Thursday 15 April 2010

More for Mother's Day!

Yesterday I decided to experiment. Whereas usually I design for greeting cards and then sometimes use a part of the design for other things, yesterday I made my first ever design specifically for a T-shirt-


and the more discreet version -

But then - and this is the experiment - I made greeting cards from the T-shirt design that I think are nearly off the scale of ghastliness and uploaded them to Greeting Card Universe and Zazzle.

This bizarre idea was prompted by a look at the 'What's New' pages on Greeting Card Universe to see if my latest designs were on there. They weren't (and they never seem to be) even though I waded through pages and pages of what, to me, were a great many cards that I wouldn't give houseroom to! I'm not going to publicise my 'experiments' here, though I can't stop them appearing in my Zazzle flash panel. But it'll be interesting to see whether anyone likes them. One thing I've learnt in the past year or so is that there's no accounting for taste! And maybe I'm just getting old.....

I didn't waste a lot of time on my experiment - the collage was already made and I used Photoshop to make the coloured backgrounds so each one only took a few minutes.

This one, on the other hand, took me so long that I was reluctant to give up on it when the lettering didn't show up and I've spent a bit more time rescuing it, painting the light flowers that were distracting from the lettering, in crimson gouache and lightening the darker blue forget-me-nots.
It was 'interesting' painting with gouache on top of acrylics, but the slightly 'veined' effect that resulted was just like real wallflower petals -  so a 'happy accident'! On both of my computers, at least, the message is now clearly visible; and, printed, it's the sort of card I'd love to receive! But, as I said, there's no accounting for taste!

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