Recently, I have been thinking about how to put my designs onto products and branding myself, so after stumbling across these fantastic card creations on Little Meg's Cards personal Facebook site, I was immediately intrigued by the artist's use of layering and colour combinations to make these beautiful designs.
Here is a link to her personal website and blog:
Website: http://www.littlemegscards.co.uk/
Blog: http://littlemegscards.blogspot.co.uk/
I contacted the artist to find out more!
"Hey Shelly!
My name is Carla Taylor, a second year illustration student at the University of Huddersfield. I came across your Facebook page and must say I was completely wowed by what I saw!
As a fellow creative I would love to know what are your person inspirations for pattern and design? Do you design the characters yourself? And how did you start out making your cards to start your own business; do you have any tips for starting out designing for cards?
Thanks for your time,
Carla Taylor"
I was excited to get such a detailed response:
"Hi Carla
Thanks for getting in touch and for your lovely comments. I have to say I'm very jealous that you are doing illustration at Uni, that must be fantastic!
To be honest I take inspiration from anywhere really and I think I'm just lucky that I seem to have a good eye for colour and what goes together. As you can see I use a lot of layering in my cards and I love to use as much
texture as I can with ribbon, embossing and buttons etc.
I use
Pinterest quite a lot to look at patterns etc and for some bizarre reason seem to love anything spotty!
I wish I was clever enough to design the characters myself but funnily enough I bought a book recently about how to draw Kawaii manga characters and my hubby had a go the other night and has drawn me some gorgeous little characters which I am going to use on my cards.
Generally though I use digital stamps which I buy from various craft companies on the internet. I find these much easier than rubber stamps as I can resize them according to the design I want to do. I colour them myself using Copic
markers.
I
usually start out with an idea of what I want the card to look like but then as I play with the papers and layer them up it becomes totally different in the end and evolves along the way. Sometimes if I'm stuck for inspiration I use card sketches from the internet to get me started with a design but more often than not I just play with bits of paper until I like the layering.
To be honest I never intended to have a business doing it. I've always been creative (but work as an office manager :-( ) and started crafting
about ten years ago when I had a long period off work. It just went from there really and then a couple of years ago I thought rather than having my cards sat in a cupboard I would open up a FB page and see if anyone was interested in buying them. I can honestly say I never in a million years thought I would have a website and a page with over 4000 followers and more orders than I know what to do with !!! I approached some craft magazines and have done some design work for them.
If you are interested in making cards
and you are doing illustration it would be amazing for you to design your own artwork for your own cards. You could even design and sell your work too as stamping is so popular now.
So sorry I've garbled on so much, can you tell I love what I do ! If I can help with anything else give me a shout.
Hugs
Shelly x"
Once again, I got such a warm welcoming response from the artist. It really goes to show that one small email can really boost a budding artist's confidence, it certainly boosted mine! Try email an artist who catches your attention, ask about their inspirations. You might find you have more in common than you think or find new approaches to your work!
