Posted by Ilene on Apr 1, 2010 in Craft Design | 2 comments
Every spring I have high hopes for the exterior curb appeal of my home. Each year I try to do a little something to make things look and work better. About 2 years ago I had a “natural” patio of brick and stone placed in front of my house. Last year I found two wrought iron chairs and matching table. I painted the chairs black but the table top had warped and needed to be replaced. This year I plan to create a mosaic top for the table. I used Adobe Illustrator to create 3 designs. Not sure which to go with, as it’s my first attempt at a larger (36″ round) mosaic so I want to keep it pretty simple. Initially I wanted earth tones, but I think I prefer the bright red whimsical and abstract the most. Plus it provides creative flexibility when applying the tiles. Any thoughts?
When finished, I’ll photo the table in place on the patio and post.
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Posted by Ilene on Apr 1, 2010 in Craft Design | 4 comments
I recently completed a bead stringing class at the local adult evening school. This was my first project (and only completed project to date). It involved “upcycling” a necklace I already had (with the paper beads) by replacing the string with wire, adding seed beads and a blue stone, and creating a button clasp. I was also able to incorporate a shoe clip (that had been passed down from my mom) as one of the key focal elements. I enjoy creating functional from dysfunctional jewelry and have already worn my necklace twice!
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Posted by Shawnda on Feb 23, 2010 in Craft Design, Digital Art/Drawing, Photoshopped Photography | 3 comments
So, for the past 6 weeks or so, I’ve been using the daily designing challenge to work a little bit every day to digitally scrapbook the photos from our family trip to Alaska in Aug. 2008. I had been procrastinating because of the effort and mess created to just haul out all of my scrapping supplies and make sure I have the photos printed in the sizes I want ahead of time etc.
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Posted by Shelly on Feb 10, 2010 in Craft Design | 2 comments
Okay, I’ve been kinda quiet for the past few weeks – I do have a reason. The fam’ has been sick with some nasty stuff, and I just have either been nursing someone back to health, or getting nursed myself.
That excuse given, I wasn’t completely useless while I was sick. (Mostly, but not completely!) While I was laying in bed, moaning in misery, I was working on some things that have nothing to do with web design or needed a computer (save to obtain a pattern or two), but I still needed to unleash my creativity.
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Posted by Kayla on Jan 11, 2010 in Craft Design, Digital Art/Drawing, Graphic Design, Illustration, Web Site Graphics | 3 comments
I need a lot more experience to become comfortable with the pen tool in Illustrator & with using my Wacom tablet (I just have the Bamboo tablet for now). So my original idea was to start with an illustration series and draw all my daughters’ pet shop animals. However, after spending 2.5 hours on the first animal, I decided I needed to do some simpler tutorials in Illustrator – maybe I could work up to drawing a pet shop animal in 15 minutes.
I had some variety this first week with my daily designs, here’s how it went…
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Posted by Anne on Jan 3, 2010 in Craft Design, Designs | 3 comments
Well missed the deadline for yesterday’s post, oh well. Here is a necklace I just made from my stash of beads and findings in my beading area. These are very large Peruvian opals with a silver nugget spacer. Its about 24″ long and took me about 20 mins. to make. I saw a woman wearing a similar design at a bead show about a year ago and have stalled in the plan to make something like it, so this was an opportunity to open my beading shop for the design of the day. Beading is soooo therapeutic for me, but its way way on the back burner since I started web design full time. Too bad, I could use some mindless fun.
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Posted by Aimee on Dec 30, 2009 in Craft Design, Graphic Design | 1 comment
I made placecards for our Christmas dinner this year. I wanted to create something clean & simple, yet elegant.
Using Adobe Illustrator, I made a blue/white gradient (you fold it in the middle of the white – each side of the card has a bit of white at the top that fades into the blue bottom), added the names with the Chocolate Box font, and created a simple star embellishment with a blue fill & white stroke.I had fun placing the star for each name.
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