Made with Love: Or What That Means, Exactly

So if you’ve been any­where within a ten-mile radius of me any­time in the last week and a half, you’re prob­ably well aware of The Big Card Project. I took it upon myself to design a set of six macabre Valen­tines, thinking it’d be a a fun little project that’d get me away from the com­puter, make me feel more cre­ative, and force me to relax a touch.

Thumb­nail sketches. This is how things started. I hate showing people my sketch­book because things invari­ably look like they were drawn by a blind five-year-old. Basi­cally, I’m just trying to get the com­po­si­tion right.

Of course, I forgot to factor in the fact that I’m a crazy worka­holic per­fec­tionist with an insom­niac streak a mile wide when­ever I get really pas­sionate about a project. My little lark of a project kept me up late, made an utter war­zone of my apart­ment, and still took far longer than I’d anticipated.

I made this card last year and still had the sketch in my book. I think that was done in pig­ment liner and water­colour, and was severely lacking in cal­lig­raphy and mass-production capabilities.

How­ever, it did suc­ceed in teaching me to use my dig­ital camera more effec­tively, so I’m grateful for that. I took a lot of photos along the way, mostly because I became highly para­noid about com­mit­ting to ink and mucking things up, and I thought it’d be inter­esting to share a bit of the process that’s involved.

Ini­tial line draw­ings. I marked off an active “image area” space using my health card as a ruler so as to keep the illus­tra­tions roughly the same size.

I started by drawing “proper” ver­sions of each illus­tra­tion on this lovely smooth square bristol board. I’m anal-retentive, so I tend to prefer mechan­ical pen­cils (they’re also easier to find at the gro­cery store when you run out, although they typ­i­cally stock a .7 lead and I like a .5 better).

Here’s my room­mate mod­eling her best “hungry arms” for me. I had her do a few dif­ferent posi­tions. You can tell how impressed she is about it.

I’m always sur­prised when drawing things by what I don’t know. Like “what an astro­naut breathes from”, for example. Or how long the optic nerve is. This was an awe­some lesson in anatomy, although I’m still not quite sure I got every­thing right.

My cal­lig­raphy tests for the cap­tions. I can’t do cal­lig­raphy without graph paper, so I ended up devel­oping a style of let­tering for each phrase, then re-inking it a few times on a clean sheet, scan­ning the sheet, and selecting the best one.

After devel­oping line draw­ings I was quite happy with, I became par­a­lyzed with fear that I’d screw them up in the inking process and would need to start all over again. I real­ized this was insane, but appeased myself tem­porarily by working on the cal­lig­raphy designs instead. My calligraphy’s still a little ques­tion­able, but I’m starting to get the hang of it, and it’s more inter­esting than my (slightly bizarre) handwriting.

No turning back now! Line draw­ings, all done in ink. I refused to use a ruler and was quite tired, so you can see where I screwed up, espe­cially with the lines of the cage.

That dealt with, it was time to commit to the draw­ings, and start inking! I like using a proper dip pen, but that’d be too messy, so I used a 0.1 pig­ment liner instead. These are lovely crea­tures and I absolutely adore them–it took me a little time to find a good pen that wouldn’t smudge when erasing or inking over top. The inking process took FOREVER and gave me insane hand cramps.

Yep, I’m anal reten­tive enough to shade first in pencil. I might actu­ally like them best at this stage.

Since I still was suf­fering a fear of com­mit­ment, I sketched out all the shading in pencil prior to inking the lines again. In some cases (the ball-shapes in par­tic­ular) this actu­ally helped quite a good deal, as cross-hatching in ink isn’t exactly the most for­giving method of shading.

More arduous work that took for­ever and nearly made me blind. I have strange depth per­cep­tion issues anyway, so I typ­i­cally work with my face about two inches from what­ever I’m doing.

After that, I inked the lines with a pig­ment liner slightly smaller than the out­line liner. I really wish I could find a liner smaller than .05, although I sus­pect that they don’t make one, and I should have just made these illus­tra­tions larger, then scaled down from a thicker pri­mary pen.

Adding the red accents. I used pure red ink and it gave a lovely hue, espe­cially when laid over the shaded lines. I’d orig­i­nally planned to use a much lighter wash, and pos­sibly use some other colours, but then I liked the red so much (sur­prise!) that I decided to keep it.

I think it was at about this point that I started saying “I’m nearly done!”, which prob­ably went on for another two days until I actu­ally WAS done. Even painting in the red was an arduous process, and I tried really hard to ensure that there was a good bal­ance of colour in each. (This is why the little can­nibal girl is a red­head, and not because I’m a raging narcissist.)

At this point, I thought I was done. Wrong.

Next, I scanned all the final illus­tra­tions and cal­ligraphed cap­tions into Pho­to­shop at gigantic res­o­lu­tions, in case I ever need to make a gorey bill­board, I guess. I cleaned up major messes only, since I had doing tedious Pho­to­shop masking work, pieced every­thing together, and printed it out. I also made a design for the back of the card involving a little cal­lig­raphy and a little handwriting.

Mis­takes often create really lovely things, unex­pected and impos­sible to reproduce.

My last step was to create a full set of cards, prop­erly printed on my card­stock. This was, by far, the most arduous and painful task of the entire oper­a­tion. (My laser printer is a beast. It weighs about as much as I do; people think it’s a high-tech humid­i­fier, and it sounds like a jet plane taking off.) I ended up crying and yelling at my printer for about three hours, sur­rounded by an utter MESS of half-printed papers and falling-over cards. It wasn’t pretty, but I even­tu­ally (sort of) fig­ured it out.

I’m excited to learn to screen­print instead of wran­gling with this beast, but my work­shop isn’t ’til early Feb­ruary, so the timing wasn’t quite right.

Finally! Finals.

And in the end–was all the effort worth it?

Of course it was! I ended up learning SO much, and, while I gen­uinely doubt I’ll make ANY money what­so­ever selling them (the profit mar­gins seem pretty low) the expe­ri­ence of selling them will give me an oppor­tu­nity to learn a little about retail busi­ness, which I haven’t dealt much with since becoming a designer.

And now I can send out delightful cards to all my friends and enemies!

They come on white or ecru stock, with a blood-red enve­lope and a hand-painted heart sticker to close the whole she-bang. I am a sucker for pretty packaging.

(PS, if you like them, you can see more on my web­site here, or pur­chase them at my new Etsy store. I’ll also be selling them at the Har­bour­side Market in Dart­mouth Feb­ruary 6^th and 7^th.)

Tags: balance, design, handmade, illustration, process, projects