making a baby shower invitation

It certainly feels like baby season at the moment. Lots of my friends are gearing themselves up for the arrival of their sweet little bundles which can mean only one thing- bring on the baby showers!

I loved being involved in my friend Mandy's shower and had so much fun making all kinds of baby shower decorations. So when my lovely friend Carla needed some help organising an invitation for her shower, I happily offered to try and make something using my fledgling photshop skills. She wanted to email the invitations which meant I only had to come up with something that would look good as an attached jpeg image.

Here is how it turned out: 

 baby shower invitation design

To get started, I first went to work looking for some cute baby themed clip art. Through Etsy I found an adorable digital clip art set called Lime Green Baby Fairy by little fairyland for just $5 US. So cute! There is so much to choose from on Etsy and you can buy the images so cheaply. There's no way I could draw things like this so I'm happy to pay for someone elses talents! (I know my limitations...)

With the clip art as the base for the design, I decided I'd like some sky and clouds to represent the background of the 'washing line'. For this I used a scalloped edge brush and a cartoon cloud brush. I love polka dots so I made a  dotty design using a tutorial from pugly pixel for the background of the text. Then I just added a couple more of the clip art images for some detail and added a border.

I am pretty happy with how it turned out for a first go. My friend liked it too which is great news! I think I'll try to use Photoshop to make her a banner to hang up at the shower too. We'll see.

I have really been loving experimenting with Photoshop and recommend it for tech savvy creative types. The possibilities are endless. I'd quite like to have a go at Illustrator too but I think that's a bit of a step up.

What should I make next?

xx

more fun with photoshop tutorials

Recently I have discovered Photoshop as a fun tool for designing and enhancing images. So far I have really enjoyed using it and learning new things. I am hoping to gain enough skills in using Photoshop to make my own branding and perhaps my own cards, gift tags and invitations. We'll see how far I get with it!

Yesterday I followed a fun tutorial from pshero for making frayed denim patches with stitches. I thought this would be a handy one to do as I think I'd like to incorporate stitches into my logo to suggest a 'handmade' sort of feel. Also, I love using denim in my projects because it's so versatile and goes with every colour. It also gives the backs of purses and bags some weight and stability.

Here is how it turned out:

Today, I decided to have another go at using the denim patch idea combined with a scalloped circle I downloaded from Pugly Pixel as part of my premium membership (costs only $5 for heaps of awesome things!).
I fiddled around with a few other things and came up with this:

While I wouldn't use this as a logo for Elegantpaws Designs, I quite like the scalloped circle with holes in it like a doily. I also like the stitching idea too.  Maybe I could try something like this but with polka dots... the possibilities are endless!

Since my skills are clearly fledgling though I think it's going to take some work to get to a place where I can make something that will a) suit my handmade things and b) live up to my expectations! I may never get there but i'm having fun, and if it means I have some ideas to give to a professional logo designer to work with (and make 100 times better) then that's a win too.

xx

Discovering Photoshop

Over the last couple of weeks I have started to think about branding for my future handmade business. I realised that in order to have a professional looking market stall I would probably need to have tags on my bags and purses, a poster or sign to put up, some business cards to hand out and perhaps somewhere for people to go if they would like to shop online.

To tie all this together I decided I needed a logo and some theming ideas. I had a good think about the kinds of things that represent me, my loves and my crafts and came up with some broad ideas to incorporate in some way, things like polka dots, cats, cute/kawaii things, vintage etc.

I looked into having a logo designed by a professional and unfortunately it was a little out of my price range at this point in time, so I decided to look into making one myself.

Enter the major epiphany that lo and behold, at my very fingertips resides a computer program to meet all the needs of an amaetur logo designer- Photoshop. My husband uses it almost daily for his photography and it occured to me if he can have multiple layers for photos, surely I could use it for patterns frames and text?

My ignorance of the power of Photoshop became apparent when I discovered an amazing website called Pugly Pixel. It's creator Katrina has to be one of the most generous, talented and quirky artists I have come across and her website hosts a huge collection of free (and premium) files of digital backgrounds, papers, tapes, ribbons and more for people to use on their blogs, websites and for arts and crafts. Amazing!

Katrina has also put together a series of tutorials showing you how to make your own backgrounds, borders and patterns using Photoshop. I had no previous experience using Photoshop and was able to follow the tutorials really easily. I'd recommend them for anyone who would like to make their own digital stationary to pretty up their blogs and websites. Fun!

After fiddling around with a few techniques I put some of them together to make something resembling a little business card. My husband fixed it up for me, flattened it and saved it as a jpeg so I can share it with you here:

first Photoshop baby

I don't think it is something I would use, but it was definitely fun to make and to play around with. Not bad for a first go! I'm pretty excited about learning some new skills and I think it could open up a whole range of possibilities.

I can't wait to learn more!
xx