In preparation for having booth at a couple of local arts and craft last summer, I started creating stickers that were more wordy and graphic design-y; fun and inspirational and not a watercolor painting.
Hike it Baby Turtle Fur Tube
I have been a contract graphic designer for Hike it Baby for a long time and this year I got to work on an awesome design for a Turtle Fur tube and it became available just this month.
A Mom’s Superpower to Combat Busy Life
You ever have times in your life where there is just so much going on, you don’t feel like you can catch your breath? Life has been busy for us these months; pretty much from April-on. It’s the kind of busy where I’ve done plenty of Instagram-worthy things, but haven’t managed the time to post about them. And then when I do have a minute to breathe, I don’t want to do anything at all.
Evolution of a Brand: Cari Hollis
Cari has been a dear friend of mine for more than a decade and, funny enough, we were friends long before we ever met in person. We “met” on an online, wedding-planning forum. We got married within a few months of each other and formed a friendship with a large group of women. She started her photography business shortly after her wedding and she asked me to design a logo and branding for her. We finally got to meet when I hired her to shoot some family photos when my oldest was about nine months old.
The flower motif and colors were inspired by the custom camera strap she found on Etsy. We designed a bunch of logo variations, business cards, website buttons, and more. We even did gift certificates and advertising graphics for social media.
A few years later, Cari was ready to rebrand and she had NO idea what she wanted for her new logo. She had also added the role of a birth doula and birth photographer to her repertoire. We tried a lot of different concepts, color schemes, fonts, and graphics and, after a lot of back and forth, we finalized this design. This is still one of my favorite logos that I created for her.
After many years as an amazing photographer, she decided to hang up her camera and delve into a couple of different direct sales companies and social media consulting, and since they usually require you to use their pre-designed graphics, we went a different direction and branded Cari all on her own.
This way, her brand remained the same no matter what kind of business she was working on. The bokeh backgrounds paid homage to her background as a photographer.
Earlier this year we rebranded again. Cari wanted to keep the gardenia as a graphic element and we kept the typewriter font because it’s a favorite of hers. We went with the same color scheme for the most and will keep the bokeh backgrounds, but added new fonts and a watercolor motif too.
She hasn’t been able to update her website with her newer branding yet because she’s busy running Direct Creatives!
You can watch the TikTok video I made documenting how I created her new logo here.
I love how Cari maintains the same general color palette with the purple and aqua.
I’m curious where her branding will head next!
2022 Sandy Visual Art Show
Draper International Arts & Crafts Festival
It was such a treat to have a booth at Draper’s International Arts & Crafts Festival a couple of weeks ago. This is only the second year that the City of Draper has put on this festival, and it was noticeably larger than last year. There was over 100 vendors selling crafts, art, jewelry, textiles, and more.
They had lots of different performances on a main stage. Here is a link to a YouTube video that the city made about the event. I’m not in the video at all, but it gives you a good idea of the different booths that were there. There were lots of different food vendors too, which is usually my favorite part of any festival.
I had my 10x10 foot tent again, but this time I was somewhat limited to keeping all of my stuff inside my booth rather than letting it spill outside a bit. I also used two of the side walls to help with the wind and to give my booth more of an entrance and exit path. So this made it impossible for me to sit down and paint like I did at Draper’s Art in the Barn.
This turned out to be a good thing.
One: the whole festival was only from 10am until 4pm, so it was overall a very short day.
Two: it rained! Right around 2:15pm, a summer thunderstorm rolled in and it started raining. It rained hard enough to for me to move all of my stuff UNDER the tent and away from the edges. Of course, this was right when my taekwondo studio (along with my kids) was beginning their performance on the main stage too. Thankfully, I was able to watch it via Facebook Live.
It only rained off and on for an hour and then the sun came back out. Overall, it was a beautiful day, Quite a few friends were able to stop by my booth and say hello and buy a few stickers and prints. I had lots of kids stop by to pick up coloring pages or to just sit and color for a while.
A new thing that I had at my booth was a handful of blank, steel water bottles and tumblers. If you bought one, you could choose any two stickers to put on it for free.
Click on this image to see the Reel I posted about my booth.
All in all, having a booth at this festival was a really fun experience and I will definitely do it again next summer. Both experiences with a booth at a festival and an art show have made me want to search online for different festivals to judge the booth fees and potential travel expenses to see if it may be worth doing more often. I had a couple of people tell me that I would do well having a booth at shows down in Hurricane and St. George.
Off to do more research….
Draper's Art in the Barn
Samy and Leo Painting
My friend and taekwondo master, Samery asked me if I’d recreate this photo of her with her husky, Leo in watercolor and I was more than thrilled to do it for her. Corona Arch is one of my favorite hikes in Moab, UT.