Michelle Clement

Now that I’m back at The B, I get to read studio bulletins while I wait for the coffee machine…..and today I saw a bunch of my old friend George’s stuff, some of it including this cool George website that I thought might be fun to check out for anyone who’s seen the show…even those who haven’t, it’s a pretty sweet site. =) Check it out here! 

I was having serious George flashbacks while watching “Horton Hears a Who” the other day…cuz Horton loses the flower in the field of flowers, and George totally had the same scenario, just with eggs. And lucky me animated a bunch of those scenes….he he. So funny…=) Happy day!

It’s always so cool to see something I drew as a real-life, hold-it-in-your-hand product! =)

This is the acrylic monster stamp I designed for the April Monster kit over at The Dozens’ scrapbook kit club. Thanks for peeking!

This is a custom-order illustration/print I designed for my Etsy shop. My lovely scrapbook friend Barb saw my monster cards and proposed a “Monster Town” print idea for her son’s room. So here’s what I came up with:

I drew the design with good ol pencil and paper, and then scanned it. I added the commercial textures and painted it in Photoshop. =) It’s an 8 x 10 print, professionally printed off on 60lb. matte paper. You can find it, or ask for it to be printed for you, in my Etsy shop. Thanks for peeking!

Goodbye, solemn blue octopus:

Hello, cute, fun new Etsy Shop banner:

I updated the look and feel of my shop this weekend: I think this banner is much more “me” and more relevant to the items in my shop, even if the art direction is a little on the “omigod-that’s-saturated” side. =) it’s just so much more fun than the first version!

I was commissioned to design a simple, delicate banner for Karen Garner’s jewelry shop through Etsy. When doing a custom order like this, I always work in a few logical steps: See what the customer had in mind and is looking for; ideas they have, colors they want, specs. I sketch out a first batch of rough sketches, and once we’ve narrowed it down to one or two designs, one in this case, I then send out a grid with a few variations, like this:

Then, after a few tweaks, the final banner design is finished:

I, myself, don’t know much about website building or complicated html, so I then passed the finished banner along and Karen got it up and running on her webpage:

I drew the swirls/flourishes on the banner by hand, scanned them, and colored them in Photoshop. It’s much faster and more fun for me to use pencil when designing these things! A simple but fun project, those web banners. =)

These are a few of the card designs I made using my cleaned-up monster drawings to sell in my Etsy shop. There are 4 designs in total, please go here to the listing to see them all. I took the finished drawings and scanned them in, painted them in Photoshop, and then added layers of commercial textures and played around with effects until I got the textured look of the backgrounds. =) Monsters are so fun!

I’m a stickler for a clean line, I just can’t stop myself. Even my roughs are almost clean most of the time! Here’s a lil look into my process from rough to clean - I design my characters roughly and draw through; there are no revisions to the rough version on these monsters, as this project was for myself, not a client. Then, I clean them up using a good ol HB pencil and try not to suck any of the ‘life’ out of them in the process. =)

Rough version:

Clean version:

So, in the design process…concepts play a huge role! As you can see, the final design remained quite simlar to the first monster, but the umbrella idea was exchanged for candy at Dana’ request. Here are some of the first rough design ideas I had for the Monster stamp I designed for The Dozens Scrapbook kit club:

Drawn in the same scenario as Monster Number One.

I also doodle cute monsters in my spare time…almost, if not more often than cows.

These guys, however, are concept skteches for a short collaborative film I made on the DRIMN trip to France. Unfortunately, I don’t have final short film file that is compatible here in Canada - we were working with French software and aspect ratios and computers we couldn’t understand. The project turned out well - very video game inspired, lots of texture, paste, painting, and Flash animated. Oh, monsters.