Making my own book

It’s been a while since my last post, Ive been very busy with work again but now as soon as Im free from all the to-dos I needed something to-do. Something fun and creative! And it hit me… Im gonna draw and create a book!

In school a year ago i learnt how to tie a book and do the cover and all of that so I would be able to create it from scratch. Then all i needed was a character and story for it. I couldnt come up with anything so I looked around the room and saw an old painting i made hanging on the wall of this very funky cat (the cat in the pictures). I painted it one day about 2 years ago when I was bored at home. I usually like drawing very detailed characters but sometimes its more fun to not think at all and just draw! To not think of proportions and shadow, to make these ugly-cute creatures ^^.

So inspired by the funky cat Im gonna use itas a character for my book. I dont want to call it a childrens book since It is’nt limited to any age but there will be big pretty pictures and a short story to it. I hope to get it done soon. I’ll sketch on it now during the weekend and can hopefully start making it some time next week.

Im so exited :D.

Have a nice evening, and to you swedes out there, hope you’re having a great midsummers night!

Space monkey ninja!

I’ll explain it to you.. ^^

About a year ago my boyfriend was planning on making a blog for himself and he came up with the domain – spacemonkeyninja.com :D.

He probably figured that space is awesome, monkeys are dope and a monkey that also is a ninja would be even kooler.. hmm ”SPACEMONKEYNINJA! :0 ”. We were really excited over the name and made this sketch of what the site could look like, I just recently found this picture on my computer ^^. Unfortunately we never created the blog so this poor ninjamonkey still keeps spinning around in space, aimlessly, searching for a purpose in life…

Todays work

A couple of weekes ago I entered a blog community and started to play around with their css templates, designing and changing menus and so on. I had never worked with code before and understanding it now (at a beginners level) I start to see all of the possibilitys there are in designing sites. Ive never known the back end of webdesign very well before but this has really opened my eyes and has given me such an creative boost!

So to all of you rookies out there, rearanging code in blog templates is a great beginners-stage way of understanding how a site is built.

Here’s a new design Im playing around with. It’s all a big experiment testing what I can do with the things Ive learned. The part I’m showing you now will be the header. It’s still alot of work to it , texture, depth and many more details but this is what I’ve got so far! :D

Now its time for sleep.. goodnight people :]

Two days left on Threadless!

Theres only 2 days left to vote for my design ”A magpies motto”!

If you like it please vote and comment on it here: http://www.threadless.com/submission/209380/A_magpie_s_motto

It would be very kind :]

Its only gotten about 500 votes and its quite strange. Relatively to the other design who are up for votes its not that strange, it seems to be the average amount but I remember that when I submitted my first subs around 4 months ago most designs got about 800-900 votes as a standard. Maybe it was because it was winter and more people were stuck indoors by their computers? i dont know :/

UPDATE: The voting just ended and I got an average score of 2.35, the limit for those who win seem to go at about 3.0 so Im pretty far of :/.

Ohwell, I’ve got some ideas on how to change it up a bit to resubmit it again. I worked to long and hard on this to let it go on the first fail ! ^^

Thanks to all of you who voted!

I’m not a good Tweeter

I got Twitter a couple of days ago and was very excited over finally joining this so hyped function even the celebrities have catched up on now. But once I had gotten registered the days passed and I realized I hardly even had the time to tweet and If i did had the time I didnt have anything to say! I would probably have liked it more and gotten in to it if I had it like my main social site but logging in now and then to say a sentence is’nt working for me :/.

I guess Twitter is’nt for me, i’ll stick to kontaining where my posts have a bit mor

e substance.

And about the strawberry! I made it when I was fixing my profile design. I made it into a pattern and repeated it as a background, it turned out pretty sweet ^^.

Good enough? :/

Ohno! The voting time for ”Yummy” just ended and the final average score is 2,95 :/

From a little research i did before I saw that most printed designs got an average score from around 3.0 to 3.8, at most. Sooome have gone through with less than 3.0 tho so I guess there still is a sliight chance for it to go through >_<, but I must kill all hope or I could be waiting for their ”winner-mail” for weekes :D.

Thanks again to all of those who voted and for all of the nice comments I got! :]

A new design will be up in a few days, stay tuned!

Yummy on Threadless

Yaay, my design ”Yummy” is now up for voting on Threadless! ^^

If you like it please vote for it here: http://www.threadless.com/submission/207939/Yummy

If you’ld want to buy it too please check the ”I’d buy it” checkbox before you rate it, it ads to the points ^^.

Thanks people! <3

Fiftopus is up for votes!

Well, I had told you about all the designs I had lying around but never really finished. Well, yesterday I speeded things up, stoped trying to make it look like a t-shirt people would want and just did it how I liked it! It might have been a great choice or a very stupid one, but it was a choice atleast, woho!

This is the Indian Fiftopus, the outcome of a cat and an octopus love-making ^^. He is the God of awesomeness and everything that is kool.

I chose to submit it to designbyhumans.com this time instead of threadless since i think it has a better chance on this site. I’ll leave my wittier ones for threadless and my funky weird ones for designbyhumans.com. ^^

If you like it then please vote for it here: http://www.designbyhumans.com/vote/detail/52172?page=1

You’ll have to sign in to vote so if you’re not a member you could register quickly. :]

UPDATE:

How strange, just found out that a design on designbyhüman can be voted on for 120 days :0.

Thats good to know if you might wanna submit the design to several communitys, you’ld have to wait untill the whole120 days have run out to be a 100% sure that it wont be used by them so you can submit it to an other competition. i was used to the one week voting period that threadless has an expected the same here. Now I know. :]

Where aare yoou?

Going through some folders on my laptop I found this old pic I call ”where aaare you?”.

This was one of the first times I made glossy illustrations like these ^^. The inspiration for this picture was actually from a song called ”Bandit Queen” by a swedish hiphop group called Looptroop. Theres a sample in the beat where an old man says ”wheeree aare yoou?” and an old ladys voice answers ”I’m hiiidiing” and I thought it sounded so sweet and playful that I had to make my visual version of it ^^.

I added a video of the song too so you can hear it yourself , if you skip to about 3:55 you’ll get to the part where they’re talking :]

Time flies

Today I had a conversation with my boyfriend on how I sometimes am too much of a perfectionist. You might have read my earlier post when i told you about my indecisiveness and well, i still have many personal projects hanging just because of the fact that I cant make up my mind. And while i keep changing and modifying my designs over and over again time is flyyying by.

About two moths ago I managed to win on threadless with a tee -design I had submitted and ever since I’ve been working on new ones but I never finish them. Now that I know that I actually have a chance of winning (wich I never thought I would the first time around) I wont let any design go untill I feel its 100% worthy a win. :(

But today my boyfriend made a great point when discussing this on the bus…

What he told me was that I cant know if the design will win! And all this time Im wasting on trying to make them perfect into the smaallest detail i could have done 10 others, just producing and posting them up for voting. So it struck me! – ”Yes! thats true!! I might have been wasting time on something only I think is a ”sure” win, while i could have been doing so many more. And what if this ”diamond-design” ive been polishing for so long wouldnt get high votes?(as I for some reason have been taking for granted). What a waste!”

So I’ll just have to kick myself in the butt and make decisions.

I could keep tweaking my designs till infinity If i keep it up like this so I’ll just have to stop somewhere and hope that It’s good enough. Right now Im not getting anywhere with mydesigns so a step to ANY direction would be an accomplishment ^^. So from now on Ill speed up my designs and make sure they’re up for votes asap!

By the way, Inspired by many great photographers on this site I wanted to make a presentation picture for this entry inspired by their kool photos. I wanted to make a vintage-like picture with those type of colours Ive seen in many gorgeous photos. I made it within an hour ^^. Its really fun to put together pictures like this one in photoshop. First googleing for photos to use and then trying to put them together and make them look like a unit. A great challenge for the creative mind!

Lula the comic strip

This is a little strip I made a couple of months ago and its about my little wienerdog Lula!

She’s the cutest dog ever but she is quite fat and extremely lazy, wich only adds upp to the funny character that she allready is. I might be the only one who finds it funny tho just because I know how well i managed to capture her character, hope you can appreciate it too without knowing her :]

The Christmas card

Last christmas a close familyfriend of mine (she’s more like a cousin) asked me to draw her a christmas card that she could send out to all of her friends, family and co-workers.

Her name’s Amalia Gonzalez and she works as a beauty-reporter on a Swedish newspaper called Metro and so I wanted to draw her as a really beautifull and classy disney-like character.Im not used to drawing illustrations in this way, colouring with soft brushes trying to make it look smooth and realistic and such but I think it came out quite well. ^^I always find it hard to sell things to friends and family members. To actually ask them to pay me for something I’ve done feels so weird.. So I usually just give it away for free.  Saves me from the uncomfterbul situation of talking about money with them.

But some weeks later when I came home i saw that she had sent me this big goodie-bag filled with girly stuff!There were more things than there is on the photo now such as lipsticks, rouge and other stuff but I dont really use those things so I gave them to my aunties mom and aunties  ^^.

Could’nt have gotten a better reward for my job ^^. Thankyou Gonza!

Indecisiveness!

This is an old print I competed with on threadless once. It didnt get enough votes that time but I liked it so much myself that I decided to keep working on it to try to post it again.

It’s alot bigger now than it was before and its looking better, but now I just can’t decide on what colors to use! These are just a couple of different tests Ive made but I keep changing my mind at the last second all the time. For now I think I’m gonna go with the brown one, its the latest one I’ve done and i like how strong the colors are in it.

Im pretty indecisive generally in life :D, when theres too many options and choices my brain just panics! :0

Grandma & chicken

This little drawing is made in a similar way as the Astor piazzola Poster I posted in a previous entry.

The motive to this one might seem a little strange ^^, but there’s a story behind it!

My grandmother had by the time I made this gotten very sick, suffering from diabetes for several years had made here home-bound and she would go from being very clearheaded at times to totally loose grip on where she was and what was happening. One day when my mom had taken vacation to go back and visit grandmom in Chile she said grandmom was sitting by the window looking out to the streets and quietly laughing by herself.

My mom and her other siblings looked at eachother wondering what was so funny so they asked my grandmom why she was laughing. Then she pointed out to the streets and said ”But look! Look at those little chickens walking in a row, they’re crossing the road.” ^^

I thought it was such a funny little story that I wanted to draw the two of them together, grandmom and the chicken with their special bound.

Astor Piazzolla poster

This is a poster I made about a year ago as a gift to my boyfriend, he loves to sample old music and this is one of his favourite musicians to sample :].

I’m not sure what the style its made in is called in english, i think it is ”dry-point” (?). You basically scratch on a hard plastic board with a needle-pointed pen, all the scratches you’ve made on the plastic board will later be filled with a thick colour-paste. The next step once youve filled all the scratches with color is to gently wipe of the excessive colour so that you see the drawing and all the lines youve scratched. Then you put a slightly wet and thick paper on it and slowly roll a huge press over it so the coloured lines transfer over to the paper. Voila! An Astor is made.

These presses are huge tho and i was only able to do this because I went in an old school print-graphic-school back then. It wasnt as kool as it sounds. Do not pay loads of money for artschools kids! They are often shady and extremely cheap(dont give you very much materials to work with). I learned alot more reading tutorials on internet during a month compared to what I learned there for a whole year. Dont we love the internet? ^^I should have known that a printing-graphic school wasnt for me tho, Ive never liked the pretentious artsy stuff, i like my things to come in handy in some way, not just be hung on a wall. Digital illustrations is much more suited for me, it feels much more practical. :]

Anyways.. there’s alot of detail-pics on this poster, I love how dirty the outcome is when you draw in this style, you get to see all the scratches and stuff. I even stepped and scratched the plastic board before i rolled it under the press, it gives it alot more character. You’ll see my little doggie on the last pic too :], my little depressed weinerdog. She didnt get to play as mush as she would have wanted today. Life aint fun when her owner stares at a screen all day. I’ll make up for it tomorrow tho. <3