I’ve been burning the midnight oil working on cute drawings for Make Art that Sells over the past few weeks!

Pages and pages of preliminary work happen over the span of a few days. Tons of cute drawings – I’m talking… TONS.

And not all of it ends up getting used in the final work! Some illustrations get filed for future use because they’re just not quite right for the current project, some of it like the “Bock Bock” is super fun and makes me giggle, but isn’t necessarily a phrase that’s going to sell if it’s on something in a store. When you’re creating art that you’d like to sell for use on products… Not only do you have to like it, but it’s gotta appeal to a wide variety of customers as well!

Another thing that you can totally see from my process work here… I get comments from people about how I can just draw anything and that’s not necessarily true. Some stuff takes drawing it over and over and over again until I get it looking juuuuust the way I want!

Look how many times I wrote “fresh”!

 

Here’s another page from my sketchbook – I just went nuts painting tons of bright happy graphic style flowers. I was really inspired by the petals on zinnias and dahlias – I get pretty obsessed with the shapes! I also really like the idea of doing a hand painted knit texture… I just haven’t quite landed on the perfect outcome just yet.

So once I had pages and pages of fun illustrations, hand painted typography, and cute drawings at my disposal, it was time to get cracking!

This was my assignment from week 1 of the Make Art that Sells Home Decor course. It was the very first time I’d really tried to mock up a lot of cute art on products (outside of Society6’s product generator of course), and looking back it’s a tad on the busy side. I should have focused on those awesome metal chicken garden stakes and the little tin can herb garden kit and called it a day!

But really, the Fresh Eggs board is pretty awesome, too. I might like to see it as a chalkboard, too, if I could let go of being mildly obsessed with drawing chicken wire.

Last week was coo coo in terms of my schedule – we had family obligations out the ying yang, and then on top of it we’ve been dealing with multiple rounds of winter sick with the kids. So I really had to laser focus what my project would be – it had to be something I could do well in the smaller chunk of time I had to work with.

I even tried to pull an all-nighter on Saturday night so I’d have more time to work in this amazing idea I’ve got for a lamp, but I totally fell asleep on my computer.

Not kidding.

I’m still happy with where I’m at in the home decor class, though – I’ve made so many cute drawings over the past few weeks, and I’m excited to see where the rest of this class takes me!

Are you looking for someone to create cute drawings for you?

You should totally hire me.