What is Direct Creatives?

I have a little store on Direct Creatives. DC is a marketplace for small business owners to find tools to use for their own branding, customers, and social media presence.

If you’re a small business owner and you’re responsible for your brand, Direct Creatives has artists, creators, and coaches selling content that you can use: custom design services, consulting services, background papers, graphics packs, fonts, worksheets, and templates just to name a few. You can also find Trello Boards, hostess coaching, e-books, templates for Canva and PicMonkey, gift certificates, and more. You can find tools to help with your business that you didn’t even KNOW you needed.

If you want to add even more to your toolbox, you can sign up for Direct Creatives Insider. DC Insider is a monthly, virtual subscription box for small business owners. Each month features something different to add to arsenal. One month was about the basics of using Trello for your business. Another month was about Asana as a tool for your business. One month featured the ins and outs of using watermarks to brand your graphics and photos (I hosted that month!). Learn how to create e-Books in Canva or the basics of PicMonkey for creating graphics. Every month features something new. Joining DC Insider also gets you exclusive discounts from the store that’s hosting each month along with fun, themed graphics that you can use in your own branding.

In my Direct Creatives store, I sell branding packages. I will design your logo and help you establish a visual brand for your small business; including business cards, social media banners and cover images, profile pics, watermarks, rack cards, postcards, stickers, and more.

I also sell background papers and stock photography that can be used for social media and I’m constantly adding more of these as I create them. You can easily add text to these backgrounds and photos using design software like Canva and PicMonkey or Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. I have some other items like customizable holiday cards, customizable cootie catchers, wall calendars, and artwork in there too.

I will continue to add items to my storefront as I learn and figure out how I can use my skills to help small business owners rock their brand.

What do you need for your small business??

Product of the Month - January 2021 - Pocket Palette

I use and love a wide variety of products with my job; from paintbrushes, watercolor paper, and pens to backpacks, computer equipment, and hiking boots. My work has me almost constantly searching for tools to make it easier, more efficient… or sometimes just more fun. I’m going to start featuring a different product each month and see if I can remember to keep it up for a while. Sometimes the products will be art supplies, sometimes not. We shall see.

These posts will often include affiliate links if the product is available on Amazon. Shopping through these links earns me a few cents and it’s very much appreciated.

On to the POTM!

This month’s favorite product is the Pocket Palette from Art Toolkit. Not available on Amazon, but it can be purchased through their website. This little palette is a smidge larger than a business card and holds a variety of different-sized paint pans. Different-sized pans can be purchased on their website to fully customize your palette. There’s even a smaller palette available.

**Edit: in the summer of 2021, they added the new Folio Palette, which is bigger than the pocket palette; about 5.5x3.25 inches. Trying to justify getting one.

The bottom of the palette is a magnet that keeps the pans in place and makes them easy to remove, wash, refill, and organize any way you’d like. The lid works as a little palette to mix colors too.

I got my first one a while back when I bought the Art Tool Kit for myself. I have absolutely fallen in love with it and you can read about it here. A few months back, I bought a second Pocket Palette so I could separate my warm and cool colors (read more about it here). They both fit in my Art Tool Kit and the size of these palettes makes them ideal for plein air painting (that’s French for painting outside).

I even use them at home when I’m just painting in my office. I’m pretty particular when it comes to how my colors are laid out and in what order, so I love being able to reorganize from time to time; especially when I add new paint colors to my palettes.

What’s a great product you’d recommend??

Wasatch Midwifery & Wellness

When I was pregnant with my second baby, I opted to see a midwife and have him at a freestanding birth center instead of a hospital. I was low-risk and it ended up being far and away a better experience than when I had my first baby in a hospital four years prior.

One of the midwives I saw on a regular basis was Adrienne Brown. She was warm, friendly, straightforward, and she made me feel completely at ease while at the same time, I felt completely confident that my baby and I were very well taken care of. She hails from the realm of “you know your body and your baby best, I’m just here to support you.” What more could a woman ask for, right??

A few years ago she opened her own freestanding birth center and practice and I was honored to be able to create rack cards for her birth center. She had a logo already and some beautiful photos, so I created a few layouts and this was the final result. It’s honestly an easy job when there are such beautiful photos!

Check out her site! Wasatch Midwifery + Wellness

I love how they turned out!

Hike it Baby Social Media & Magazine Ads

Aside from the activity sheets and watercolor stickers I’ve had the pleasure of creating for Hike it Baby, one thing I create for them on a regular basis are social media graphics and magazine ads. They work with a bunch of really amazing photographers and I get to turn some truly beautiful photos into social media graphics and, when it’s in the budget or they can get free ad space, magazine ads. Below are some of my favorites:

The graphics below were printed in a couple of magazines like Backpacker Magazine, Outside Magazine, and a couple of smaller publications.

This one is easily one of my favorites, and I think it was the first time we were able to get a full-page ad in Backpacker Magazine. What a beautiful photo!

These are so much fun to work on and it is very exciting to see one of these ads in print!

New Look!

I mentioned a while back that it usually takes me a long time to design a logo for myself. I think I went six years once with the same logo simply because I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. I made a new logo in 2018, and I felt ready for something new again in 2020.

Here’s my new logo; nice and simple. I’m kind of loving it.

The past few years have brought a little bit of a shift in the focus of my work; focusing more on contract work with companies and branding. I have reorganized the artwork on my website to focus much less on event invitations and party stuff. I am still happy to create that stuff, but it’s no longer my main focus. It turns out that creating a logo for myself kind of goes hand in hand with figuring out what the focus of my work is. I have been tremendously lucky to get to contract with a couple of amazing companies in the last few years and I really love the work.

I printed my business cards with Overnight Prints and I love how they turned out.

In addition to this refocus, I have always had watercolor as a part of my life, so it was fitting for it to still be prominent in my logo. With the Covid-19 pandemic forcing us to cancel travel plans, I took to my painting to virtually escape to the places I had hoped to visit and I built a little branch of my business with it.

I started with creating a YouTube channel (with some serious encouragement from my oldest son) and I started posted timelapse videos of some of my paintings. From there I started having these paintings printed as stickers and, as of last week, they are now for sale. Click HERE to see what I have for sale. I am going to try and get two more paintings done before the end of the year and then I’ll end my Utah’s Public Lands Series and look at starting a different series; or I may just paint some of my favorite outdoor spaces. I already have a finished painting of Delicate Arch from Arches National Park, but I’m not sure if I want to do a series on National Parks. We’ll see.

One thing I do know, I want to eventually have high-quality prints available of these paintings. In January, it’s on my to-do list to research printing options and find out what it’ll take to have a limited number of prints made, maybe I’ll sign them, and what will be involved with shipping them to customers and make sure they make it there in good shape.

If anyone has recommendations on a printer, please share in the comments! Even better if they can print on paper that feels like watercolor paper.