Failed Commercial Work

School is over for the term and due to me moving to another state and waiting to gain residency, it is going to be  little bit before I go back. Which is fine by me!

About a month (or 2 or 3 months?) ago I met with a lady who needed an illustrator to design some pictures for her children book. I met with her and she showed me one picture that she had for the project. She didn't give me much direction to go with my art, so I made some line drawings. Then I took one of them and painted it in a bunch of different ways. After I sent them back to her, she never responded. After waiting a couple of days, I tried some more, but no response. Then about 2 weeks after I first emailed them back to her, my friend who new the lady, told me she didn't like them.

So here they are for you!

It would have been fun to do my first commission, but I wasn't too worried about not getting it. I feel that she might have not been ready to move forward with the project yet, so she just backed out. Or maybe she just really didn't like my art.

Business Card

It's official, I am now for hire. Now that I have my newly designed business cards, I am ready to do business. I didn't think that I would need a business card so soon, but my boss has been talking me up to an acquaintance of hers that deals with publishing. She asked for my card, so I made one up. I didn't want to pay for 250 business cards, that were double-sided and full color, because the cheapest place in town was $40, and vistaprint would still be about $17-20. I decided to do it the old fashioned way, and print it out on nice cardstock at FedEx Printing just a couple blocks away. The end result looks awesome, but it took a little bit of trial and error though.

Here are a couple of unused designs that I came up with, but decided not to use.

 Pencil sketched in ArtRage with rotated and transformed stencils for the blocks of color, I really like the feel of this one with the construction lines beneath.

 The finished product in a couple different examples. Done in Inkscape (which is an awesome free program. Very powerful) I decided it was too heavy though and scrapped it.

Pretty much the final design. After my first printing though, I decided to enlarge my phone number and email to make it more legible.

After the first printing I learned a couple of things that I hadn't thought of. First, printers can't print white, so anything white will show up as the color of the paper being used. That is what I did for my final card. I picked a paper that was tan like my design and printed on that. Second, I saved my images as 8.5 x 11, but I forgot that printers needed around a 1/8-1/4 margins around the absolute edges. So, my first print was automatically scaled down a little bit to fit into the printable area. For my next printing I exported my image at like 10.6 x 8.2 so that it didn't get scaled down.

 Here is the full-sized sheet that went to the printer.

Then I also realized I needed a backside, which wasn't too much trouble to do. Here is my first design.

Here is the full-sized sheet that was used. There was a lot of variation in this design but unfortunately, I didn't save jpgs of all of the variations.

Finally, here is some photos of my card in all of its glory. I then got out my ruler and my exacto knife and sliced them into perfect rectangles.

Overall, it cost less than $2, which is right up my alley. $0.53 per side plus $0.12 per piece of cardstock.