The Potbelly Pixie

Bamboo Fun: All that, and more

I broke in my Bamboo Fun Wacom tablet today (got it for Christmas; haven't used it much yet) by taking on a digital design challenge. A doll owner at BJD forum Den of Angels was in search of a face-up design for her newly arrived ball jointed doll, and asked forum participants if they'd help her design a "look" for her 43 cm. NARAE (3/4 eyes) which was dark but not too gothic; with focus on the eyes and lashes; softish, full lips; with brow and lip piercings; and black eyebrows -- cause she'll wear a black wig.

It was super fun, messin' about with my pen & tablet... and I'm totally excited about how this turned out! Loooooove playing with this thing.  Wish I could make some money doing so.  Anybody wanna offer me a job, painting dolls digitally??  :)~

Here's the before and after, worked on a photo template provided by the owner.

And here's my final image.  Although it went way beyond what the doll owner asked for, I just couldn't resist finishing this pretty girl. 

New avatar

I've been kinda out of the graphic design thang for a while now but with the coming of the teddy bear "season" -- bears fly off shelves from fall to spring -- and with my time entirely my own for the first time in many months, it seemed like a good time, any way you slice it, to redesign my website and blog.  Because I'm churningly OCD about some things, though, and because when I get into redo mode I tend to do so on in a kinda manic way (sub-clinically manic, btw), I just HAD to redo my avatar at Teddy Talk, too.  And since I've been expanding my branding to include dolls and art cards more broadly, I decided to include them on my avatar as well.  You like?

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should  mention that I'm currently also redoing every throw pillow on every sofa in the house, as well as the color scheme of my kitchen/family room and possibly, the downstairs bath.  When it rains, it pours.  But hey... This kind of raw energy and motivation comes in waves, and only once in a blue moon.  I'm no dummy.  Use it or lose it, baby! :)~

More tutorial sites

After posting earlier about the Scrapbook Bytes site I tried to click thru to a few tuts and man, was I frustrated with the slow pageload speed!  I've got, like, speed of light internet here, so I know it was the site and not my connection. GREAT content, I continue to think... but I hope the speed issue was just a glitch today and isn't a permanent feature of that site.

Just in case it IS permanent, though... here are a few more great tutorial sites on the web for the would-be, self-taught, graphic designer in you.

• Photoshop Cafe
• Janee's Photoshop Tutorials
• Tutorial Outpost
• Laurie McCanna's Free Image Editing Tutorials
• PS Workshop
• GrafX Design

Image editing tutorials

People are so daunted by digital design but the internet itself can be a wonderful teacher.  I've found that four things have improved my Photoshop skills enormously... all of them fairly equally:

• Hard, sit-down study (mocha in hand, of course) of books and manuals specific to  my software
• Tinkering with the program itself,  drawing and editing with no particular goal in mind
• Googling tricks and techniques I'd like to learn (e.g. "straight line photoshop")
• Browsing online tutorials on sites where they're grouped en masse

One of the most helpful sites as I began learning Photoshop was Scrapbook Bytes.  I just happened by there again today, looking for a tutorial for a friend who wrote with a question, and I'm even more impressed with the huge variety of tutorials they've assembled all in one place.  They're organized by program and even level of understanding, with special tut areas for beginners.  Very useful & cool.  In fact, I'm so excited about the amount of information at this site that I've created a special photo link to the tutorials there in my left sidebar, here in my blog.

If you're at all interested in learning image editing, give the Scrapbook Bytes tutorial pages a visit!

Wrapping up design clients

Finished this animated banner today.  The colorways were all client suggestions and I really felt inspired by her black, white, and sepia brown directions combined with her old-world B&W photography.  I like this one a lot!  I'll hate to see my graphic design business die out but I really do miss being in my studio and need to get AWAY from the computer and back in there if I want to keep any kind of presence in the bear world, especially now that work for Boyds will require many of my bears go east, and remain unseen by my collectors and bearmaking peers.

Anyhoos... here's that banner.

Final pin

This is the final version I think we're going with.  Just a few little tweaks...

teddy talk pins

Whipped up a quick design for some TEDDY TALK pins and am awaiting word from the big cheeses at Admin on whether it's a 'yay' or a 'nay' concept.  Here 'tis, for now...