Thank Art it's Friday! February 28th

This is the first installment of our Thank Art it's Friday series. Every Friday we will be scribbling up a blog with updates for the week, plans for the next week, sometimes with coupons and contests we will have and are having, or answering questions that we get from you. Since it's our first one, we'll update you on what's been going on since our last blog we had.

February has been a pretty busy little time for us at Happy Gecko Sticky Situation. We've been doodling our heads off on day-job lunch breaks, evenings between cleaning or feeding geckos and dinner, and on weekends between laundry loads.

Wow.

I finally crashed on Tuesday evening. Napped for about three hours. Maybe that wasn't a good idea, but then again maybe it was. I have a tendency to over-work myself no matter what time of year it is, what I'm doing or where I'm going. And so I had a looooooooong list of reptiles I wanted to get done before the show in March and have ready to go out.

Haha. I overshot my time by a long haul--but at least we got those tortoises done that were my priority. Yay! The only little tort squig we didn't get finished was the Hermann's Tortoise, which will just be a little late and featured in April. I can't wait until this little project really takes off so I can dedicate more time to drawing and get commissions started.

March's available-to-purchase stickers added to our roster are the Jackson's Chameleon, Red-footed tortoise, Cherry Head Red-Footed tortoise, and the Sulcata Tortoise.

This is our first order with our more eco-friendly company that stamp-cuts out the stickers for us. We are stoked. The shop will be working through our non-stamp-cut stickers and integrating the new styles. They are the same vinyl, the same quality, and eco-friendly, just cut out differently. We're very happy to be more eco-friendly.

We also got our banner finally! YAY! We will have a better time at shows, and it'll be easier for our amazing customers to find us. It's so awesome. Very good quality. This banner was ordered off of a fellow Etsy user, Pixel Munky. We were very pleased with our purchase.

We've also been giving you progression shots on our Facebook Page. We actually moved our progression shots onto a tumblr blog instead as an inside-the-design-room type of blog to keep Facebook updates a little bit more streamlined. Our tumblr won't be as business-like, we're going to have tons of silliness on there too. And random cell phone pictures, and silly pictures of me being a dork. Because some of you may not realize it, but I am a huge dork. It'll be a pretty laid-back kind of blog, which is kind of how tumblr works anyhow. Just for kicks. We also have the option of you posting animals you'd like us to use and contribute to the tumblr blog!

In addition to our newest Thank Art it's Friday series, we plan to also have an Art Tip Tuesday once a month, as well as an integration of Artíst in Question series where we find an artist we admire and let you know about them! The Artíst in Question series will be a little bit more random, but we'll try to grab someone to spotlight at least once every couple of months. For our blog posts we would love to hear from you on what you'd like to learn about and who you'd like to see on a feature blog to give a shout out to a great artist.

For every expo we do, we'll do a little tidbit blog, too. That mini series will be called What the EXPO?! One of those is scheduled for the first week of April after our biggest show yet on March 29th-30th. This show is the reason for our latest order. A huge one at that. We're restocking existing items as well as getting the new ones that you see pictured in this feature. Also, a coupon before the show begins will be available. We'll have 10% off your order of $15 or more for the week leading up to and during the expo. That coupon code is: PACNWEXPO. We'll also remind you of this coupon in our blog installment the week before the show.

Next week we plan to get a few snakes started once we finish up that last tortoise. Our first little one we're doodling is a corn snake of a few morphs. Not sure what morphs we're planning on yet, but we're thinking a bloodred motley, a normal and maybe a leucistic of sorts. Let us know what you'd like. We've had several requests for a Hognose, too. We're looking at models for hognoses right now to see what the differences between species are, but honestly have no clue on these guys for morphs or differences between the species there are. That's what research helps with! :) Hoping to have those two doodles done and ready to go for you on our next installment of Thank Art it's Friday. See you next week!

Tools of the Trade, Plans for the Future

How do our stickers start? How do we draw them? What tools do we use? How do they get printed? Where and how do we sell them?

Our stickers are drawn free-hand digitally. I have a very old Wacom tablet back when I first started playing around with Photoshop about six or seven years ago. I didn't even realize just how old my tablet was until I went to look for an extra stylus for it today (since I keep on losing mine, I'm good at that) and nibs to replace the one nib I have left. Not only are the styli completely different, so are the tablets!

My tablet is a Bamboo Fun. It came with a pretty basic looking stylus with a pen-tip end and an eraser end, and Photoshop Elements 6. I've had a couple questions on what stylus I prefer, and to tell you the truth I have no idea. I have a pretty limited budget on the tools I can utilize. Nibs and an extra stylus are sort of a necessity now, and now that I'm searching for one I'm finding it a confusing experience and wondering which I should choose myself. Hmmmm... hmmmmm..... Guess I'll just have to dive right into it.

The program I prefer is Photoshop CS3. I've used 7 before that, and find CS3 pretty similar but with a few extra tools. The reason I choose this program is because I learned how to use 7 when I was in college. All the shortcuts, tools, how to use them, where you can change the opacity levels, etc. I know it by second nature. I know that not everyone can get a copy of Photoshop. It's a pretty darned expensive program. I was lucky enough to get it for school and paid in part by extra scholarship funds.

A pretty comparable program, from what I've gathered is GIMP. It's completely free. I have tried to use it myself, however I had a huge problem using the program because a lot of the commands, shortcuts and placements of tools was completely different from what I was used to. I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to do one thing. For me it's just easier to use PS.

Before I begin doodling a sticker I look for models. I google images, ask friends and clients for models, look on YouTube for videos to see how the animal moves and behaves, and look for a few things about each model that I like. Some of my doodles have a mixture of models' colors and patterns. I usually spend about an hour prior to doodling just looking at the animals. Then I save poses that I think might work for the finished sticker and use them as a reference. Sometimes I draw line art and redraw them if I'm not happy with the outcome.

It's definitely a process.

Once I'm happy with the line art, though coloring comes pretty easy to me. I started out in October drawing. One squig was taking me about 16-24 hours. I had to remember all my shortcuts in PS, get well-acquainted with the tools again and frankly I needed practice drawing since it had been so long since I did any artwork at all. Years, to be exact.

Now, though one squig will take me only two or three hours to complete from start to finish. Each squig consists of about twelve layers on average, depending on the intricacy of the animal. Every color or two is a new layer. They start with a top layer of the line art itself, a base layer that's filled with the base color (typically lightest and highest percentage color of the animal) and then all the layers leading up to completion. Arms, head, body and tail are all separate layers, typically.

Without my tablet I wouldn't be able to do any of this work at all. I really love the pen tool in PS. It's amazing and easy. I use this tool to sort of make a clean, smooth line art after the initial sketch of the animal. Then, the rest of the doodle is colored in with just a soft brush. That's all I use. Just a soft brush with a multitude of different sizes as I see fit. I do smudge a bit to make things blend well, and sometimes will take out my blur tool to make things evenly soft. In the beginning of my doodle escapade I was using a wet paint splatter brush, but have since moved away from that. I didn't like how the finalized item looked.

After my doodle is done and ready to be ordered as a sticker, I save it in a transparent background format in PNG. That way the printers can die-cut the sticker and print it out nicely. I send my drawing to the printers, what size and quantity I need, proof and receive them in the mail two to three weeks later. We're working towards becoming a self-sustained company where we have our own printing, cutting and laminating tools out of our home, but for now we're utilizing outside sources, and are currently switching to a PACNW local and eco-friendly company to create some great-quality stickers. Sticker making tools have proven to be rather expensive, as well as the supplies that go along with them so as a new business it isn't feasible to get that deep into debt when I can have someone else cut them out and print them for me.

Once we get the stickers delivered to us, we put them up for grabs in our shop on Etsy. Stock expands right before shows, but while we're away on business we put our shop into vacation mode. I just love shows. They're awesome. You can connect with so many people. My favorite part of shows, though is when someone comes up to our table and tells us that they found us on Etsy before they ever even knew us by seeing us at a show. I just want to hug each and every person who says that. Hopefully we'll be able to do one or two shows a month. At the moment we only plan on attending about eight shows this year in the Pacific Northwest including Seattle, Puyallup, Portland area and some places in Northern California. By next year I hope that we can go to more places like San Francisco, LA, Reno, Las Vegas and even some shows in Arizona.

We do wholesale orders, too. We've finally ironed out wholesale pricing and have a standard for folks that want to maybe have our stickers in their own store fronts, pet shops, vet offices, or even to give them away as freebies to people who purchase their animals. Volume and wholesale pricing starts at JUST 50 stickers.

As we grow, and as our shop expands we do plan to open up commissions. We were hoping for this summer, heck we were hoping for March, but now it's looking a little bit later than summer as our demand grows in our shop. We also want to bring out some t-shirts and sell those in our shop, too. And although we'd like to do that RIGHT NOW, it's a little unfeasible for us at the moment.When we do open up for shirts, though we will probably toss messenger bags and other fabric items in there, too.

Until then, thanks so much for following us. For reading blogs, posts, and liking and sharing our items and statuses. We love the feedback. It keeps us moving, rolling, drawing and keeps us wanting more!

~Rachel

We FOUND Our New Print Shop

Wow. How amazing we feel. We were going through a non-local shop to get our stickers printed. We were spending countless hours cutting these stickers out individually once we got the stickers (which came in sheets). The quality, though was unsurpassed.

Until now.

We found another company, fairly LOCAL to our own shop, with faster manufacturing times, ship dates, great customer service, and they cut the stickers out FOR us. They're also eco-friendly and use eco-friendly inks! The quality is the same, or even maybe better! How great is that! So now we're a much lower-impact company than when we started (which was a huge goal for us as we grew). I just can't believe that we found someone so amazing so quickly and fairly local.

Wow.

We'll be seeing these new stickers getting phased in starting in March for our holiday stickers and new designs. While we do still have a lot of stock in the older style of stickers, our newer designs will be coming out professionally die-cut and streamlined. So if you order a few items and some are die-cut professionally while others are die-cut and then cut out, that is the reason.

Best of all? We don't even have to change our pricing on most of our items. Double wham bam oh yeah ma'am!

The future of Happy Gecko Sticky Situation just keeps on getting better.

Antsy to Draw MORE

Well I was hoping to have a Jackson's chameleon done for you last week! What's TAKING SO LONG?!
Dang. It's tough to get things done when the curator, artist, sticker cutter-outer, shop fixer-upper and Facebook post poster all get sick at the same time. (ahem, me... I'm all of those things.) Feeling much better now, though! I am about halfway through our Jackson's Chameleon. Line art and base colors are already laid down.

Is it normal for an artist to get antsy. To want to hurry hurry hurry up to get the next design done?!

Well. That's happening. :) I so wish I could just divvy up more designs for you faster faster fasterrrr! Since I was sick last week, I'm a little bit behind. I was hoping to finish this chameleon by tonight to show you all. However, looks like a couple other things came up (thanks life! Love ya!) and so it'll be another day or so. I've got some hungry geckos I have to feed tonight and a little bit of product photography to punch out. That should take up the whole evening. Not a lot of time to put towards drawing when I have a full time day-job and a part time gecko nursery that takes up most of my day.

Even so--I want to get to these tortoises like nobody's business! I'm already looking up models and watching videos to see how they move.

I'm even thinking about the OTHER animals I want to do. Like the boa constrictors and corn snakes and rainbow boas... and and and and... all the things. I just want to draw it all. ALL. I keep looking at my shop front thinking: 'It's just too empty. Just TOO emptyyy!'

I want it to have pages and pages and pages of stickers available. And we will. It will just be a matter of time. I'm getting lots of requests still for custom stickers. I'm working out pricing for commissions. For custom artwork, a piece starts at $50. That includes one sticker and shipping for that sticker.

At the moment we're still taking requests (which are free but not guaranteed of course), but we are not doing commissions. Once commissions are open, I will make an announcement on Facebook and here on my blog. Commissions will also be posted on Etsy as an option.

Here's to blinging out the shop! *cheers*

Happy Sticking!
Rachel.

Doodling, Cutting out Doodles, Making Timelines

Some of you may know, some of you may not know: when we order stickers they come in sheets of stickers. We cut them all out by hand. We have two sizes of stickers, regular size and then minis. Before the show we made a huge order. We estimated at about 2000 stickers. Of course, that was before we got the order. Once the order came in, and we got out our scissors we realized we actually had about 61654651354684313546841354 stickers to cut out. I haven't even finished cutting them all out yet!

We spent quite a few pretty hours cutting out stickers before the expo. About... oh fifteen of them between myself, my awesome local reptile friend Dea and my awesome local friends Nick and Ashley. I don't know what I would have done without them! Probably a lot of crying would have ensued. My timeline was all kinds of messed up from that late order!

We just recently ordered two more orders with around a thousand more stickers on it. All the Valentine's Day stickers, beardies, fat-tailed geckos, pygmy chams, two colors of panther chams and ball python morphs are on those orders. We wanted to get a Jackson's chameleon and some tortoises on that order, but time kind of ran out with me getting pretty darn sick and being fairly tired after my day job. We're expecting another print order in March to get our late debuted stickers on track for those Jackson's and torts. The torts on our list are a redfoot, hermann's and sulcata. We want to also have more things done by March. Just depends on how fast we can draw this February. Trying our hardest to get the following finished by the end of February and first week of March so we can order them that first week and get them going for the expo on March 29-30th.

That list consists of the following:

Clown Tree Frog (line art is DONE, just gotta color it)
Leopard tortoise
Blue Tongue Skink
A Russian
Uromastyx
Tegus Tegus Tegus
Rainbow Boa
Flying Gecko (psst Elizabeeeth)
Corn Snakes
King Snakes
Tree frogs of various species.
I've got a couple requests for a "normal" leopard gecko morph too. I'm surprised by this, but I won't ignore that! Lots of folks have normals, so I suppose that's the reason :) Everyone wants a sticker that looks just like their baby. Even I do!

If there's something you really really want--I always take requests into consideration for new species and morphs. Depending on how often I see the request, the higher up on the list it goes. That also means my list is subject to change fairly frequently. I think we've got quite a few of the most common requests. Considering we've only been open since late October, I think we're doing pretty well!

We started a little coupon in our shop for free shipping on orders over $25, too.

We'll keep you updated on the shop, how we're growing and where we'll be. Even if it's as mundane as "oh my gosh we just cut out x amount of stickers and we have bruised hands!".

Next blog: Watermarking. I had a couple questions on watermarking techniques. So I'll explain the technique I've used for a few years now. I'm sure there are easier ways out there, but this works for me! :)

Happy Sticking!
~Rachel