The cutie fruity friends (yes, that is going to be their name) are progressing from their sketchbook doodles! These are the four that ended up working best and will soon be a badge set. I hope I picked your favourite – mine is definitely the happy orange though I also love how the watermelon looks like she is nervously freaking out.

To get to this point, I basically just scan the drawings, take them into Photoshop and fiddle about with Levels and things until the lines are nice and clear. Then I tidy up any messy bits and colour them in. I like to colour in a watercolour wash kinda way so I don’t worry too much about being neat. I also have the super-steady mouse hand of someone who has spent about ten years laboriously photoshopping images for the web. Once that’s done, they’re ready for my badge templates which I have set up in Illustrator ready for printing.

Later on I will redraw all the characters in Illustrator for other stationery items. I love the sketchy charm of the originals but the lines are generally too rough to be used for anything bigger than a badge. You can see this with Cakeify above. Sketch on the left and redrawn on the right. I’ve lost a little of the character of the original but it’s also much neater and clearer.

Now comes the tedious part of cutting out circles and making and packaging the badges. Hopefully I will be back very soon with the finished badges!

PS. Surprised at the love for Cactus Bear in the last post comments. He was a total joke doodle but who knows what may become of him now?

I hate it when I’m too busy to blog! Here, then, are some random bits of news.

New Stuff!
I have been working away like mad behind the scenes and have a few new products to launch in the next few days. I’ve already added some new Super Cute Kawaii sticker tags to the shop so you can cute up your gifts. The Christmas ones were super popular but gift tags shouldn’t just be for Christmas. Thus these ones will do you for any occasion and are in a smaller pack of 6 at a much cheaper price!

Press Page
I have finally updated my Press page, with all the more recent interviews and features I’ve had. The newest one is above – Patty from Little Red Suitcase asked me some very interesting questions and the results are online now. Thanks Patty!

Mama’s Little Babies
This is a new shop I designed for Mama’s Little Babies, run by Cheri who makes lovely vintage inspired jewellery. I think it looks fabulous so do go and have a look. It’s based on my Prettify theme. Speaking of Prettify, there are now some tutorials there on how to change the banner and colours should you wish to tinker with it yourself.

Oh noes!
Shopify finally gave us customisable 404 error pages and I have been havng LOTS of fun with it. Grumpy Cakeify is made for the job. It is actually very useful as well -take a look if you like.

DaWanda
Yep, our European friends can now purchase some of my wares via my brand new DaWanda shop. Since a large proportion of my family is Dutch, it makes sense to have somewhere that people can buy in Euros. Hopefully they will spread the word! More on this soon, as it’s very very new.

Look what I made! A bunny and panda desk calendar! Whenever people ask what the downsides of working at home are, I can never think of anything. Today I realised one of them – having no idea what day it is. I’m still convinced it’s Saturday today, despite my laptop having Friday displayed at the top of the screen. I usually rely on my desk calendar but I didn’t get one this year – sob! With the end of January almost upon us, clearly the only thing to do was make my own.

My old desk calendar was bought in Tokyo and is of the CD jewel case folded over variety, but a bit smaller. I just measured the pieces of card and drew up a grid in Illustrator, then tediously added in the correct numbers for each month. Then I printed it on to card, cut it out and hurrah! Here it is in real life (excuse the dark photo).

Sad life of a freelancer – the only thing worth noting this month is doing my tax return. This is the top of my shelving unit right beside where I work. You can see here some of my tins, a plastic cookies cup that I keep pens in, my cute notebook from Rebecca that I am trying to make myself use, and a corner of one of my lovely tiles by Campbell Firth.

March is my favourite month as both me and Panda have our birthdays then. The only thing to do was add a tiny bunny and panda on the right days!

If anyone else is short of a desk calendar, I could probably enlarge this a little bit for CD size and give you a PDF. Email me!

Back in December, I announced the winner of the Prettify competition as Red Panda Chainmaille. Well, the shop redesign is now complete!

I had a great time working on this site. Jessica was full of ideas and had a clear idea of what she wanted. The general layout is hardly any different from Prettify but with the Red Panda branding and colours making it her own.

There are a few custom features that I added from Jessica’s ideas. First is the Sold Items section, which displays all the products that aren’t currently in stock. She also nudged me into creating some code so that the sold products have an enquiry button instead of a useless buy button. This was such a great idea, I promptly added it to my own shop.

Here’s what Jessica had to say:

“Marceline was great to work with! I supplied my logo, font, and colors, and Marceline made it happen. I feel that my website now looks very professional, and most importantly, it’s suited to me! She was always very friendly and got all requested changes done in a very timely manner. Highly recommended.”

Do have a look around the Red Panda shop and marvel at the intricate work in this type of jewellery. It really proves my point about my concept for Prettify, that what handmade designers need is BIG PHOTOS to show off the detail of our work.

If you like what you see, then you can get yourself a very similar design free by applying Prettify to your Shopify shop. And if you need any customisation, you know where I am.

I’ve also started a Shopify Tips & Tutorials blog on the Prettify example site – there are already step by step tutorials on how to change the banner and avatar images and I’ll be adding more very soon.

Thanks again to everyone who entered, and hoping Jessica has a successful shop!

One of the freelance projects I finished this week was some graphics for cute crafter Petit à Porter. Mariví currently sells on Dawanda and is working on her own ecommerce site. She asked me to create a logo, banners, icons, buttons etc. that she can use around the web.

She was after something French and cute to match her sweet creations of jewellery and accessories and this is what we came up with.

Banner image

Shop icons

Business card template

It was a fun little project just to do the graphics and not all the coding as well. I think it all looks lovely and can’t wait to see the finished shop.

As always, you too can hire me for both big jobs and little jobs – see www.marcelinesmith.com

As I mentioned yesterday, the theme I designed for Shopify has now been released. If you use Shopify you can go to the Themes area in your Admin Panel and use it for your shop.

The idea behind it was to create a theme that would be perfect for artists and crafters, especially those who are used to sites such as Etsy, Folksy and Dawanda. I spent a lot of time on those sites comparing the layouts and design and merged the best parts together to make Prettify.

It has a similar clean look to all those sites, and the design is built around banner and avatar images that can be swapped for your own design without too much difficulty. The emphasis is on large product photos to show off intricate details and unique handmade products. A lot of the other Shopify themes give much more emphasis to product descriptions and prices but for most art and craft products, it’s the pictures that are most important.

There are four colour versions available, as you can see above, and these can be switched easily in the Theme Editor. Of course, you can also edit the stylesheets to use your own colour scheme and build additional features on top of my code. That’s the beauty of Shopify.

I’ve built an example site using Prettify so you can have a browse around and see how all the pages look. I’ll be adding more features in the coming weeks and will explain how some of them are done.

And now for the competition! I’m giving away a FREE Shopify theme design based on Prettify. I’ll edit the images and colours to match your current branding, or come up with something new for you. I’ll add some extra features that you might need and help you get everything set up. The only catch is that you need to have a Shopify account on at least Basic level which does incur a monthly fee. If you’re serious about your business though, it’s an excellent investment. I’m literally 100% happy with my Shopify shop.

If you want to enter, just email hello AT askingfortrouble.org with a link to your current shop or website and why you need a new design. I’m keeping this open until December 1st so you’ve got plenty time to enter. You could have a brand new shop for the new year!

UPDATE: This competition is now closed. I’ll be picking a winner very soon and will contact everyone who entered.