My new design "Gilding the Lily" - please vote for me at Spoonflower!

Here is my latest design/illustration called "Gilding the Lily" - a title I think is self explanatory!
 I originally hand painted this in watercolour on paper and then scanned, cleaned and Photoshopped the files ready to be uploaded both to my Society6 and Spoonflower shops to make it available as iPad and iPhone cases, framed and stretched prints, tote bags, fabric, wallpaper and so much more.

Here are pictures of some of the items with links to purchase them below the images:

Indoor and outdoor pillows available with and without inserts HERE

Shower curtains available HERE

Women's and men's t's are available HERE in a plethora of colours.

 Kids t's are available HERE and Baby Onesies HERE

Allover printed tote bags HERE

Samsung Galaxy S4 and iPhone cases HERE

Mugs are HERE

Rugs are a brand new item at Society6 and they are available HERE

 

Stationery cards are HERE

For other items and designs in my Society6 shop please click HERE 

Gilding the Lily is also available as an archival print, hand signed by me - with personailzed signature if requested - from my ETSY shop

Coincidentally this weeks recent competition at Spoonflower was a call for Lilies so I created my original design into an allover repeat and entered it into the competition - I would be ever so grateful if you would be kind enough to vote for me by clicking on this

VOTING LINK

You can only vote once, I can't tell you where my design is as it shuffles for each person voting, you click on the tick/check mark upper left, the border goes green and then put in the code at the bottom of the page!

Here's the design to look for:

 and here is that design in repeat:

I think I'll be trying this design out with perhaps a blue ground to see how it looks as an alternative/addition to the black.

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Thanks for stopping by - next up is an interesting twist on Hot Cross Buns for Friday IF they work out - well I've changed my mind since I wrote this post (I think I'm doing a very lemon cake instead for Easter) but if you want gorgeous Hot Cross Buns please check out my friends Anne blogpost about such at Carrington Lane Bakery. Here's a pic of her perfect buns:

 In the meantime if you would like to bake a faboo cake for Easter why not try a Simnel Cake bursting with dried fruit and oodles of marzipan - click HERE for my recipe.

Please follow me on Bloglovin and you won't miss a single post - thanks!

Designing a logo for Farmetta Farm, Morrill, Maine

Here is the finished Farmetta Farm logo which I recently designed at the behest of proprietors Rose Rapp and Wes Soper.

As Rose says of the farm:

"We should have named the farm the happy critter farm. We strive to build this farm from the soil up. Having healthy thick dark soil will feed the animals, keeping them content to be who they are. Sheep being sheep. Chickens scratching up a storm. Ducks marching out on bug patrol. You just can't beat it!"

As I usually do with a logo design project and after ascertaining some important motifs to be included in the logo - specifically a sunflower and 'farmstead' - I created 2 or 3 loose coloured pencil layouts on tracing paper to present to the client for review and help pinpoint a direction in which to hone the design.

 The 3 above helped me realize that Rose and I had very different ideas of what farmstead meant and Rose asked specifically that it should evoke the farmstead - in my mind I was thinking of the farm buildings and homestead so I conjured a farmhouse - Rose was thinking of the fields and pastures and their moto is "From our PASTURES to your PLATE" - so here are some of the second go around sketches.

 As you can see I also played with type/fonts and colours in these last 2, and a half and full sunflower motif. The one above became the chosen design and we tweaked it in colour and layout for the final layout which I painted up in watercolour on paper and then scanned, cleaned and finalized in wonderful Photoshop. 

Next in the order of things we needed to translate the image into black and white for use on Farmetta's labels and order forms as 4 colour printing is expensive for a small operation and a throw away item. 

 

 Then onto Facebook:

Yes this was before the new timeline pages - little did I know they would be coming so soon - the one on the left didn't translate well into a profile pic so I redesigned the masthead to that on the right in order to show the whole name of the farm in the smaller profile picture that goes with each Facebook post. 

Then a new masthead and profile pic for the new Facebook timeline - where now the cover images are big and dynamic and wonderful - yea!!!! 

The new timeline cover - and profile pic below which actually sits on top of the cover on the live Facebook page. 

 

My partner, James Strickland, created the website based upon the logo I designed and the colour pallette I established and a wonderful job he did - don't you agree - click on the name to be whisked off there and take a look yourselves - Farmetta Farm 

Farmetta Farm eggs are fantastic and I always use them now in my recipes for this blog, James enjoys their excellent grass fed beef which is part of their CSA programme and I love visiting the donkeys, chickens, sheep etc when Rose and I enjoy a cuppa and a hearty laugh together at the farm. 

An Acadian chicken says "What?"

Donkey Mother and son - Holly and Jack

Bull eating apples - kept my fingers away from those eager teeth!!

Let me know what you think of my logo and be in touch with Farmetta if you want to buy any of their wonderful products.

My Green Hive Honey Farm Label Design

 

Just recently I was asked by Magy and Clay King of Green Hive Honey in Camden Maine to design a label/logo for their delicious honey. How could I refuse when A. I was asked so nicely and B. they wanted a design with a pink background with gold foil accents and complementary fondant icing colours and C. I love honey...now tell me that doesn't sound like a dream job for yours truly...lover of pink and all things sweet??

So I betook myself to the place where their honey is made and availed myself of these photographs for visual inspiration.Above you see the Green Hive Honey bees doing their job...buzzing and dancing and busying their days away in their idyllic environment not far from the town centre of Camden, Maine.....

This is a corner of the garden where they do their work and make oodles of delicious amber coloured honey which is lovingly extracted by mechanical means from the comb.

"Organically raised “girls” busily buzz in

orchards, fields, and gardens making

exquisite wildflower honey. Brought to you

straight from comb to jar, our raw, boutique

honey is nature’s purest gift from happy

bees. Never heated, thereby naturally

preserving the healing properties only honey

affords."

Just look at that deep amber colour...so beautiful, and I can vouch right now to how divinely this honey tastes....Magy and Clay gave me a jar to sample and inspire the muse - help get the creative juices a-flowing

 

And thus they flowed. I started the process by designing three separate but similar layouts, seen below in the order in which they came to be.

...and the final sketch and winner was....ta dah, not only Magy and Clay's favourite but mine too...I'm so glad they choose this design below, although having created them myself, and thus being ever so slightly biased in that regard, I would have been more than happy to move forward with any of the three.

And so the work begins on the layout.....

and continues with the watercolour paint-up with my trusty Winsor Newton Number 7 sable brushes, Winsor Newton watercolour paints and Arches watercolour blocks....joy of my creative life all.

And here below Ladies and Gentlemen the final label design...scanned, cleaned up and with a computer added pink ground and darker pink border...for who in their right mind wants to paint a pale pink ground around such a complex outline...not me for sure. I have learned my lesson with that in the past...put the grounds on after you have scanned the handiwork and make your life SO much easier.
The word Honey, the honeycomb and the central bee outline will all 'bee' in gold foil on the finished labels...won't that be divine?

This design is already available in the Green Hive Honey Farm Cafe Press Store and will soon be available as archival prints from the Green Hive Honey Farm Etsy shop along with jars of the glorious honey. I'll post on My and Green Hive Honey's Fan pages when the Etsy shop is ready for business.

My sincere thanks to Magy and Clay King for being so gracious and easy to work with...it was my delight!! Now I must find a British dessert with honey as the featured ingredient and do a blog post on that...suggestions anyone?

And now to the Bee Loud Glade with you!!

The Lake Isle Of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core. 

 Buzz Buzz everyone!!

More illustrated logos by Yours Truly.

I love type and I love illustration so what better way to combine the two than in full colour illustrated logos. When I first left school I took a year off and decided to work in a commercial art studio before heading off to art college. I spent almost the whole year laying out Letraset and learning about the spacing, leading and kerning of many different typefaces. Thus my love for type began, although I have to admit the Letrasetting was amazingly time consuming and laborious compared to the ease with which one sets type today...still I enjoyed the challenge!!

Pictured here are three logos I was commissioned to create by different businesses and a sketch of the first draft of one of those logos. As you can see “Ambiance” started off quite differently than it ended but the seed of the idea, the typeface, remained. The concept was embellished with English Ivy and a more formal, decorative flourish.

The "Harmony" logo above was designed for a company in California who wanted to depict a combination of the Monarch butterfly and the California Poppy, both of which are indigenous to that companies geographic area, along with the name of the store "Harmony" in an elegantly flowing script.

“Panache” was designed for a store in the Temecula wine region of California.

“Created by Mother Nature” isn’t a logo per se but has the feel of one. I had so much fun with the type on this one, changing fonts and fading the colour from top to bottom. I added the type about 5 years after I had created the central motif and was pleased with the results. This design is now featured in my Cafe Press store and part of the profits from it are donated to Maine Farmland Trust whose offices are in downtown Belfast.

All of my logos are created with watercolour paints and my beloved Winsor Newton Series 7 brushes or colour pencils on watercolour blocks by Aquarelle. The type is hand drawn with design flourishes added to create a uniquely decorative word. The only time I use a computer is to scan the image, create digital files of the artwork, change any small imperfections and resize the logos to fit their end need.

I am looking forward to designing more logos in the future and hope I am lucky enough to be commissioned to create delicious ones like that in the post two back for The Sugar Shack Cupcakery. I love the look of desserts and enjoy making and EATING them too.

If you are a small business owner interested in having a logo designed for your business please feel free to get in touch (you can click on 'e-mail' under my profile pic when you click on View Profile above in the right hand column) and ask me about my concept for marketing on a small budget!!

My MOFGA poster submission....

So there I was thinking I had missed the deadline for a submission to the MOFGA (Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association... a marHvellous organization which puts on the wonderful annual "Common Ground Fair" coming up soon on Sept. 25, 26 and 27th) poster competition for 2010 when some lovely person at the Belfast Coop, thank you KATE, told me the deadline had been extended to September 10th at 4pm. Well...what the heck I thought, I might as well pull something together, I work well with a tight deadline, and throw my hat in the ring too. Those of you who read the blog will recognize the rooster from my Belfast Chicken Village t-shirt...a little less colourful this time, and here above you see the beginnings of my design...in my usual messy manner (actually this is a little tidied for the photograph - I CANNOT work on a clean table...just not possible and believe me I have tried!)

Here is the finished result...my apologies for the not-so-good quality of the photograph...it was too large for me to scan on my 8.5 x 11 scanner so the image is distorted and the colours are not good but you get the general idea...if MOFGA doesn't take it I have plans to make it into a new year's card for...you guessed it, this coming New Year!!!
Wish me luck!!

Recycling my artwork!

I designed this illustration for a paper products company some few years ago and it was quite successful on paper plates, napkins and the like. Just recently I realized I could rework it with some nice hand lettering into a tribute to Mother Nature and our local farmers so here I am adding the lettering to the basic central design. All my artwork is done by hand, mostly with watercolour paints as here, I do type out the lettering on the computer first but then I trace it and put it onto the necessary curve by hand and that gives me the ability to let the lettering have a human touch in slight inconsistencies here and there in the quality of the line.

Here is little Eleanor helping me paint....she is very good at constructive criticisms!!

The final design with the lettering added...I have to say I am quite pleased with the result!!

Here is the design applied to a fitted women's t-shirt......this one is organic...

...and a cute little baby's bodysuit, this one isn't organic but I do have organic one's at my Cafe Press store along with tote bags, greetings cards, lots of different t's for men and women and children and other various and sundry gift items...please do me the honour of taking a look by clicking here. Thanks so much!!!!