Purple Pony Art Blog

It's been hard to sit on this design, but I had immense fun making these Valentine's cards for a group card exchange. Each pony was hand coloured in different hues - pink, yellow, blue, purple, seafoam. Originally they were supposed to go on the outside, but I whoopsie measured. Still turned out great though!

For many years now, I haven't been good at sending Christmas cards. I think a few trickled out though. Over the holidays I made a lot of special cards for friends, and you'll be seeing more of them soon. Here's one for a budgie friend of mine:

I really enjoyed making the cards. Truly, my friends inspired me! Best of all, I didn't let thinking get in the way of doing. I just went with what I felt and didn't worry about being perfect. I would love to do a giant disco Muffin down the road.

In terms of 2014...well, for the Year of the Horse, I felt more like the horse was dragging me through the mud and gleefully running under trees instead of me riding it. Hopefully I don't get headbutted by the ram next month :-)

I just have to get this up with a January date stamp on it :-) For the second time, I have sent out New Year's cards instead of Christmas cards...mostly because I fail miserably at doing Christmas cards. I figure it's always nice to get something in the new year anyway. Now that I'm checking the blog archive, I realized I didn't post pictures of the 2012 cards. Gee! That's what I get for putting Muffin in charge of things. Here's what they looked like:



I have a Pazzles craft cutter, and after fiddling around with the text for about an hour, I found a font that I liked. The tricky part was cutting them out of the glitter cardstock. It took a while to find the right pressure - the cardstock was actually heavyweight cardboard and the chipboard setting was too light. But once that was done, it was just a little bit of glue before they were off to friends and family. If you have a Pazzles, I have posted the cutting file for sale on Artfire. Just $2 gets you cutting right away.

The pink one is the only one that was glittered on plain paper. Glittering took a surprising long time, so I quickly abandoned that. Not that the glitter cardstock was much better - glitter still got everywhere :-D Things were glittered for days afterwards.

So I did have the aforementioned crafty weekend last weekend. I made my entire inventory of pony cards for the fall season. As I get set to go back to school and practice for my road test, I'm worried I'll be scrambling to make stuff! My friends took my husband out and Muffin and I worked hard!

I took some pictures so that people can understand just how labour intensive a card can be. First, there's the ponies! The original pony card was made for my friend Noela Jewelry. I translated the pattern to my Pazzles craft cutter, but even that took some work perfecting as the software is fussy. Anyway, I cut a variety of bodies, manes, and tails.

Next comes drawing the eyes. Each eye is hand drawn and coloured with a fine marker. I use a dud pony as a template. It takes about a minute to draw each eye. Then I dot each one with a white Souffle marker to make it pop. Lastly, the manes and tails are glued on and decorated with Copic markers. By the time I got to the 30th pony, I was pretty worn out!



Once the ponies are assembled, I still need to assemble the cards. I cut 8.5x11" paper in half, then fold the halves, to make quarter fold cards. I use pastel colours because I like the way they show through the paper underneath. I print out a background, run it through the adhesive cartrige of my Xyron, and then stick it onto the cardstock. I could use white cardstock and just print the image, but full-bleed on scored cardstock is tricky for my printer.



I have a few designs - clouds, a rainbow and pasture.



But wait, there's more! The first batch of cards featured glitter stamped onto them. The glitter, while very fun, was very messy! I tried to move away from that with the second batch, but I didn't have an ink that was metallic enough. For this batch, I took a chance buying Tsukineko Brilliance metallic ink. It's really shimmery! The only thing I didn't like was that I found the little containers hard to open and I dropped them a few times :\



So 60 impressions later, the ponies are ready to go on the cards! It takes about 5-6 pieces of adhesive squares to secure on to a card. All the cards are blank inside, and some ponies get stickers on their rumps! Here are some of my favourites from this batch:



So far it seems like the most popular colour is white, which really surprised me. A few people have said to me, independently, that maybe it's because white is associated with unicorns. I dunno! We'll see what colour emerges the true winner after Christmas.

Somedays I don't think the average person realizes how much goes into designing something. Often it is the most simple design that takes the more work (it's easier to overdo it, trust me on that). Since I'm snowed in, I spent the day designing some new pansy cards.

Pansies are my most popular item. I should have named my company Purple Pansy Art instead, but I had no idea they would be so popular! I literally sit on a mountain of pansy photos as they are my favourite flower too. Not every photo is "card worthy" - the composition is off, there's flaws in the background, too much clean up is required - but they are usually still good references or good for something.

I carefully made some pansy faces into cut outs - pictures that have white backgrounds - touching up flaws in the petals made by insects. Then I played around with colour palettes until it felt right - a purple background with a damask like pattern, gray, white - the pansies would provide a little bit of yellow to kick it up.

In trying to create one design I ended up with two more. I am really happy with the first design, but after printing it out, I realized that the main image was too far down. What a difference half an inch makes! The original CorelDraw file was so object heavy (a mistake on my part) that grouping and moving everything back up seemed too fussy...so I simplified things down some more. The original design is for sale on Etsy while the simplified one is on Art Fire The third design has more of a gray box around the text...again, very simple, but effective.