my name is ruth, hello.

Happy Birthday Vintage

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My favourite thing to do is draw and paint. 

I make personalised hand painted cards, notecards and prints for every need you could want! Let me know what colours, names and styles you want, I can come up with something just for you.

Flower Power. 2013.

When I was in New York in November I came across Rifle Paper Company at the Museum of Modern Art. I loved the colour and typography of the cards and wondered what I could do with that inspiration.

When I experimented I tried with watercolour, but it felt quite weak, I wanted stronger colours so changed to gouache which gave a much stronger, brighter feel to the cards.

Watercolour and Gouache 

I decided to go with gouache and got painting…

Today I spent the day watching Dexter (this season is amazing) and having a play around with my christmas cards. Since the last time I blogged I got two beautiful christmas stamps from Present and Correct (link here) an incredible stationary website that has delightful vintage bits and bobs. I want everything from it basically.

Present and Correct had a lot of stamps on offer but I picked these two because SWALK reminds me of my uncle who used to always write them on books and cards or anything he gave me, and the snow globe because I am obsessed with snow globes. They make anything look pretty.

So, I decided I want to work with these to come up with a design.

So I went back and forth deciding what to go for. I knew I want to make the snow globe the focus of the card, so I decided to stick it right in the centre then work some of my doodles into the card. The one thing that will change is Christmas Greetings from Ruth to Christmas Greetings from London. I realised I will be sending more christmas cards than I have done in a while, because I won’t see the majority of my friends and family for christmas, so it makes sense to put in London.

On the inside, I didn’t want to write much, because I always feel writing happy christmas on the inside of a card that already says it on the front is stupid, so again I made the stamp the centre and doodled around the outside. Plain and simple, but I like it. 

With my business card stamp on the back of the card.

So now I have to work out how many cards I will have to make in about 2 or 3 days off I have before I need to get them sent off!

So here I am again, Christmas time coming up which means Christmas card making. I have had lots of ideas back and forth.

My first idea to use a simple hand written font with a simple christmas illustration along side. When I began experimenting, I couldn’t get the font quite right and felt it could end up being too simple and plain. I had a flick through my sketchbooks and went back to some work I did in the summer and looked into how I could tie that in to Christmas.

I worked on this typography below, and involved small christmas doodles in it to incorporate the season. I stuck with the obvious colour choice of red and green but I am looking to experiment with blue as well as maybe gold or silver. More photos to follow!

 

Designed and completed my thank you cards today. I used the font FFF Tusj Bold, downloaded off Dafont. I traced the type, and originally it is coloured in sketchily, but I loved the outline of the font, so focused on that. Unsure whether or not to put a border round them, especially the all blue ‘thank you.’ Work in progress!