2019 Bags

Tomorrow we depart for the yearly trip to the Redwoods. I'm still carrying on a family tradition from my Grandmother, who made little "treat bags" for all of us grand kids for long car drives. Last year's bags (and links to previous years) here. This year I didn't make designs totally from scratch, but I did do custom tweaks to existing designs.

For Isabel, I took the firefly luciferin molecules, made them very small, and in an aqua-violet color scheme. For Emmett, I tweaked the colors of the Norse eagle/hawk to be more blue/cool (in a color temperature sense, not a hipness sense). For Bruce, I took the geology design and removed everything but the volcanoes and colored it orange. For James, I tweaked the rhinos to be more green. And for Eddie, the large-scale alphabet design, scaled down and turned red.

Cat tree

For the "cats" theme, my spouse suggested a repeat of cat towers, so I drew that and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out:



This was fun to draw! It actually did pretty well, ending up in the top 100. My favorite was the colorful cats in boxes.

Dinosaur skulls

So to follow up last week's dogs, for the "dinosaur" theme I did t-rex skulls using the same set of colors.



 

The colors don't work nearly as well with negative space in between! I'm pretty happy with how the lineart turned out, though. My favorite was the painted parasaurolophuses. 

"Dog days" best finish so far

For the "dog days" contest, I did a little scallop of upturned dog noses.



The colors are inspired by this image.

This actually got 38th place! Since it made it into the top 50, they set it for sale without me having to proof it. Pretty cool!

My favorite entry was this damask with hounds.

Next batch of designs

For the "paint by number" contest, I used the paint-by-number roses I made for Maren's quilt, with bolder colors.



My favorite was the heron woods.

For "vintage postcards," I did the BACKS of postcards.



My favorite was the Hawaiian themed cards.

Then we had a theme to do an animal portrait that would fit on a tea towel. I thought it would be funny to do a tribute to the inescapable "Baby Shark" song, but in the style of those really old-fashioned portraits with the baby in a big, lacy white dress. So that was fun! I wanted to add more detail to the frame, to make it look like a carved wood frame, but ran out of time.



Next the challenge was to do a print that would work for boys' clothing. I adapted the orange doodle design I did of a bunch of Bruce's favorite stuff and did it in color instead.



My favorite was the bugs on stripes.

Lastly, another restricted palette contest where we had to use bronze, peach, and light & dark teal (and optionally black and white). I based my design on this image and added some mysterious symbols.



I thought the ginkgo best used these colors.

Of all these entries, the boys' clothing doodle did by far the best!

Fitness

For the "fitness" contest, instead of a repeating design I made a poster-type layout of that 7 minute workout that was going around awhile back.



My favorite entry was the one about kinesio tape.

Related to fitness news, we recently bought Fitness Boxing for the Switch and have been having fun with it. James has fun following along when Bruce is doing the punches.

🎶Guess who got a Cricut 🎶

My combined birthday/Mother's Day present from Zack and the boys is a Cricut! I haven't had a chance to do too much with it yet but I did a few small things to try it out.

I did a few of the free included projects they have online - a beetle greeting card and some page-corner bookmarks.

Then I used some of the free elements and composed them myself to make little banners for each of the kids. (You can see that James crinkled his a bit before I could get a picture!)