Over reading break, I have been trying to make as much art as possible for the craft fair. However, my original goals were much to ambitious. I have realized over the course of this past week that art making is the least time consuming part about gathering enough merchandise. My grand plan was to make prints of a few of my new and older paintings. However, I did not account for the time it would take to have the prints made and so, when I went to Speedee Printers and was told it would take a month, I was very disappointed. I cheered myself up by telling myself I could just sell original work and make lots of stickers… I would never have expected how agonizing the sticker making was.
To start I painted four separate designs on small canvas’. Here they are…
I was really excited to make the stickers because my partner’s family has a Cricut and in my head, that meant I could make them for really cheap. No sir.
Before even starting the process, I had to buy a blade, a mat, and sticker paper for the Cricut. Once that was accomplished, I had to figure out the program. It is only fair that I give all the credit for this project to my partner’s mom because she did all the problem solving for me (and there were a LOT of problems). First off, making my paintings into a digital format was a nightmare. We had to take a perfect photo of them, then we had to fix them up in photoshop (which was so frustrating), and then we had to upload them to the cricut (also frustrating) .
Once that was all figured out, we had to print the designs onto sticker paper but the printer refused to cooperate. I had not even realized we were going to have to use the printer originally so I hadn’t considered this as a potential barrier. Next were the issues with the evil Cricut machine of doom. Six hours in, after finally printing some nice designs and calibrating the Cricut ten million times, we were ready for the last step, cutting them out. The Cricut must have sensed that things were finally going well and decided to go berserk and chop up all our stickers… Pain.
Anyway, after about twelve hours of work we finally managed to make two of the designs into stickers. If it weren’t for my partner’s mom, I would have given up a couple hours in to this project. Each sticker will now cost a thousand million dollars for the amount of effort they required. Needless to say, next time I want to make my art into stickers, I will be using digital art and paying for a company to print them.
Here is the final result, please appreciate these little things in all their glory (and come buy one on November 30th!).
