Fun and personal cards

Here is the very first swing I ever took at graphic designing (don't worry...I promise I've gotten better)!  The nice thing about personalizing a card, though?  Unless your sister is a graphic designer herself, you really don't have to be skilled at all to make it a special gift.

You do, however, need a ripe amount of patience.  One October day in Vermont (probably, oh... 0.5 days before my sister's birthday), I spent almost two hours on my hands and knees rearranging and photographing bright fall leaves.  If you've never lived in Vermont, it's worth going some fall, just to get the brightest, prettiest leaves this side of anywhere.  If you have lived in Vermont, you can imagine just how long this took, given how windy the place is in October.

It's worth it, though!  If you photograph an entire alphabet, you've got a working set of letters you can use to spell out anything you want from then on!  I recommend compiling a few sets of these, overtime.  I have a fall set, a pebble set, a "funky" set spelled out with summer boat toys, and I'm hoping to put together a driftwood set next time I encounter some driftwood.  You can make an elegant theme or mix and match to create all sorts of different tones.

Here are a couple more examples:

 

With this last one, I collected most of these silly animal photos from the internet instead of using ones of my own (I haven't been this successful at catching animals in the middle of belting their hearts out).  These are fine to use for your own personal projects and for fun, but remember that they're probably copyrighted, so they cannot be used to make a profit!

Getting started

I am awful at remembering to send cards. 

A sampling from the last few months.

I love cards. I'm even pretty good at recognizing an important date once it lands upon me.  Unfortunately, at that point it’s usually way too late to play it off as "I just keep forgetting to get a stamp," or "I needed to look up your address," and it's just clear that I didn't get my shiz together for the birthday/holiday.

To save paper and to shake my identity as the only card-deficient member of the family, I began putting together digital birthday cards.  That’s where this all started.  As I became more familiar with the graphic designs I could make using low-tech options like Microsoft PowerPoint, I became more and more enthralled at the artistic world that opened up to me.  I don't have any background in art (I studied Geology, for goodness sake), but before long I was beginning to see the graphic designs around me not simply as pleasing images, but as sums of many different, surprisingly simple parts.  If I could recreate these parts through graphics, then maybe I, too, could be artistic!

Let us pause here and appreciate this concept, as I did when it first hit me:  me...artistic?  While I have a healthy imagination, my outlet for creativity has always been in the written, not visual arts.  The possibility that I could create physical pieces of prettiness.... that I could actually play an active role in a visual art, was super exciting!

This discovery came at a good time for me, too.  I recently transitioned from a trumbleweed-style life to a more stationary one, moving to Madison after a couple of years bouncing around the country (Pennsylvania-to-Vermont-to-other-place-in-Vermont-to-California??-to-maybe-other-place-in-California-wait-no-Wisconsin).  Given my roaming nature, I doubt this will be my last stop, but for now I'm relieved to be nestling into one place.  I've spent a lot of time in the last few years looking at "what's next, what's next," and I'm excited to spend some time focusing instead on what exactly I've becoming, while tumbleweeding about.  Including the fact that hey... I do graphic design, now, in my free time!  Maybe I should spend some time honing this!

Hi!  I’m Gwen, and I am a budding/wannabe graphic designer.  I’m hoping that a little blog action will be a fun way to get some of my projects out there for some feedback!  So for anyone out there with graphic design knowledge, with interest, or who are just also terrible at remembering to send cards, I'm looking to you!  Be nice, please... but tell me what you think!