New Adventures: LambDesignGoods

 

 

After years of saying I wanted to, I've opened up an Etsy shop with a focus on digital downloadable designs. LambDesignGoods. Sometimes it takes us a while to get where we want to go ; )

With a few of my own Valentine's designs from recent holidays pretty much ready, it gave me the extra push. So I pulled them together over the last few weeks in time for this year's Valentine's Day. There is a handful of card options to purchase for digital download, but I'm hoping to expand my selection of other ideas and designs in the next few months. Stay tuned for more.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/lambdesigngoods

XOXO Valentines

Wanted to post this year's Valentine project before St. Patrick's day rolls around too...

L's latest thing is tic tac toe. And the song X's and O's. So there you have it. Ready made for a take on the tic tac toe Valentines idea.

I took advantage of my paints from my daily drawing challenge to brush out red and orange X's and O's and a red color wash for the game board background. A couple of dotted pen strokes and embellishments for the lettering and separator lines and I had my base for the card. I then scanned and assembled the design in Photoshop. Placed them four up on a page and printed them out double sided.

All that was left was to assemble the bags and sort out Hersey's Kisses and Hugs for the game pieces. That was L's job, which he loved.

A-mazing Valentines

 

 

In honor of Valentine's day, I'm digging back to last year's cards to kick things off. L was heavily into mazes. He plowed through every book we gave him and then he asked me to make new ones by hand. Usually while we are out to eat. So when I saw this idea floating around the internet, I knew we found our project.

I created a heart shape in Illustrator and then repeated the shape inside it to build the maze channels. I placed it four up on a letter sized page each with a different path. To do so, I began cutting out openings and creating blocks with additional lines unique to each of the four.

I selected different shades of red, pink and orange paper to form the backdrop of the cards and to cut down on ink. Once all the cards were cut to quarter of a page, two slits were made with an X-acto to hold the pencils to the cards. I found some cool two-sided pencils at a local art shop, which I thought made it even more fun. 

These were fairly quick to make. The most time consuming part was creating the artwork for the cards at only about 1.5hr. Then copying and cutting only took another 1hr with the little guy's help. He was so excited to craft his Valentine's cards.

Valentine's past

 

So...I've been a bit absent lately. I had hoped to kick off the new year with great gusto on the blog but here it is almost the end of February and here I am. I thought I'd catch up with some of my recent craft/design projects that have been keeping me busy and happy in my free time.

First off, Valentine's Day! You've got to love all the great ideas being pinned lately. My little guy has been running around retelling the "Orange you glad I didn't say banana again" knock knock joke for months. So this idea seemed to fit just great.  He also woke up one Saturday morning saying he wanted to make hearts for the treat bags. About 100+ hearts later we were good to go. That coupled with orange slices and a custom label and we had our valentine's set.

Color Palette: Warm Autumn Sky

These pinks, golds and grays remind me of the warm, slightly wild evening skies we've had lately. I loved playing with the overlapping transparent hues.

Color Palette: aristokitten

Inspired by the Aristocrats DVD looping in our house all weekend, these color palettes are taken from two of the kittens in the remastered movie. Which by the way, also has great vintage typography and animation.

Color palette: Poppin poppies

I can never get over how vibrant poppies are. I got to see so many of them today on a walk through the neighborhood. Some of the flowers too saturated with color to even capture them realistically. Most of the red ones were almost fluorescent. These are two of my favorites. The vibrant oranges with their dark warm centers and the super delicate pinks that seem so fragile but yet hold themselves up proudly.