Purple Pony Art Blog

I've been wanting to enter the Twitter Art Exhibit for years now. It always passed me by, but I was on it for 2023! The physical exhibit and sale is followed by a virtual exhibit and sale and this year all proceeds go to UNYA, or Urban Native Youth Association in British Columbia.

Each 5x7" original piece of art is $37.50US and you can browse the remaining cards for sale on the Twitter Art Exhibit website.

I created a paper silhouette of a horse called "Keep Moving". If you're unfamiliar with my silhouettes, I draw on one side and cut away paper until the silhouette remains. It's harder than it looks :-D I think next year I'll do a traditional drawing or painting because I'm unsure a silhouette translates well into an online sale since it's a niche art form.

Do take a look and pick up some nice art for yourself or a friend! The sale ends July 24 and right now if you buy four cards, you can get one free!

It's always amazing how long it takes me to get something to market - mostly because I still have a full time job that needs attention. In 2016, I drew these cute little ponies for Christmas cards. I scanned them before cutting them up, knowing that I would fix them up at a later date. The hand drawn look is quite charming, after all! To save time, I whipped up the line art on my computer and printed them out on a sheet of cardstock. I coloured a wide variety of horse coat colours.


Recently, I had the time to sit down and clean up the pictures so I could offer them as clip art on Creative Market and Etsy. Usually clean up involves removing dust and scratch, little spots and fixing up stray lines or the eyes. As I zoomed in on the horses, I discovered yellow dots. All. Over. The. Place. Ugh!!! Suddenly having to do clean up was seriously time consuming! What had happened?

Well, it turns out that some home printers have anti-counterfeiting and tracking capabilities called machine identification code. So yes, your printer could be spying on you.

Sometimes failure presents an opportunity. It would be far easier to retrace the images in CorelDraw and make flat clip art than clean up all the dots. So the cute little hand drawn ponies morphed! In the end it was a better idea as I could offer more colours in the clip art package.





Many people think success is a straight line, but it's not. It's more of a curvy path where you wander in circles until you get to your destination :-D

The pony clip art will be perfect for anything pony related - there's 72 images in CMYK and RGB JPG along with PNGs in the package. I'm going to make stickers out of them and maybe magnets too! Of course, you can buy the package for personal use on Etsy or licence the commercial rights through Creative Market.

One of the problems with crafting and making is that you can spend so much time assembling. I haven't drawn anything in quite some time - I was sick in January and February was kind of wrecky for me. But, as I hurtle along towards another turn in the artist alley at the comic expo, I did end up drawing an Animal Crossing character, Winnie. I expect I will whip out a few more pretty soon!

ACNL Winnie by calzephyr on DeviantArt

Whew, I am always moving at the speed of life! Here is an 8.5x11" papercut that I did earlier in the month. It was inspired by a friend who reshares a lot of feathered horses on Facebook! Adding some horses within a horse made for a more interesting picture than just pinto coloured. It's for sale on Etsy too!

I turned my 2003 holiday horse into a colouring page! You can download it for free from my website. You will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to open and print it. Have fun!

It's been forever since I took a horse photo, and I was not ready at all when these guys came by. We were at Heritage Park for the quilt festival and it was packed! It was really difficult to get good photos, but it was still a gorgeous place to spend a Saturday. See more pictures on Flickr.




DevArt ::: Etsy ::: Flickr ::: Zazzle ::: Purple-Pony.com

Finished just in the nick of time! I really missed doing a Christmas horse, and I'm just so pleased with how it turned out. Happy holidays peeps!

Christmas Horse 2013, a photo by Calzephyr on Flickr.

So, I had been very good at keeping my New Year's Resolution, but - I have to confess - after just over four months, I broke it. But, dear reader, I did so unwillingly and joylessly. I swear!

My rapid prototyping teacher, Cam, wrangled a deal with the local polytechnic, SAIT, to 3D print objects on their big fancy Fortus machine back in March. I decided to make a pin, as rendered below, in copper finish.





Cam suggested that adding the pin hardware on the back would be a great use of real world application, so I researched double stem pinbacks and designed one. Then the TA, Stephanie, had an easier idea - add some pegs onto the back that would fit a pinback. I could attach the pinback by using a heat gun to melt the pegs. Just one problem...I could not find a pinback around the house. I looked through every inch of stash and had to face the awful truth. There really isn't any other place to buy craft supplies except maybe a dollar store or a Wal-Mart. It's been at least ten years since both Lewiscraft and Crafts Canada closed down; I miss both. I would have to go to Michaels.

I made peace with the decision and bravely walked through those automtic double doors, inhaling the store's strange and long forgotten perfume (seriously, all the stores smell the same). I made a beeline for jewellery supplies, found the gold pinbacks, breezed through the scrapbooking supplies (just to see what was new) and headed for the checkout with just the pinbacks. I was gripped by anxiety; it seemed like everything was on sale! But I held firm and let out a sigh of relief when I stepped outside.

Time passed...and then the big day came, when Stephanie walked into class with a box of our pieces, all carefully wrapped in paper towels:





The best project was a ball bearing sort of bracelet that had free moving parts and something that looked like a Kinder Egg toy with gears. All the pieces were fragile, however. SAIT provided the invoice and my pin cost $1.77 to make. My piece was the flattest and it still had a slightly tiered look. The scaling went awry on one person's project and her bracelet ended up being teeny tiny instead of wearable. The pin back didn't fit on mine - I think there was a slight scaling problem too, so breaking my New Year's Resolution was all for naught! Still quite pleased with it though. Now I can send the file away to a place like Shapeways and have them make it in plastic or metal.

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.

If there's any model horse collectors on my f-list, I think you'll recognize this guy :-) If not, click to read about this swap.




September 6, 2010 ::: Prismacolor Marker ::: 2.5x3.5"