In lieu of an apology....

... I have been silent for a looooong time, and I owe at least one post to the "Shop Swap & Blog" organized by Pattie of Structured Chaos. Bad, bad blogger !

But look I managed to take a picture of my creative space ! Which, in turn, means there IS such a thing as a creative space, that is, something else than milk bottles, feeding times, diapers and falling into bed whenever the kid sleeps.... I can barely believe it.
Theses are the cards I had printed for Christmas and that I've started putting online on Etsy. It's a first batch, so I only did 25 of them and I'll see which designs work best. Actually, 10 of them are already taken (I just don't know exactly which ones), so grab some quick if you want them !

If you'd like to peek into other artists' creative spaces, check out Kootoyoo's blog !

New stuff ! Exciting ! Yay !!!

The title about sums up how I feel about the new line we're currently introducing in our shop. Yeah, I'm *that* excited about it. We have kid's birthday invitation and birth announcements lined up right now, with more to come and wedding invitations to be added.

Ever since I started working on our own wedding invitations, I got addicted to designing those. I'm very happy that the next month will provide me an opportunity to design another - a birth announcement -, but I have to many ideas to just narrow it down to one. So here it is, the new Serpentaires line of customized, print-your-own wedding and children stationery !

We dedided to go the print-your-own route as this is the greenest way in terms of shipping and also the most cost effective we can offer to our customers. Of course we are very, very much interested in any form of custom work in this line. Not just mere personalisation of an existing design, we'd be thrilled to work on a design from scratch following a client's desires !
The first ones will be in similar soft watercolor tone, but we have many more ideas. Stay tuned for more, including work by Lady Fi !

Silly me !

While sketching and coloring, I'm also working on putting a third trial run tarot deck together. I worked on it some yesterday - well today - let's just say : last time I was awake before now. Then I let it dry overnight and went to bed like a good girl. Or so was the plan.
I made the mistake to go have a look at it during the night, to discover that it had gone awry. The wallpaper was getting wavy and all. After that, I unsuccessfully tried to get back to sleep, but my mind was just running in circles, I kept thinking about how to best fix this mess and other options to make that deck. So I got up again.
I *think* I am going to keep working with the current method. Half of deck #3 is now drying between stacks of books. Here's hoping it still looks okay in the morning.
Silly me although thought I had to go buy fixative. Turns out I already did last time I went supplies shopping !
Now I'm trying to get back to sleep, I need it, but I'll leave you with a little previwe of my "Enchanted Forest" sketch.

En parallèle avec mon travail de dessin, je fais des essais pour la troisième version d'essai du jeu de tarot. J'y ai bossé un peu hier - enfin aujourdhui - disons : la dernière fois que j'ai été réveillée avant maintenant. Puis je l'ai laissé à sécher pour la nuit et suis gentiment aller me coucher. Enfin c'était le plan. J'ai commis l'erreur d'y jeter un oeil quand je me suis relevée cette nuit, pour constater que ça n'allait pas du tout. La tapisserie se mettait à faire des vagues, ack ! J'ai bien tenté de me rendormir après ça, mais impossible, mon cerveau surchauffait à se demander comment réparer ça et s'il n'y avait pas de meilleures solutions pour fabriquer le deck. Donc retour au bureau.
Je *pense* que je vais rester sur ma méthode actuelle. La moitié du deck numéro 3 est en train de sécher sous des piles de livres, en espérant qu'elle sera toujours présentable demain matin.
Ma petite tête de linotte était aussi persuadée de ne pas avoir de fixatif. Sauf qu'en fait j'en avais acheté lors de mon dernier passage chez Arteis !
Ce coup-ci, je vais essayer de retourner dormir, j'en ai besoin. Mais je vous laisse avec un petit aperçu du croquis pour "Forêt enchantée".

Faire-parts, faire-parts...

J'ai été soudainement réveillée ce matin par une idée amusante de faire-part de naissance. Non que ce soit d'actualité, mais je me suis précipitée sur un carnet pour noter le concept. Et comme je n'ai pas eu le temps de faire de vrais croquis qui ne ressemblent pas à des gélules, je vais poster un autre faire-part... celui de notre mariage ! Comme vous pouvez voir, il y a un un léger thème geek dans l'air...
I woek up today to a brand new birth announcement card concept, and had to jump out of bed to note it down. Of course, I haven't gotten to sketch anything more precise than a vague elongated shape over the course of the day, so in lieu of said card, I'll show you our wedding invitations. Yup, we're slightly nerdy.

Les enveloppes, en train d'être découpées. Heureusement, j'ai eu de l'aide, ce qui a sauvé ma main droite.
Cutting out the enveloppes. I'm thankfull for the help I got that saved my right hand.

Les invitations elles-mêmes, dans l'enveloppe, la première page, et l'intérieur.
The invitations themselves, in the enveloppe, first page and inside.

Et le coupon réponse, sous toutes ses coutures. Pas mal de gens ont refusé de nous le renvoyer, soit-disant qu'il serait trop mignon ! Je suis super contente du résultat, c'est un bel exemple de collaboration, entre votre servante au dessin, le geek domestique (aka le futur époux ) à l'édition du PDF et au lettrage, Lady Fi à la retouche d'images et son époux derrière l'imprimante. Oh, une petite erreur s'est glissée sur la première page du faire-part, elle a été rectifiée par la suite !
Then there's the answer card, all inside and out. I'm so so SO happy with the way the invitations turned out. They're the result of a great collaboration between myself (drawings), the Home Geek (assembling text and pictures and making the file for the enveloppes), Lady Fi (mad graphic editing skillz, she has dem) and her husband behind the printer. Oh, there was a tiny mistake on the first page of the inviation, it was corrected afterwards.

J'ai adoré travailler sur ce projet, et j'ai bien l'intention d'offrir quelques faire-parts originaux dans ma future production. J'en ai quelques uns en projet dans mes cartons, mais surtout, j'espère bien trouver des clients avec qui développer des concepts sympas !
I loved, loved, loved working on those, and I fully intend to offer some nifty wedding invitation sets in my future production. I have a few projects in the making, but above all I hope to find some clients interested in developping unique concepts.