Behind the Scenes
behind the scenes, twopartsofone greeting cards
A bling of the eye and it’s April 2020!
A bling of the eye and it’s April 2020! This post has been on hold after much revisions, I guess it’s finally time to set it live.
2019 was pretty much a roller coaster ride. Keeping the recaps aside (along with all those outdated posts…), yes I’m finally ready to show bits of my creative process/space… well, the BTS! Amidst all sorts of outbreak at the moment, staying at home does seem like the best idea. Though I have to say that being someone who work at home all the time, sometimes I really have the urge to go out and sit in a cafe, people watch, smells of coffee, breathe in some fresh air— which at the moment isn’t exactly the best idea.
Right into the working process, after months of procrastinating, I finally hang up my golden grid to make up the current moodboard of the month… (which obviously by now, this is way over due…) I’ve actually spent quite a lot of time developing some of my drawing styles. I’ve been mostly drawing with inks and testing out foiling prints at home. Then earlier this year, I decided to splurge on an iPad Pro. Oh dear, how the Apple Pencil brings much fun and frustration to life these days, that will be another story to share!
So then December 2019 I decided to take a leap and started making and selling Christmas/Season Greetings. It was lots of fun to make 😜Many thanks to all the awesome friends who contributed to my sales! I miss doing handy crafty stuffs. But on the down side it does make a mess in my home. With all the materials splattered across rooms around the floor, it doesn’t make my life any easier when there’s some people around too.
behind the scenes, twopartsofone greeting cards
behind the scenes, twopartsofone greeting cards
The Process
1
I usually start sketching out my first complete visual in pencil, of course after much browsing on pinterest for Christmas vibe ideas. But I ended drawing up something that was inspired by Christmas markets back in the day- in Bordeaux city (Oh dear, that felt like a lifetime ago 😣).
2
Once I’m satisfied, I ink them with the help of a light board. Gods, it was one of my best purchase on TaoBao. It’s a super thin A4 sized light board with a USB which you can plug it to your computer and it lights up in 3 different intensities for you to trace over your sketches!
3
Once I’m done, I snap a picture and send it to Photoshop. Cleaning it up and making sure it’s black and white without any other disturbance so that the image is ready to be vectorised in Illustrator. Disturbance = Weird sorts of yellow or red tones in the image or extra brush strokes elsewhere… etc
4
Illustrator has lots of vectorising option. I use “Image Trace” and then playing around with the options until I’m satisfied. Image tracing is randomise in some ways, so sometimes I get weird strange lines which I will have to redraw. Then, layout the drawing in the right way I want before printing it out on a nice paper with a laser printer.
5
Once it’s printed out, I will have to prep my laminator machine, letting it heat up to the right “temperature” (it’s the basic settings) and cut out the foil to cover which ever part I want to foil. Then, placing the foils on the printed parts, I cover the (printed) paper with another paper to protect the foil before sending it through the machine.
6
The machine will roll out the paper, heat transferred through the foils and ink will stick up whatever bits of foil necessary causing the foils to wrinkle throughout the process (which is the tricky part). Once everything is out, simply pull of the foils and voila ✨✨✨ Watch how everything blings 😍
bts twopartsofone greeting card foils
bts twopartsofone greeting card foils
bts twopartsofone greeting card foils
bts twopartsofone greeting card foils
Voila!
This is how I do my foilings. Of course foiling at home is nothing like professional foiling machines. Those are something else. Homemade ones have the tendency to crack depending on what kinda laminator you have as well as the quality of the foils. I’ve tested dozens of different foils and tried many different machines. It’s a slow process with many trial and errors because sometimes foil easily break. But on another hand, sometimes you get amazing random effects!
Till then, I will try to share more of my work process 😆
