Monday 19 October 2009

A Bit of a 180.

Soooooooooo, I put all my dancing ladies together and at first I was pretty happy with the result. I knew I'd have to tweak the text a fair bit, but in general I was pleased. Then I printed out the rough at 100%.

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Eeek. It was WAY too busy for the small size of the card.

OK, I said, I just need to alter the idea so there's not so much going on. How about this?

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I ummed and ahhhed a lot about this. A LOT. I was in a pretty bad mood for most of Saturday. Boyfriend can attest to that. (Sorry again, by the way.) I decided to sleep on it, picked it up again Sunday afternoon and knew it was just wrong. Again, too much detail for such a small card.

So then I was faced with the conundrum: what the bloody hell do I do now?!

I felt bad about abandoning this idea. I liked where it was going, it's simply that the Christmas card size is fairly small. If it were one of my usual large-size postcards I was making then I don't think it would be such an issue. I like my dancing ladies a lot, so I'll use them for something else. Maybe some kind of poster, or a new set of screenprints. There's no such thing as wasted work.

So, anyway, I scribbled about a bit yesterday and came up with a new, simple idea that is much easier to execute. So easy, in fact, that I did the whole thing today. It's been uploaded to Vistaprint and should be with me within 14 days. Here's just a sneaky peek:

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I manage to experiment a little with it, too, which I'm quite glad about. Although you can't really see it in this small section, I've only used colours from within PhotoShop, not any scanned textures. The sky is painted, but that's the only "real" colour. I used a paint brush to ink the outlines, and I've removed some of them in places to give it a kind of retro/screenprint feel. I'm so glad it's done now. It was beginning to stress me out and I really wanted to get it done before packing everything up for moving, especially as after this Saturday I won't have my working table. What a weight off, though! Now I can go pack without worrying I'm going to box up some paints or something that I'm going to suddenly need!

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