Dear friends, old and new, near and far.

It really does mean a great deal to me when you reach out to say hi. So thank you for tagging along and for your continued support. This post is dedicated to all of you darlings. Thinking of my East Coast school buds. ;)

Tag line: I was brainstorming with my friend N and we came up with the idea to include a tag line on the back of the cards to showcase that it is in fact locally made. Since greeting cards are an intimate exchange of thoughts why not make it a little more personal from me to you. You'll find the following tag line on the back of my work.

"Made and printed for you in Vancouver"

You seem to have some questions about my process and how it is all printed, etc. Anyways, I thought I'd also share some production photos of my work coming off the digital press and onto post production (trim/score/fold)! Thanks again S!

Illustrations: I start off with an idea or theme, find reference images to create an image bank. If you saw my desktop, you'd probably scream WTF or some sort of hail mary! The screen is literally packed with thumbnail images pulled off the internet. Chaos, yes, but it's an organized chaos I swear!

For those of you who have asked if I use clip art, the answer is no, it's all me baby. The image bank is used to create a loose composition of ideas that I use to draw.

The next step involves Adobe Illustrator and I absolutely love love this program. It uses the cartesian curve which means a line is a 'line' and not made up of tiny pixels. You'll notice this difference when you create a line in Photoshop, the lines are often blurry. The cartesian curve also allows you to create these vector drawings that can be scaled up or down, so one image or part of an image may have several applications.

The illustrations are drawn with a black stroke and white fill. Once complete colour is added, stroke weights are exaggerated and embellished using the various stroke tools. I like to use the pantone colour library because there is an extensive range in colour swatches. At times I create my own swatches if one is not readily available in the pantone library.

Printing: The files are uploaded to a secure FTP server and sent for sample proofs. Proofs are a great way to ensure no colour shifting occurs because the digital file will differ in colour from the printed version. Proofs are especially handy when you are using a coloured paper in place of a white sheet. Note: even though I use the pantone library, my work is not printed in pantone colours, this is very very expensive and is not necessary. Generally speaking pantone colours are used in trademarked logos like the red in Coca Cola is always that colour red.

I hope I've taken care of your questions. Drop me a line if you have more questions.

xoxo,

Sarita