Scribbles & Scribings

I hope everyone out there is having a great Thanksgiving, able to spend some time with family and/or friends to appreciate all of the good things in their lives. Personally, I’m very grateful for having been born into — and married into — a loving family, for meaningful work that supports me, for a comfortable home to live in. These are the things that really matter, more than “Black Friday” and all the other craziness that goes on this time of year.

So what’s up with this somewhat…. unusual picture? Well, one of the things I’m grateful for has been an increase in client work, but it’s been cutting in on my time for making “for fun” work. As a result, instead of something more personal I’m posting a recent piece I produced for Cactus to promote scratch-off tickets for the Colorado Lottery. It should be only the first in the series for a campaign called “Celebrate the Season,” which is already shaping up to be a lot of fun. They wanted an old-fashioned look, so I drew it in ink to simulate an engraving and added subtle tints to color it; the rest of the series should be in a similar style. I produced this one in record time for the complexity of the drawing, and I look forward to taking a little more time to lavish details on the rest of the series.

I wish you all home, health and happiness for this holiday… have a good one!   

It seems like I turn around and BAM realize I haven’t made a blog post for over a month and a half. Blame it on the crazy, hazy days of summer. This year it’s been the crazy HOT days of summer around here: we’re officially tied for the most days over 90 degrees in a single summer, and it seemed like we definitely got more than our usual share of 100+ days too.

I spent some of the time I was hiding indoors where it’s air-conditioned at my drawing table, working on my flower alphabet, playing around with materials, and keeping my hand in with sketches, including some rather silly ink drawings and experimenting with watercolor pencils, like in the small piece above. Most of that work has been posted directly to my RedBubble portfolio, I’ll try to remember to cross-post here as well.

I’m also slowly adding new products and upgraded artwork to my Chinese Zodiac series at RedBubble and at my Zazzle store, generally trying to get ready for the holiday season (I can’t believe it’s already time to be thinking about that!) As always, if there’s a particular product that you’d like to see one of my images on, just let me know!

Look what arrived this week, just in time for me to bring with me to the InHowse/HOW Design conference in Denver! These are the new die-cut vinyl stickers from Redbubble, and they live up to my expectations. If you’re there, find me and I might have one to give you!
I’ll have a very limited number of these with me at the conference, but you can always order your own — without the website on them, I made these up special for myself :)  Any of the T-shirts in my RedBubble site can be ordered as a sticker instead of a shirt, just click on the “buy/preview” button and choose the Sticker option at the top of the screen. For reference, the dragon is about four inches tall.

I’ve also finished a super-quick but much-needed remodeling job on my main website. (This blog is next in line for a makeover, but it may take a while before I get to it.)

Between preparations at work and at home for this trip, there hasn’t been much time for new drawings. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make up for in some part in between waiting at airports, spending 5 hours on a plane, and doing some sightseeing in Denver tomorrow. After all, June 5 is Drawing Day! I won’t have my scanner, but I’ll have my camera and my laptop, and will try to post *something* over the weekend on my RedBubble site. See you there!

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…

Just a quick note to let everyone know about the “12 Deals of Christmas” sale at Zazzle.com! Today’s sale is on packs of cards but there will be different things on sale every day for the next 12 days! Just click the sale link at the Zazzle site to get the discount.

CafePress is also offering different daily specials,  so check out the Critterwings CafePress shop for special deals there too!

To start you off, here’s a shortcut to all of the cards in the Critterwings Zazzle Shop.

create & buy custom products at Zazzle

Yes, I know I promised new art, but Thanksgiving preparations have to come first I’m afraid. In the meantime, I wanted to let everyone know about a sale in my Critterwings shop on Zazzle: $5 off sheets of custom stamps! In addition, I’ve lowered my base price on stamps, so if you like my art it’s a great time to stock up on some genuine US postage. Enter the coupon code ZAZZLESTAMPS at checkout. The sale only lasts for 2 more days! Here are some of the stamps I have for sale right now, but there are more designs, sizes and variations available at Zazzle:

“The Holiday Courier” medium size postage by critterwings

Flying Dove Postage by critterwings

2010: The Year of the Tiger by critterwings

“The Dragon of Autumn” Small Size Postage by critterwings

If you want to make your own custom stamps with your own design on them, you can do that too, so check out Zazzle.com today. (And new art tonight, I promise!)

 This is just a quick note to let folks know about the shiny new offerings over at Critterwings.com, including items featuring the swallowtail butterfly seen above.

My CafePress store has just been upgraded and loaded up with all kinds of new goodies, just in the nick of time for holiday shopping!  In addition to mugs, cards, and tote bags, items unique to Cafepress include:

Ceramic ornaments
(comes with red ribbon for hanging)

Aluminum Sigg water bottles

Ceramic pet food dishes

Wooden keepsake boxes
(with a ceramic tile on the lid)

Throw pillows

There’s more of everything; the store is organized according to the image you want so take a look around. Of course, other items with these images and more can be found at my Zazzle Store and in my RedBubble Gallery. I’ll be adding new art and new items to all of my stores through mid-December, so be sure to stop by.

Next update: more new art!

Just in time for the holiday season, the new store at Critterwings.com is open for business! It has links to products with my illustrations at several different print-on-demand venders, focusing on special items for Christmas:

Critterwings at Zazzle.com has a wide variety including mugs, shirts, tote bags, magnets, cards, and real US postage.

Critterwings at Cafepress.com has ceramic ornaments, clocks, and other gift items.

Stephsmith at Redbubble.com has calendars, T-shirts, cards, and prints, and the largest assortment of fine art images for sale.

New products will be arriving soon in all the stores. Needless to say, putting this together has slowed down production of new art, hence the lack of blog updates lately, but I’ll be posting more new art here later this week… stay tuned!

Great news for those who like to plan ahead: RedBubble is having a sale on 2010 calendars for the next few days! In honor of the occasion, I’ve made a calendar, including some images that are available for sale on RedBubble for the first time. As befitting the title — Legendary Tales: Fables and Myths — all of the images come from either Greek mythology or Aesop’s Fables. Check it out!

New artwork is coming soon; I have a few different pieces in different stages of completion, but with luck there will be some new art up in the next few days…

Looking back on this year, it’s been a very busy one. Unlike some people out there, most of the chaos has been good. Crazy-making sometimes, but usually for good reasons. I have lots to be grateful for and despite the current state of things in the world I have a good deal of optimism for 2009.

As far as this blog goes, the thing I’m happiest about is that for the most part I’ve been able to keep a steady schedule, in part thanks to Illustration Friday. At the beginning of this year I committed to posting something every week based on the IF topic. I didn’t quite make that, but given my horrid track record for diary-keeping I’m amazed I did as well as I did.

Out of 52 weeks in the year:

• I posted IF illustrations for 43 of them (only missed 9, although technically a couple didn’t make it to the blog in time to post on IF)
• 39 of those were new, original drawings, three of which never got further than a rough sketch.
• 14 were existing work I’d done for another purpose but were appropriate for that week’s topic (and one of those was significantly edited for IF)

I’m pretty happy with that. The hardest part was getting back into the habit when I missed a whole month over the summer due to my insane schedule.

I don’t know if I can make the same vow this year, since I may have more illustration projects coming in. However, I do promise to post something to this blog every week, and participate in IF when I can. I’m also going to start merchandising my existing art more, making better use of my redbubble account and my CafePress store, and making more art that is directly in line with that. Toward that end I’d like to redo my website (including this blog!) but that’s a secondary priority to making more art.

Is anyone else making an “art resolution” this year?