design

(f)unemployment < fun employment

So many changes have come in just the past two weeks. First, I found something of a part-time dream job. Over the past 4 years I have worked on and off as a childcare provider. It started with my 3 amazing nephews. I loved caring for them. They taught me so much about life, and I taught them the Batman theme, so we’re even. That spread to working part time watching a close friend of mine’s amazing toddler.  And now, another close friend has come out of nowhere and trusted me with her little guy. They’re all family to me, and, not to put too fine a point on it, but as someone who made a decision while I was still a teenager that I would never have my own kids, at least not biological ones, it’s almost a necessity. It’s a kind of fulfillment I’ve never experienced in any other job. I can’t even really call it a job.

I’m in a good place. What a load off my mind. I neglected F2F while all of these things were settling in, but things are rolling again. I’ve pared down the designs available on Society6 and I’m finding a design voice for the shop, right now focusing on simple kid friendly patterns, geometric patterns, and some spacy collages. I have some fine art prints coming soon as well! I can’t wait. On top of that,  I’ve  got a new round of needful things going up for sale in the Etsy shop. I should have an update on that very soon!

For now, here’s a guy modeling my new, snow day inspired pattern. Sex  sells, no?

guy in shower

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baby sleeping…

My new goal is a design a day, but I’ve already failed two days running. You see, I’ve been babysitting the sweetest little guy this week. He’s a doll. I finally got myself in gear to use his nap time for more than just catching up on Facebook today. I only planned to goof around and play with brushes in Illustrator, (I’m still feeling rusty,) but, before I knew it, I had ruined what was once a complete gorgeous stock image. HA.

I give you, Pointy Circles in SPAAAAAAAAACE!

stars(It does look rather good as a shower curtain…)

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patterns

I think I need to start off in a realistic, attainable place. Keep it simple for now. I have aspirations to make and sell original artwork in my Etsy store. I will do that. Society6 is more about pattern for me. And I need to go with what I know. People love the Sloth. It’s sold so many units completely on it’s own, with no feature spot from S6 and no advertising from me. People found it, liked it, and bought it over all the many hundreds of sloth designs available. I’m still so jazzed about that.

So I thought, why not do more designs based on the sloth pattern using different animals? Go with what works, right?

First up, foxy man.

new fox pink

It was at this point that I realized I did pink AGAIN, so blue foxy was added to offset my apparent pink obsession.

new fox blueWhat other animals shall I do? What’s trendy now? Maybe tomorrow I’ll put a bird on it.

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finally!

A new design! This simple thing took way too long due to some seriously troublesome computer problems. I’m using Illustrator CS2 and, for some reason, it would not rasterize the artwork. It wold just say, nope, too big. I don’t think it’s a problem I’ve ever come across. It also would not export them in JPEG format, saying that the images were, again, too big. On top of all that frustrating nonsense, my computer crashed several times during my saving attempts. I finally had to PDF it and open it in Photoshop to convert it to a JPEG. So weird! I’m hoping a newer version of Illustrator will sort this.

Anyway, Pink Moon. Available on all the usual Society6 products, including the newly added shower curtain!

pink moon

By the way, this is a mixed media design. The stars and the moon are real space telescope images, very high quality. I expect they’ll print beautifully.