My Experience with MATS B: Paper

Hi again!! How's your week been going? How's your summer so far? The weather last week was hot and muggy and we only got a very little rain. Thank goodness for air conditioning! My girls were at day camp all last week so I managed to keep to a regular work schedule. This week they are home with me and I will be adjusting my workload so I can spend some fun time with them :) If you've been following me on Facebook (click here to be taken to my page) you already know that this past week I've been working steadily painting and designing icons for one of my MATS B projects. Yay for moving forward!!

Last week I talked about my experience last November with the Make Art that Sells course MATS A, you can read that again here. This week I'd like to talk about the MATS B course I'm taking and what's different about it vs the MATS A course. Also, because my last post was so long, and because I'm still working on MATS B assignments, I thought I'd break up these posts a bit more to give your poor tired eyes a rest from my ramblings :)

MATS B is another portfolio building course and is considered to loosely be a continuation of the MATS A course, though you don't have to do them in that order. The subjects included in MATS B include paper, baby/children's apparel & decor, scrapbooking, editorial, and party paper. Unlike the one I took in November though, this one is completely self-paced, do it in your own time. I enrolled for the course when it was on sale in late December (I definitely advise going for the sales, it was a great deal!).

I started downloading and reading the first assignment immediately. Now, the very first thing I have to say about the self-paced course is that it's a lot more difficult to keep to a schedule when you have almost 2 years to complete the course. There's no push except what you give yourself. On the one hand this is wonderful because it allows you to work at your own speed. You can take all the time you want to research and try things out before you commit to your finished piece. On the other hand, it makes it much easier to drag out the research portion, to allow your inner perfectionist to block your efforts to work, and basically take two months instead of one week to finish your first assignment.

Here is my first assignment completed for Paper:

My finished piece for Paper. The topic was a holiday greeting card using cookies.

I actually have seven more sketches in the same theme but with different images that eventually I'd like to paint up as well. This piece I did completely traditionally. It's done on water-colour paper with gouache. I didn't add any lettering because at the time I was not very comfortable with my lettering skills and I wasn't confident that it would turn out well.

When I finished this piece and looked at the calendar, I couldn't believe how long it had taken me! The time felt like it flew by! I felt pretty bummed that it had taken me so long to complete the first assignment, so much so that I didn't jump right into the second one. Okay I admit it, I was scared. I felt like a failure, which I admit wasn't fair to me because I'm still very new to the whole illustration schtick and scheduling is one of the many things I will struggle with, as all Freelance Illustrators do. But it took awhile for me to pull myself up and open the second assignment, which I will talk to you about next week so stay tuned :)

In the meantime, have a great week and if you're looking to see more of my work or my current progress you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook. If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave me a message below.

Until next time,

Mandy

If you're interested in commissioning me, click on the Contact Me button at the top to send an email, I'd be happy to answer any questions :)

Mid-June

I have to say that considering how horrible the weather was this past week, and how miserable I have felt with allergy season in full swing, I didn't realize how productive I was until I started compiling the images for this week's summary :) This is most definitely a lesson in keeping up momentum, even when you feel like being a bump on a log.

My lettering practice continues on a semi-regular basis and I thought
I'd try branching out a bit with these to add design elements with a little layout practice :)

I've always wanted to paint feathers and this font was so much fun to do - it's my new favourite :)

Aside from lettering practice, I chose to spend the morning at one of our many parks to get out of my usual space and do some painting and sketching while enjoying the outdoors. It was so much more fun that I expected it to be. The park was pretty quiet that time of day, though I did get to meet the most adorable puppy :) My intention was to get out some inspirations that had been itching in my brain. I wanted to do some light painting and work on some line drawing work to help with future designs and patterns. I also really wanted to sketch out some of the waterfowl.

This was a fun exercise in creating a pattern. I laid down some watercolour paint blobs first
and when that was dry I drew over them with a micron pen.
Then for extra fun, I added splatter and drop marks in watercolour.

Some line work with lilies, ivy, milkweed and ground cover.

Ducks are so much harder to sketch than
 I thought, they keep moving!!

Rose flowers from a bush near home that
I had taken a picture of. I really like the
way these turned out :)

And of course, this weekend was Father's Day and I thought I'd surprise my husband with a card made by yours truly. To keep it manly enough I thought I'd go with more feathers for the wreath. I hand lettered the text and even did a little lettering on the inside to let him know what a wonderful dad I think he is to our two girls. I think he really liked it :)

I've also been working on my digital design skills with Photoshop and Illustrator by following along on tutorials with DesignCuts.com. The site is cool because they give you the elements you need to follow along with the design and you learn for free. I haven't saved my two posters as pics yet but I will show you my progress on that next week.

That's it for last week. Next time I hope to have a few more wreaths to show you for teacher gifts for my girls, they have 2 teachers each - that's a lot of wreaths!!

Until next time :)

Mandy

If you're interested in commissioning me click the Contact Me button up at the top to send an email, I'd be happy to answer any questions!