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!