the addition of a butterfly (a symbol that is important to her), and some tweaks to the hanger and frame around her name. The back was changed quite a bit because she preferred a feeling of order rather than the jumbled clothing that I started with. Once Gisella was completely satisfied with the design, I sent out for negatives from Stats Prepress in order to make polymer plates to print letterpress. Here’s what the finished plate for the blue layer looked like on the press:

The yellowy thing is a steel backed polymer plate. The ink is on the blue rollers and puts a thin layer of ink on the raised surfaces of the plate. Woo, industrial age technology!

These are all the backs of the cards printed with ink jet and sprayed with a protective glaze layer:

mmmm, protective glaze. arhlarhllarh...

This is the big ol’ cutter that I cut the cards apart with. I like to end my sentences with prepositions, and I’ll never stop.

Technically, it's called a board shear.

I poked the holes in the cards with a great tool called a “Japanese screw punch”. It also sounds like an awesome karate move.

Japanese screw punch to the head!

Ok, here are the finished guys with baker’s twine looped into the holes to complete the shopping tag feel. Rounded corners also.

Look at that big pile of bakers twine!!

And finally, here is what the back of the card ended up looking like:

(Clockwise from top left) dress, blazer, necklace, and shoes

A great project that I was glad to get to work on. Thanks, Gisella & good luck with your business!

A process

A very very great friend of mine got married recently, and to send the proper kind of good wishes and congratulations, I decided to draw a card for them. I started by drawing in pencil a simple message in a Copperplate style of calligraphy. But then the curlicues—oh the curlicues! They started sprouting out of every ascender, descender, finial and …some other word.

The curlicues! Oh the curlicues!

I showed it to my husband who thought it needed some more variation in line. Too much of the same. So the curlicues grew sproutlings:

Look at them sprouting everywhere. It's almost like an infestation.

So a nice little monochromatic card was ready. But for a spring wedding, it needed a little sprinkling of color. Some pale green and pink.

The Colorful Sproutlings—so springy

Painted while watching Celebrity Apprentice. Is that shameful?

The Donald Says No; not shameful

Egg-vidence of the Hand? Terrible.

My friend Tanya taught me how to make Ukranian Easter eggs, called Pasenki Pysanky. We sat down and made a few before Easter. It is a wax-resist dying process. First you draw on the egg with melted wax:

Sorry it's a little blurry. This is Tanya's Hawaii themed egg.

Then you dunk it in dye of whatever color you want:

This one is red.

Then after doing this a bunch of times with different colors, you remove the wax by melting it off.

you gotta melt it, then wipe it, then melt some more, then wipe some more

And at the very end you end up with something, like or unlike these:

warm colors egg

giant squid egg

Super fun! Thanks Tanya!

Cactus people

We visited Anza Borrego to see the desert bloom yesterday, and lo and behold! We witnessed these adorable but painful creatures populating the dusty roadsides. They are such happy-to-know-ya cactus.

Mr. Spike Tingleberry-Thornton

Mrs. Quilly Bristlebaum

Ms. Barb Tingleberry

Spike Jr.

And then there was this guy:

The Weirdo

It’s best not to mess with him. He’s a lonely stranger wandering the desolate desert plains. And also hills. But definitely lonely.

p.s. These things are called Teddybear Cholla. Have you ever heard a cuter name in all creation? Here’s the link
But watch out, cuz

The teddy-bear cholla is extremely flammable.

Thanks for warning me, wikipedia.

Time to be Awesome

Oh man, I abandoned my last blog because it was too much pressure to say something interesting and or relevant and or funny and or something. But this time, I’ll just write whatever I feel like and who cares if it’s any of the aforementioned aforementionables. But at least I can keep track of progress and images of projects I’m working on over time. Oooh, like a diary. But for my work.