Product Creation: Valentines
Product Creation is a Series of Blog Posts which let you sneak a look behind the curtain to see what I am doing to create products for sale in my shop. I dedicate Fridays to work on new products and sometimes I blog about them here.
Valentine's Day is only a couple of weeks away and it hit me a couple weeks ago that I could create custom Valentine Cards for kids to give to their friends.
I pulled out my sketchbook where all the alien monster sketches live and started to sketch out some ideas. I thought I would make them more uniform in size and shape, but as I drew, not only did I have some different ideas, but I thought about my own kids valentines and how they often come in one sheet with varying sizes of Valentines. Here's what the sketchbook page looks like. Ignore the original thumbnail lines that I drew in Ink (of course)
I had one day to do this project so I took my best ideas and refined 4 of them into a tight line drawing.
Using my light table and a Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen, I created a coloring page.
In Photoshop, I then added branding and copyright notices with my name on them so I can get the free advertising when they are used. I put a PNG up in my shop and that was all I had time for that day. It always takes longer than I think it will.
The next time I worked on this, I scanned in a sheet of color swatches I had made with the acrylic paints from the original Alien Monsters.
Going into photoshop I sampled colors and using the dump bucket, I added the colors between the coloring page lines. It was an easy process and allowed me to do a couple of different versions quickly.
I put both versions up on my social media for input and the green spaceship won by a landslide.
I know the reason for this: It's because I forgot to worry about value in some of the grey spaceship images. I drew clear silhouettes, but when I went to color them, the value of the background was too close to the value of the figure. When you squint your eye, you don't see a clear silhouette. Which makes the picture hard to read.
After choosing the green spaceship, I printed a copy on my Epson, cut it into individual Valentines, staged them with candy, and took promo pictures.
They are all done. You can buy them as a coloring page for $0.99 or get them in color for $2.99. It comes with a personal use license so you can print off as many copies as you need for your own needs. If your friends want a copy, send them a link so they can get their own too!
While you are there, pick up a "Grow Old Along With Me" Valentine for your special someone.