Scribbles & Scribings

Zazzle.com is having a fantastic Memorial Day sale this weekend, good on many of the fine products at my Critterwings shop! In all cases you can mix-and-match styles, artwork, sellers, and even your own custom products, so whether you’re buying mugs, T-shirts, stamps, stickers, and aprons at Critterwings or have something else in mind now is the time to stock up and save!

30% off all aprons, 20% off postage stamps, 50% off posters, and 40% off business cards with sale code MEMORIALSALE, valid through June 1, 2010

There are also a few ongoing sales that are running through the end of June:

15OFFINVITES — 15% off all invitations

TSHIRTS10OFF — 10% off all T-shirts

MUGS15SAVER1 — 15% off three or more mugs

BIZCARDSAVE1 — 15% off business cards

POSTERS1DEAL — 10% off posters

1STICKERDEAL — 10% off all stickers

And remember, Zazzle always offers bulk discounts on almost all of their products if you need a lot of anything.

It’s a little out-of-season at the moment, but new art has been posted in my RedBubble portfolio! I’ve been working on The Dragon of Winter for a while, a companion piece to The Dragon of Autumn. It took me a while to sort out exactly what I wanted to do with all those snowflakes after I’d drawn them. It was created with the same process: ink drawings, layered together with Photoshop coloring and a few watercolor textures.

(Also available as one of those cool new stickers RedBubble offers…)

I’ve been working on several new pieces… watch this space!

 
click to enlarge

I finally had a moment to take a break from other things, sit down and do a quick sketch for this week’s Illustration Friday. Nothing fancy, just a fast still life in ink on smooth bristol paper, 9×12 inches. For all that I’ve been thinking about my garden lately, and puttering about in it with this very equipment when I have some time (and the weather cooperates), the yard is still pretty sad. My big accomplishment of the spring was pulling up a bug chunk of the ivy that’s devouring the back yard, but there’s still quite a bit. And it looks like the poison ivy has  made a comeback…

Still, this weekend promises to hold enough nice weather for me to get my tomato plants in the ground, once I clear their bed. And last weekend I had just enough time to plant some seeds before the gentle rains of the past few days started, just what those tiny seeds needed to get a good start. Bit by bit it’s coming together as everything — including me! — recovers from a freakishly snowy winter.

Meanwhile, I’m still hard at work on those flower drawings! Even though they’re not as time-sensitive as the real plants, I can’t wait to add them to the Critterwings store, especially for the new stickers and baby clothes available at Redbubble as I mentioned in my last post. I’m having far too much fun with these!

The folks over at RedBubble have been hard at work these days! First, they added postcards to their product list, along with the cards and prints. They’re letting YOU choose what month you want your calendars to start with, so if you needed one that starts any other month besides January you can do that too. Then they added hoodies to their lineup of shirts, and you can choose if you want the image on the front or the back. EDIT: And they’ve also added baby and kid’s T-shirts to the lineup too! RedBubble does some of the nicest on-demand T-shirt printing I’ve seen so this is great news.

But this is one of the coolest things I’ve seen by far: die-cut stickers.

That’s right, any one of the designs in my T-shirt gallery at Redbubble can be ordered as a large (about 3″) vinyl die-cut sticker. Just click on the “buy/preview” button for any T-shirt and choose the “sticker” option — I’m loving the way the Chinese Zodiac animals look! If I needed any more motivation to add more T-shirt designs to my collection, I have it now…

It’s been busy around here with spring cleaning and getting stuff done in the garden. But just because I haven’t had the time to participate in Illustration Friday the past couple of weeks doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy on the drawing board. (In fact, I had an idea for “cocoon” I really wanted to draw, but the week ended way too quickly…)

Here are the rest of the first batch of  Flower Alphabet Artist Trading Cards continued from my last post, most of which were sent out as part of an art swap. The remaining cards may very well end up for sale, they’re all 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches, drawn with ink on bristol paper with some quick colors added with colored pencil. I’m finishing up the rest of the alphabet in this format to make sure I like the layouts — most of them are just waiting to be colored and scanned — and then I’ll be drawing them all again to make finished art for the online shops. Anyone have any particular products they’d like to see with this art on it?

I guess it’s a sign of how much I want to whip my garden into shape, but I’ve been having a blast researching and drawing all of these flowers! Some of them have been difficult to find a good garden flower for (like “K”) and others have so many possibilities it’s hard to choose between them. And in the meantime, I need to get some of these planted in my real garden!