Endings, Beginnings, and Old Memories

On top of the freelance work I've been doing, I have been working on other side projects for the various events that have occurred over the last few months. Here are a few of 'em:

This is a gift for the daughter of an old family friend who died back in May. Since the family is fairly religious, my mom thought a cross was an appropriate commemorative gift. Of the ones she found she liked this one best, but hated the paint job (I don't have a 'before' picture, but it looked pretty poopy -- literally). My job was to repaint it to make it look like a relic and give it more 'character' to better reflect the personality of our late friend.

The daughter of the family that used to like next door graduated from high school this year, so my family's gift to her was a 'College Survival Kit'. Along with a plethora of practical items (i.e. tools and other things that come in really handy, but no one wants to give as a gift because they aren't too exciting), we included this Piggy Bank, hand-painted by yours truly, as a place to keep her laundry quarters. The pig is muddy because he needs to be washed...just like you wash dirty laundry. Eh? EH? OK, fine. All of my jokes aren't winners.

Later in July, my aunt is taking great-uncle on an honor flight to DC for surviving veterans. The program suggests that family members send in cards and letters, so my mom wanted my help in making him a card that is special and unique to him. She picked the picture (it's of him and my grandmother) and the quote, and I incorporated each into design of the card. I wanted it to look like an aged journal, and used some textures from this site to help create that effect (it's an amazing resource for textures, I highly recommend checking it out). Here's a look at the inside:

I'm gonna try and post sketches and stuff more regularly ANNND I have a few cool projects coming up soon I wanna share with you guys, so keep your eyes peeled for some new stuff. My end-of-summer goal is to have my website revamp done, so hopefully I'll have something to show on that in the near future too. 

Super Post III -- Christmas in March

I was consolidating/deleting some files on my desktop when I found a folder containing a bunch of images I meant to post to the blog a while back. Since they are all gifts I made to give to people for Christmas, I decided to make it into another big fat super post!

It's become a yearly tradition for my mom to brew some variety of alcohol to give as gifts during the holidays. This year, she wanted the bottle to look a little more 'professional', so I designed a wine label using an updated version of the one I did for Vargo's class. For those of you who are wondering, 'Trois Amis' is French for 'Three Friends'. At least that's what my mom said. I have a limited knowledge of French (a.k.a. none whatsoever).

To further develop the sewing skills I discovered last year, I decided I wanted to try my hand at making hand-sewn ornaments. The moose was for my mom (she's crazy about moose) and the owl was for my good friend. Funny story: the design of the owl is actually based off of one of the designs I created for my application for the internship at Carter's. The difference is that this time, the recipient actually liked it.

Before my sister moved to California, she adopted a kitten from a litter one of her neighbors abandoned. For her gift, I decided to make something she could give to Florence (her kitten), so I made a handmade catnip-filled dead animal toy. My original idea was to make a set -- a bird, a fish, and a mouse -- but I ran out of time. Maybe next year!

When trying to figure out a gift for another one of my friends, I remembered how taken she was with Lizard Wizard, one of the abandoned toys in the Toy Story short that proceeded The Muppets. What's significant about this drawing is that I used markers over top of my rough pencil sketch, and then added stronger values with colored pencil. I didn't do any ink outlining -- which you all know I am so prone to do. You can scrape your jaws off the floor now.

In addition to moose, my mom has always been an avid collector of nutcrackers. So every Christmas, my sister and I make a custom nutcracker to add to her collection. This year, we decided to do a matched pair -- a tamborine player and a trumpet player that were supposed to be Salvation Army workers...but we lost the Salvation Army scarf and badge accessories, so we decided to made them into a police band. My sister knit mini-scarves for them to replace the ones we lost.

...And that's what kept me busy during the holidays. I'm currently working on some more projects now, so expect some updates in the near future!