JFlah's Blunders

  Had a blast digitizing this character that our children's minister drew for me. I changed a few things but not much - he's got skills LOL

John 3:16 sketch John 3:16   -  digitized sketches in Illustrator then did a mockup in Photoshop Do you dream and remember it? I've always had an over-active dream life... nightmare life, more like, and I often remember what I dream. At least I remember enough snippets of dreams to put them together - probably because I don't have kids or family that forces me to pop out of the bed like a daisy and go to running... [I have too much quiet time... is that even a thing?] Sometimes these dreams become the genesis of a short story, but other times I know they are helping me work out the scary stuff that's happening in my life. Why am I talking about dreaming? It's because I had a weird one that woke me at 4am this morning. A dream that woke me because I died in it - little unusual for me. There's usually danger in my dreams, but I don't usually die in them. Well, thankfully it was an accidental death vs any other sort of terror - the car I was riding ...

Did this design for some cut vinyl that will go into our new Ministry Center. Will be black vinyl on a yellowish tan wall. Will take a photo once it's up. Design went through three sketched versions before I landed on something that started to look right to me. All told, the design took more than 20 hours (including the 4 hour sketching time) and I enjoyed each second. Am so glad that I've got Adobe Illustrator to help me digitize the sketch into a vector format - that would've been a bear to do if I'd have had to do all of those points and curves by hand. As it was, I traced the cleaned up sketch scan in illustrator and then got rid of zillions of extra anchor points as I refined it. First version of the trace had girly ribbons with outlines that would've been really difficult to lay in cut vinyl but, the thickened lines aren't too terrible - we'll see how the printer does with it and how much of a monster it is to install.

Can't believe that Walmart.com is still selling the infant bedding set I designed while at Crown Craft/NoJo . I was there for only a few months and they granted the the great honor to of allowing me to take this project and run with it. They even let me name it - Dreamland Teddy. It's done well enough that they have since made a pink version and I couldn't be happier about that. I've seen some of the reviews online and have to say that they're encouraging. When I'm feeling like what I design or draw isn't good enough or that what I'm doing looks juvenile or when I have any kind of negative thought about what I'm doing, I consider what a great success Dreamland Teddy continues to be even 5 years after I designed it and how uncertain I was about it even then. It's surprising how emotions so often prove to be unfounded in truth. Here're my mechanicals: