Polygons and aquarels

Howdy y'all, how have you been? I've been busy with studying, 9 to 5 plus five hours of travelling daily, and I can tell you: that does not leave much time for other projects. However, as my mom had her birthday recently and today I was ill at home and couldn't focus on school stuff, I've been picking up making illustrations for postcards again.

The last card I've made was almost half a year ago, trying out polygons for the first time for a Christmas/holidays card we sent.

The card below is the birthday card from a couple of days ago, using polygons again which is a style I just love. I've been doing a tutorial on how to make polygon illustrations from 3D files with the software Blender, but I have yet to finish them so these are simply made in Inkscape (open source and free Illustrator-like software). The background was taken from a downloadable polygon backgrounds pack  from Spoongraphics (who, by the way, has lots of awesome tutorials; if you're interested in graphic design I'd really recommend visiting his site).

Today I just didn't get anywhere with my school stuff and felt ill, so I chose to move that work to the weekend and instead try out a new graphical style: water colours.
Using tips from this and this tutorial, and the awesome watercolour textures from Carolina Garofani, I made two cards. The first one of a daisy, for a 'spring' kind of feeling since it's very sunny today, and the second one with a crown, continuing on a design I didn't finish last year.

It's King's day tomorrow in the Netherlands, the first one ever probably. Last year our queen abdicated and her son became king, the first one after over a century of queen regnants. Traditionally, the queen's birthday has been celebrated in a day of orange-coloured craziness, and this well-loved holiday is of course continuing with the king.

Keywords on this day: orange, more orange, crazy hats and outfits (orange, of course), free market, childrens' games, music stages everywhere, beer, party!

A change of pace, and post cards

Hey hello, it's been a month! Lots of things happened so I kind of forgot about this blogs existence. Whoops. To sum things up:

I decided that I will indeed go back to school again in September, for the Master's course Advanced Product Design at the Technical University Delft, which is basically thé hard-core industrial designer course. I'm really looking forward to it!

My part time job at the cooking supplies shop (which was pretty much my sole source of income) suddenly went bankrupt. So, no more job. Apart from the fact that this sucks - not just for me and my colleague, but even more for the couple who owned the store and had both been working full time on it for 13 years- it means I will have to find a source of income for the months until September.

Since I highly doubt I'll be able to find anything interesting for just a few months -retail is very slow during this time of year, so I doubt I'll find something equal to what I was doing now, leave alone find a temporary (ánd part time) job as designer with no formal experience- I've concocted a new plan *drum roll*:

Web design!

Yep, I've embraced my old 'frenemy' that is webdesign for paying clients. At the time, doing client work next to my part-time day job robbed me of all my time for working on my product designs. This, paired with too low prices and not being prepared well enough for client work (read: communication problems and clients expecting more work than they had paid for), led to a lot of stress and frustration on my side.

At the same time, I still liked web design, I just didn't like it when paying customers were involved. The websites I made for people on a voluntary basis were a lot more fun and virtually no stress. The things is, voluntary web design doesn't pay the bills.

But... right now, things suddenly are a lot more favourable. No day job, so I could spend 3 days a week on client work and the rest on product design. A serious focus on web design also means I can afford investing the time needed to prepare a strong business identity and a standard for dealing with the clients. I could basically prepare a lot of things that would lessen the stress and frustration I had in the past. Checklists to discuss before accepting projects, clear contracts, packages for clients that state clearly what is paid for and what not. And a set time when I'm available for calls and when not, plus a separate phone, so I won't be called when doing groceries...

So right now I'm working on all of that. Business plan, contracts, an acquisition website, business cards, etc. And not completely unimportant, I'm training in designing layouts and improving my technical skills so that the design process will go faster and smoother later on. In other words: I'm busy, busy, busy, but I'm actually having a lot of fun while doing everything so that's all right.

Oh, and I've also been doing other things last month. Things like cooking and baking, even though I've already forgotten what exactly (there is a chance I'll find pictures of them somewhere, so they might be posted later on) and I designed two post cards:

a 'get well' card, and a 'birthday' card:

Once again available in printable format on the 'Downloads' page.

On another note, I completely forgot that May is almost approaching and that I haven't done a single thing for my May wallpaper yet. Bad blogger, bad!

...I'll start on it right now. I promise.