One of the long overdue tasks gathering dust on my TO DO list is an update of this website. It functions fine as my blog, but for first time visitors, I imagine can be a bit burdensome to figure out. This was pointed out to me by a friend who was nice enough to be telling someone else about my work and wanted to show photos of the kind of stuff I do. He phoned me later to complain saying, “All I could find was pictures of your dogs! Where are your PAINTINGS???”

Whoops! There are a few original paintings for sale in my Etsy shop, but the vast majority of them have not been photographed properly. So they end up selling at local shops and markets, never making it to the website in any other format than my quickie phone snapshots as works in progress. Remedying this is my January project, though I have to admit – I’d much rather be painting!

I did web design and internet marketing for several years, so you wouldn’t think this would be a major undertaking, right? Well, you’d be wrong, my friend! My rustiness coupled with how fast technology changes (oh WordPress updates and your insistence on stripping any attempt at line breaks!) has made for some slowwww going. I’m realizing now that I should have just bit the bullet and started from scratch with a completely new design instead of the patch job I’m currently undertaking (which is ultimately proving to take longer than a complete redesign would have anyway!).

To make up for all that complaining (did I mention that since I’m self-employed, you get to endure my water cooler chat? Lucky duck!), I’m including a very cool vintage typography tutorial I stumbled on that teaches step by step how to create some of the beautifully intricate designs of vintage typography ads, like so:

credit: webgraphics.net

The author uses Adobe Illustrator, but I had no trouble following along in Photoshop. Whenever I look at that vintage style of lettering, I’m blown away by the detail, but I’ve never really looked at it to break it down. I think of it as always being hand drawn, but of course there are plenty of examples of lovely work like the one above that are completely computer based. And when you start to reallllly look, you notice that the fancy lines and swirls are often just combination of very simple shapes. Time-consuming, yes. But totally do-able.

Enjoy!