Freebie Friday - Holiday Inspired Paper Textures

Happy Friday!

Today's textures were inspired by the holiday season that is upon us and were made with gift wrap paper, stationary paper, and some gold and silver spray paint. Hope you enjoy!

(The bottom three textures are all the same design, but different colours. I added all three, cause 'why not?' )

As always, feel free to use these resources for personal or professional projects but please:

Do not claim the original resource images as your own,
Do not redistribute commercially. Basically, don't save and sell the resources as your own, but by all means do share the link to this page with others. :)
Do not use these textures as a base to create your own stock art/resources.

And, as always, please feel free to share anything you've made with these resources with me. I'd love to have a look! =)

Previous Freebie Friday posts:

Speckled & Stamped Paper
Animal Print Textiles
Sweater Season Textures
Subtle Fabric Textures
Paper Textures 1
Paper Textures 2
Stained Coffee Textures
Layered Lace Textile Textures
Colourful + Abstract Textile Textures
Branches, Berries and Blossoms
Blue Pattern Textile Textures
Black and White Textiles (part 3)
Black and White Textiles (part 2)
Black and White Textiles (part 1)
Coffee Stained Paper
Fanciful Florals
Fanciful Florals 2
Fanciful Florals 3 
Vintage Inspired
Green Textiles
Red Textiles
Denim Textile Textures

Have a great weekend!

Freebie Friday - Speckled and Stamped Paper Textures

Hello and Happy Holidays!

Sorry I haven't posted any new texture packs last month. I'm afraid time ran away from me. To make up for that, however, I'll be posting two new texture sets this month. One today, and one next week!

Today's set is a result of my playing around with rubber letter stamps and gel pens. Hope you'll find them fun and useful! =)

As always, feel free to use these resources for personal or professional projects but please:

Do not claim the original resource images as your own,
Do not redistribute commercially. Basically, don't save and sell the resources as your own, but by all means do share the link to this page with others. :)
Do not use these textures as a base to create your own stock art/resources.

And, as always, please feel free to share anything you've made with these resources with me. I'd love to have a look! =)

Previous Freebie Friday posts:

Animal Print Textiles
Sweater Season Textures
Subtle Fabric Textures
Paper Textures 1
Paper Textures 2
Stained Coffee Textures
Layered Lace Textile Textures
Colourful + Abstract Textile Textures
Branches, Berries and Blossoms
Blue Pattern Textile Textures
Black and White Textiles (part 3)
Black and White Textiles (part 2)
Black and White Textiles (part 1)
Coffee Stained Paper
Fanciful Florals
Fanciful Florals 2
Fanciful Florals 3 
Vintage Inspired
Green Textiles
Red Textiles
Denim Textile Textures

Have a great weekend!

Freebie Friday - Stained Coffee Textures

Happy Friday!

Today I have an extra large texture pack to share with you - 11 pieces of coffee colored paper stained with various things found at home. Sort of the opposite idea than the "Coffee Stains Textures". Here, there are stains created with salt, alcohol, lemon juice, candle wax, and some letter stamps with an "M" or a "W" hand stamp I've found bargain hunting. These textures were really fun to make and now my studio smells like coffee and ink! Enjoy and use wisely!

 
Feel free to use these resources for personal or professional projects but please:

Do not claim the original resource images as your own,
Do not redistribute commercially. Basically, don't save and sell the resources as your own, but by all means do share the link to this page with others. :)
Do not use these textures as a base to create your own stock art/resources.

And, as always, please feel free to share anything you've made with these resources with me. I'd love to have a look! =)

Previous Freebie Friday posts:

Freebie Friday - Layered Lace Textile Textures
Colourful + Abstract Textile Textures
Branches, Berries and Blossoms
Blue Pattern Textile Textures
Black and White Textiles (part 3)
Black and White Textiles (part 2)
Black and White Textiles (part 1)
Coffee Stained Paper
Fanciful Florals
Vintage Inspired
Green
Red
Denim

Enjoy May everyone!

Mail Me Maybe?

Happy Friday!

Apologies for not posting for a few weeks. No, Free Textures Friday hasn't been cancelled. I just had to pause it for a little while due to the need to focus on a few other projects first. It shall resume next Friday and the theme will be "diverse denim".

Kay, but today I'll show you a few process steps for my latest little illustration I call "Mail Me Maybe?"

One of my fellow illustrators - Patrick Wong {his site here}- told me about this show happening in New York at the A.I.R. Gallery which I couldn't help but want to submit something into. The show is called "Wish You Were Here 12" and here's a little bit about it from their website:

Artists & Friends of A.I.R. Gallery:
We invite you to participate in our yearly benefit postcard show:
Wish You Were Here 12: June 27 - July 21, 2013 Reception: Thursday, June 27th, 6 - 8:30 pm
Last year's exhibit featured work by over 400 artists from as far afield as Australia and Guyana. This year we hope you will join us in our mission to provide leadership and community to women in the arts by exhibiting your work in Wish You Were Here 12. Artists of all mediums including writers and musicians are encouraged to donate.
**All the proceeds of this exhibition help fund our programs, including our Fellowship Program for under-represented and emerging women artists.

I got to work as soon as I could, though not without technical difficulties which derailed me a little. I roughly knew what I wanted to do right away so I just threw down some quick compositional thumbs to help me decide whether I wanted to work horizontally or vertically:

thumbs

My plan was to illustrate the endangered Scissor-Tailed Hummingbird (Hylonympha macrocerca), since I wasn't able to incorporate him into my Mail Me Art 3 piece along with the other endagered little guys. And to go with the whole post card/wish you were here theme, I was going to incorporate some envelopes into the piece as well.
So I got some paper, penciled and inked him. But then I discovered that the paper didn't like the ink too well and that it would erase along with the pencil...

inks 1.0

Instead of starting over entirely - I scanned what I had in and printed it on some thicker bristol paper I normally use. I printed the inks at around 20% though, so that I could re-ink on top and change it up a little. Eventually it looked something like this:

inks 2.0

 And then I coloured it with my usual mix of coloured waterproof inks, watercolour, and gouache and it was done! 

finished

I'm sad to say that it all came together a bit last minute and I mailed it out yesterday, but hopefully it will arrive safely in time, before the due date of June 7th!
 
Bristol Smooth Paper
Size: 4 x 6"
Media: microns, waterproof inks, watercolour paints, and gouache

Have a good weekend! And send someone a postcard or a card! They'll be so surprised! It will be awesome:)

Alphabet + Frivoli-Tea

This week's Decorative Illustration Project!
Our theme was illustrated typography and for the first part of the project we were to invent/illustrate our own alphabet. Mine was on things, mostly kitchen things, that are used to hold or deal with liquids:

Media:
`micron pens
`waterproof colour inks
`assembled digitally in Photoshop

And for the 2nd part of the project we were to illustrated an onomatopoeia word or a play on words of sorts. I chose to illustrate "Frivolity" which I turned into - "Frivoli-TEA". And I absolutely feel a series coming out of this pun. =)

This is the original version

But then I also decided to create my own hand drawn background pattern...

And I actually colorized it in Photoshop to be more of a light blue colour and put it behind my image=)

Materials:
`9 x 11 Bristol Smooth Paper
`Prismacolor pens
`Micron pens
`Koh-i-Noor waterproof colour inks

Oh, and now I'm also on letterplayground.com! A great place for illustrated letters and inspiration=)

Happy Thursday!