Product Prototypes... and Why You Need to Read Your Printer Manual

Part of my final for Decorative Illustration was to create prototypes for all of the products I have designed throughout the semester. It was a lot of work cutting all of the greeting cards by hand, and it made me grateful that if I ever do this as a job, the companies will have proper printing and laser cutting equipment to deal with all that so I can stick to the designing and let a machine do the manufacturing.

T-Shirt Design:

  

Birthday Card Prototypes:

Baby Birth Card:

 

 

Holiday Card (just a fun extra to go along with the paper placemat and napkin coordinates):

Paper Gift Box:

Lesson Learned: Know your printer! I rarely used my inkjet printer in the past because I thought it was broken. There was horizontal banding in all of my prints, and realigning and cleaning the print heads and nozzles wasn't fixing the problem. It wasn't until I reviewed all of the printer settings that I realized my printer defaults to "speed" instead of "quality" for all prints. Once I switched it to "quality," all of my prints turned out beautifully with no gaps! 

St. Basil's Cathedral... and a Tip for Traveling Artists

For the final project for my Decorative Illustration class, I created a paper box. It is a little gift box that someone might get in a souvenir shop.

My design was inspired by a trip I took to Russia last year- I used photos I took at Red Square in Moscow for reference. For the bottom of the box, I made a collage from scanned images of tickets that I had saved from places I visited in Moscow and around the Kremlin and Red Square.

Here is the box design template:

And here is the printed box prototype:

 

Lesson Learned: When taking photos of your travels, don't leave out the details! I took a couple of standard tourist shots of the outside of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, but I also took dozens of pictures of the details in the paintings and patterns inside. The tourist shots are great for my photo album, but those photos of the little details that caught my attention have served as a great source of inspiration for me when it comes to color and pattern design in my illustrations.