Card Making

For the first time I failed to do 2 blogs in a week last week, unless you count reblogging! I do have a good excuse, a customer wanted a pet portrait but she needed it by the end of the week, which gave me 3 days.
This was achieved just, I was baking the glass Friday morning an hour before it was due to be collected! At least I now know the minimum amount of time needed. Day one is printing off the photograph to work from and painting the outline and any background. I then have to leave it to dry and return with fresh eyes on day 2 and finish the painting, making alterations until I’m happy with it. This must then be left for 24hrs before you can bake the glass to make the paint washable.

In between doing the pet portrait I collected my photographs for the art cards and started to make the cards. In my wisdom I decided to print a description of the card and my name etc onto the back, rather than use stickers,  not realising how complicated it would be. Of course the issue was some photographs were portrait, some landscape and 2 different sizes as well as needing different descriptions, so I had to create templates for all these options! It was worth it though, I am really pleased with the cards and hope you like them. They are all available in my Folksy shop and two sets in Etsy.


With regards to my experience of photo editing software, I tried using Gimp to make the water marks but found it too complicated. I have now downloaded paint.net, also free. This I have found much more user-friendly with very helpful online tutorials posted by users. It still took me a while to get the hang of it and I’ve yet to try paint.net out for super imposing my painted animals. So in the mean time I’ve kept both on my laptop!