Were You Looking for Thank Art It's Friday?

We are in the process of moving our blog to our new website. Our latest blog post of Thank Art It's Friday! can be found on there! :) We'll keep this little one up so you can read past blogs, but any new ones will be found there! :)

Enjoy!

Happy Sticking!

Our new website:
www.reptilestickers.com

Latest blog post:
http://www.reptilestickers.com/blog/thank-art-its-friday-march-21st

Thank Art it's Friday! March 14th

Our days are getting closer closer closer to the reptile show. We're doodling as quickly as we can so we can have more stickers available for pre-order at the show for both regular and wholesale orders for pet stores and vendors alike and we've started a few little things in our shop to make things more exciting for you!

Thank You For Voting!

Sticker of the Month

Last week you all voted on what snakes you'd like to see. You're totally going to be able to vote for what you see next every time we finish something you already voted on. The next poll will take place after the last drawing, a sand boa is complete and debuted. If there isn't a voting poll, we'll be doing little games instead to make things a little more fun.

Another new thing to make stuff more fun is the Sticker of the Month! Every month you can get one sticker from our shop for 20% off! The Sticker of the month will be announced on the first of every month. This month you can get the Golden Mantella for 20% off.  No coupons necessary! The discount is already in place on the listing. No limits or anything either. Just this pretty little thing for 20% off the retail value.

Our New Designs

Hermann's Tortoise!!

You've all been waiting for that little Hermann's tort to be finished and debuted. He was completed last week and debuted on Monday on our Facebook page and Tumblr. We also started a rough sketch for our corn snake and finished one morph of him. For some reason or another the line art takes a million years for completion. I get pretty picky, and sometimes redo the entire line art before I'm done and satisfied with it. You can find sketch doodles and work in progress on our Tumblr blog. We aren't sharing any work in progress sneak peeks of doodles on Facebook anymore, though, only finished doodles.

Our finished normal corn snake

The next two corn snake morphs that we plan to have finished by next Friday's installment is a bloodred motley and a lavender. So excited to have these done. You'll be able to purchase these pretty little things in April.

 

 

What My Time Kind of Looks Like These Days

It feels like drawing has been taking forever. If I could give my whole day to just drawing I would live in a completely blissful world. I spend a lot of time caring for the geckos, though. And working full time at my day-job too. The geckos alone take 2-3 hours a day to check on them, feed, mist and sometimes clean and weigh them. A lot of this time I actually spend observing my animals, turning them this way and that way, and cuddling and kissing them. Sometimes I hand-feed a select few who are my most special ones. 

Maté on my laptop.

My average feeding schedule per week is a fruit-eater feeding every other day. On non-fruit-eater days I feed my bug-eaters. All the bug eater babies and smaller geckos get fed every day since they either have super fast metabolisms or are growing and need that extra nutrition. I spend about 15-20 minutes on my bug eaters sorting out appropriate sized food for them. I do a big sort of my roaches and mealworms about once every two weeks that takes an hour or so, but every few days I'll go in and pick out a few small feeders to put in my roach nymph tub to keep up with the demand of my gecko colony. Once a week I do a paper towel and hide change. Once a month everyone's tubs get deep cleaned. This takes me HOURS. I love it though. I wouldn't give it up for the world. Although I do have small project plans for breeding geckos, until the shop is doing better and my schedule frees up a little bit I've decided that this isn't the time to make more baby geckos. With a crunched schedule having 100 animals to care for could be pretty daunting. The forty or so that I have already is my limit for sure with everything I have going on.

I typically don't get to drawing anything until around 8 or 9 at night if I do draw in the evening. Some nights I don't even get to it. One drawing will take me anywhere from 3 days to a week with a few hours set aside for it. But I'm doing my best to get a few more squigs finished the next couple weeks leading up to the show so I'll have more options for customers to pre-order from or get some wholesales for.

The Show is On the Road, Sooooooon

Pacific Northwest Reptile and Exotic Animal Expo

Show, show show! We've been preparing for it for the last couple weeks or so. It's on Saturday the 29th and 30th of this month. If you're in town, stop by! We'd LOVE to see you. Jason and I will be manning the table.We've got all our ducks in neat little rows, and all we're waiting on right now are the newest stickers and more stock to get here. It's been a breeze so far with the new company. The only thing we have left is setting up the table at home to make sure everything is aesthetically pleasing. That may add a couple things more for us to do. I always get so nervous a couple weeks before a show. Leading up to it, those nerves get bigger and bigger and bigger until about a half hour after doors open. Then I relax. Shows are so fun, though. I definitely enjoy meeting all of you.

We'll remind you every Friday on this blog until the show is actually here. We'll also have some coupons for those of you who won't be able to make the show to use in our shop while we're away. That way you can take advantage of similar specials even if you aren't with us.

New Website and Shop on IndieMade

Click to Shop

Now you don't have to sign up for Etsy to purchase items from us! There's this amazing little web host called IndieMade that allows you to purchase items without having to have an account. By all means you could certainly do that. From this new shop, you can pay with PayPal or credit card and everything is totally secure.

While the website is still under construction and has a myriad of tweaks going on, you can still browse around and see a little bit of the behind-the-scenes stuff in our Gallery section. Photographs from shows will most definitely be posted in there and we also have a gallery of pictures that you have shared with us decorated with your stickers. When you send us pictures of the stickers you get, it just makes our little hearts jump for joy.

If you happen to have a shop, or are thinking about opening one up with your artworks, we'd highly recommend IndieMade.

 

What Next Week Will Look Like

We got the corn snake finished this week, and hope to have that bloodred motley done tonight. So by Wednesday expect to see one more corn snake morph. Also, that little hog nose snake. Yes! Next week is the week for the hog nose snake. You're all excited about that and it makes me super duper excited about it, too. I think the hognose snake has had the most votes for a sticker than any other sticker we've asked you about! Wonderful! Hoping for that one to be finished by Thursday. Deadline for the hoggie is Friday afternoon, of course. If we finish up the artwork by Thursday of the hognose, we'll begin art for the rainbow boa. Which, will indeed, have a sneak peek on Tumblr and here on our blog.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Sticking!

Rachel

Thank Art it's Friday! March 7th

The week is over! And it's time to relish in the weekend. We're having a majorly reptilian weekend full of reptile cage cleaning ahead of us, but we're in the mood to finish a corn snake doodle or two. For this blog I'm going to touch a little bit on some frequently asked questions we get at the bottom of this little update.

I got our little Hermann's tort finished! We'll be debuting him sometime this weekend or on Monday on our Facebook page and on Tumblr. He didn't quite make it in time for our printers, but he'll be on the next round. We've also started collecting morph models for the corn snake we are working on next. We already have our morphs picked out for the corn snakes: A normal, a bloodred motley and a stripe. Design for this sticker will begin soon and we hope to have at least two morphs finished by Friday next week to debut by then in our next Thank Art its Friday! segment.

We also had a little poll this week on what snake species to do after our corn snake. We have these scheduled for debut sometime in either late April or in May. The voting resulted in a hognose snake,

a rainbow boa and a sand boa as our next three snakes to come on board with us at Happy Gecko Sticky Situation. I can't wait to draw them. And thanks to everyone who voted, tagged people to vote and shared the poll! If all our timing goes well, we'll be doodling at least one sticker per week. That's our goal! So I'm setting aside at least an hour a day to just do nothing but doodle.

More polls like this will happen when we get ready to implement more stickers. That way you are able to help me decide which to do next, and a gazillion heads are better than just one!

At the end of March, the 29th and 30th, we're vending at the Pacific Northwest Reptile and Exotic Animal Show. You can find more information on this expo here on their website. We've got some more supplies for this show. I am so excited! They're little booklifts. These little things are awesome. This way at shows our little notebooks with stickers in them are not just level to the table, but raised so you can see them better! I love them. And I'm probably more excited about these than I should be, so I had to share. Plans for the expo are going very well!

Now for our F.A.Q. section of this blog:

Here are a few questions that we regularly get. We hope they're helpful to you to see some answers right here! If you have any further questions, let us know! We'd be more than happy to help you.

When will you be drawing [insert animal]? 

Right now, we are adding anywhere from two to five species per month to our shop. We started out with five or so back in October (if I remember correctly!) and now we've got 21 species in our shop that will be available this month with around 35 designs available. That's some pretty quick growth for just one person drawing in their free time. :) I can only dedicate an hour or so here and there.

With my schedule being a tad bit pressing, I can't make a guarantee on when a certain species, morph or etc will be done. I can only give estimates. Those estimated times change often as popularity of another species rises. As popularity rises, so does the expected time of completion on my list of animals to do. Send me some models! I love getting models to use.

While I'd like to do a minimum of 200 species total in the shop, it's going to be a long journey! I'm focusing on getting my most common requests done and running in our first year before we can achieve more obscure things. I LOVE getting requests. So please, if there's a sticker you'd like to see, let me know!

Do you do custom stickers? Logos? Banners? Etc?

I am so happy that you like my work enough to ask for this service! It just blows me away and turns me to a little mushy ball of humbled jibber jabber for a few minutes before I am able to pick myself up to answer.

Unfortunately, at this time HGSS is my main focus. I barely have time to get the doodles I want done for my shop. So commissions aren't open till time opens up a bit more in my schedule. I also am very new at doing artwork for stuff, so I have a few things like pricing, contracts, legal mumbo jumbo and guidelines for commissions that I have to figure out before I can offer that. I WILL be offering that. Most definitely! Just not for the time being.

What about a custom morph of something you already have?

Some of our morphs are limited editions. About every six months we plan to revamp morphs and add new ones, while retiring older ones as time allows. That keeps our shop fresh! In the future we can so do custom stickers, however we most likely won't implement custom morphs for line art that we already have.

Can I sell your stickers?

Short answer on that one is YES! If you have a pet shop, vend at shows, own a vet office or just want to sell them for fun, we certainly do allow for sales of our stickers. We have special volume pricing for stickers, so if you're interested message us for that! You don't have to sell them to get volume pricing, though. You can also purchase them as freebies to give away at volume pricing, or even just hoard them for yourself. Some people do that!

Can I get this sticker, but bigger?
Yep! We do custom sizing. Just note, that if you need a sticker bigger, it's going to cost a little bit more than our regular sized stickers are priced at. The bigger it gets, the more expensive it is. Our size limit is eight inches on the longest side.

I missed pre-order! Can I still pre-order?

While we'd love to, unfortunately we can't take pre-orders after they close. When we close our pre-ordering option that's because we've already sent our order off to the printers with the number of stickers to print. Don't worry though! They'll be available for purchase once we receive them and are able to stock our shop.

If there are any questions we might have not answered for you in this FAQ, let us know! Comment below or ask us in our Etsy shop or on our Facebook Page. :)

Thanks for reading!

Creating a Text Watermark in Pixlr

Welcome to our first Art Tip Tuesday series. For now we'll do Art Tip Tuesdays every first Tuesday of the month. Later on we may do it bimonthly, but for now this is all we'll have time to jolly for. This month's topic is watermarking with text in Pixlr, a free program online. We'll touch on more watermarking tutorials later, and you're always welcome to ask questions in the comments for clarifying anything that may seem a little confusing.

If you're just starting out as an artist of any sort, a photographer, a painter, a digital illustrator there are sometimes concerns about how to protect your images on the internet. Marking them as your own is important when the information superhighway is traveling at light speed. Things get missed. I've stumbled upon tons of artwork or photography on the internet that is absolutely gorgeous. I want to find the artist or photographer.

While you think it would be a no-brainer for someone to source where they found the piece from, sometimes that just doesn't happen. People who are not artists or photographers sometimes don't think about that. Sometimes people who aren't artists don't think about the time that is put into any kind of art piece, and so will not realize that it's important to source everything.

As a result these beautiful pieces are lost to the internet as far as who they originated from.

A watermark is different to many people. It can be just a little logo or text that you simply place in the corner of the image so it's sourced permanently. Or sometimes it's a blaring thing that covers the entire photo. I've gone back and forth on whether or not I want to watermark my work for a long time. But after I had a potential customer post one of my works and ask who's work it was because they forgot who it was I realized just how important it was to me and my business to include my information, however small on my work.

While I started out watermarking, I've now gone to using low-res files with little copyright information that lines the piece. That way if someone saves it off the internet, they'll be able to do a quick search and just find me easily.

Art thieves are a whole 'nother story. If someone is going to steal your piece and claim it as their own, unfortunately watermarks are only so effective. There are art thieves out there who can indeed remove watermarks. And while it takes a bit of work, it can still happen even if your watermark is plastered in every which direction on the image. Even if your watermark is opaque. In this case, just display low-resolution files if you're a little leery about it and keep your original high-resolution file safely tucked away for your use only. Watermarks just sort of keep the majority of art thievery at bay.

Watermarking is a very simple thing to do once you figure it out. You can use a myriad of programs to do this, depending on how you want it to look. The first thing you want to do is find a logo. Or a photo, or a piece of text, or really whatever you want to use to watermark with. Your name, company name, logo, whatever. As long as it's a graphic you can use it.

Let's show you what to do a text watermark in pixlr. Pixlr is a free program online. I really like this program, it's pretty comparable if you have nothing else to use. A few cons on this one is you can really only use the fonts that are available in the program. And if you don't have a "Are you sure you want to close this tab/window/etc" function on your browser--you can lose a lot of work. SAVING is super important with this program because it does not prompt you to save before you close. It's also a little more tricky, although not impossible to rotate text for the beginner layer user. If you're using a logo graphic that you already have doodled up, then it's awesome.

First go to www.pixlr.com. You'll be greeted by a few pretty-looking options. Click on the butterfly option, Pixlr Editor. You'll get the best options here for editing etc. I really like having such a good working program for free that I can access anywhere. Can't beat free! No downloads necessary.

After this lovely little step you're going to get options on what  you'd like to do, create a new file, open from your computer, or even open from an existing URL, which I'm pretty partial to when I'm not home and have a link to an image from my photo storage or website that I'd like to use. It's totally up to you to do what you're doing in this stage. I usually use the open from computer or URL.

For this tutorial, I'll just go with "Open image from computer".

Here's my little file I opened, below. The red-footed tortoise doodle I've done. Let's watermark it! Now, you'll notice on the right hand side there are a few little windows that are open. There is the Tools window on the left, and on the right the Navigator, layers and history. I don't really use the navigator. In fact, I've never used it. It just sits there. The layers is a window that we're going to focus on in this tutorial.

Layers!? What are layers. A layer is exactly what it sounds like. A layer of your work. When you open an image in JPEG, PNG or GIF format, you're going to have one layer. You can add layers, delete layers and also move layers so some are above others or below others. These layers are transparent, except for the stuff that you put on it. Be it a logo, text, or even a line that you draw. You can see I only have one layer open in the above graphic. It's the image itself. And it's locked. You can tell it's locked by the little padlock that shows on the right side of the later that is selected. For this tutorial, let's just keep it locked since you probably aren't going to be messing with that layer if you're just watermarking.

A watermark will need to be on a separate layer than your image. This way you can move it around and place it where you want. So, first things first, let's create a text watermark. It's as simple as selecting the text tool on the tool window and clicking on your image. It's the little "A".

So, click on your image now that you've got your text tool selected. There's going to be a new dialog window that shows up labelled Text. Type in what you'd like to use as your text. Choose the color you'd like your text watermark to be. White is the best option, because it will show up on nearly everything. Except of course, if white is the primary color on your image. In this case, go with a darker color. You can also choose your font, size of text and style. The size of your text is pretty limited on Pixlr. You can only go so high, so if you need it to be pretty big you're probably going to have to find another program to use. Once you're through choosing the size, color, etc of your text watermark click OK. You can always make changes to the text options later. You'll also notice that on the right, in your layers window there's a new layer. It's your text layer. Make sure this layer is on the top, so it shows up above any other layer.

Ok, so now you have two layers, your text and your background, or image layer. You want to make your watermark a little more.. clear, right? More like what a watermark looks like, traditionally. So now look at your layers window again. At the bottom left of the layers window there's this weird looking box with arrows on it. Click that.

Opacity comes up in your layers window. Make sure you have your text layer selected, and change your opacity level from 100 to somewhere closer to 35-45. Leave the mode normal. You can play around with modes if you like, but for simplicity, normal is fine. That makes your text watermark a little more clear so you can still see the image below, but have it marked with text. Your opacity changes the opaqueness of the watermark. Higher opacity makes it more opaque, lower opacity makes it less opaque.

Now, let's say you want to tilt your text. Before you attempt this, make sure your text is exactly how you want it to be by color, spelling etc. In Photoshop it's very easy to tilt and also edit, but in Pixlr it a little bit more tricky. Once you tilt your text you cannot edit the text again in Pixlr.

Before you can tilt your text, you need to rasterize the text layer. That pretty much means you're changing the layer from a text layer to an image layer. You can do this by selecting the text layer you want to rasterize, right clicking it and clicking "Rasterize layer" from the menu. Your layer is then rasterized and has changed to an "image" layer.

Perfect. For the next step I recommend selecting your move tool from the tool menu. It's the top right little arrow in the tool menu. After you've selected that, click on the Edit menu at the top of the screen. Not the Edit menu from your web browser, though. If you see two Edit menu options, choose the lowest Edit. Then click on Free transform. This'll put a little box around your watermark.

 Below you can see the box that goes around your watermark:

Now you can rotate it. Hold your cursor towards the outside of the little box around your text watermark, click and rotate it however you like. You can also make the text a little bigger once you have the layer transformed. When you're done changing the tilt, size, etc of your watermark just hit the Enter key and you will get a dialog box that asks if you want to apply the changes. If so, click yes and  your rotation or size changes will take place. You can Free Transform your watermark as many times as you want to change the tilt or size. Mind, changing the size of the text once your layer is rasterized will make it look pixellated and lose quality.

There you have it for the text portion in Pixlr. A lot of these same basic principals can be used in Photoshop or other layer programs. For an image watermark, instead of a text layer you use an image layer. Simply open your image and drag it onto the picture you'd like to watermark. Change the opacity for that layer and you can also change the size of that layer the same way you do for the text. IMPORTANT: Be sure you save your newly watermarked image as a NEW file. Rename it. You don't want to save a watermark over your original file. For any other questions or clarifications feel free to post a comment, as I check them regularly. :) If there's a tutorial you'd like to see next month, let me know! Hopefully soon I can do a little speed drawing too so you can all see how I doodle my doodles.

Happy sticking! And happy watermarking!