audrey kawasaki
There is a post-it art show. How amazing is that? I would love to go if I was in the LA area – here’s more info if you are. I’m going to have to start taking post-its more seriously.
Here is more art from the show hosted by Giant Robot. Each original post-it is $25 at the show. Pretty cool! I could picturing putting one of these in a cute little frame.
Andrea Kang
stella im hultberg
The top post-it notes are by Andrea Kawasaki. She does beautiful erotic/unexpected paintings of women, usually on wood. I see her stuff all over the place and she’s one of my favorite inspiring artists. I went to her site and here is some handcut paper art she filed in “doodles.” I wish my doodles looked like this!
I think the size of the paper you’re working on definitely affects the outcome. I might have to try sketching on some smaller pieces of paper. How inspiring!
Images from Supah cute and Andrea Kawasaki.
Lettering Quest – Part two of Peru signs and lettering. I have a lot to post! There is beautiful hand drawn lettering all over Peru.
This Silencio is from Santa Catalina convent in Arequipa, Peru. This is the arch the nuns walk under to begin their vow of silence. I love the simple lettering and knowing the meaning of it kind of makes the lettering seem really powerful in an understated way.
More lettering from the convent.
Again, love the shadows these metal signs make.
You know I love flourishes!
The only downside about these types of signs, was that sometimes you couldn’t read them with all the heavy shadows. But beauty is fleeting right?
These metal bars make it look crossed out, but still cool. We ate here as well.. really good chicken curry.
Not sure if I love the “i,” but it works. Love the “CALLE” though.
This one is from Arequipa. If I knew how to make metal signs, I would make a ton of these.
I have started an attraction to rounded fonts. The numbers on this sign are really nice too.
Nice wooden sign, but even nicer blue detailing.
That’s Part two of Peru! Hope you are as inspired as I am for pretty signage!
I’m on a lettering quest – to get better at lettering for use in my own work, to appreciate the craft more when I see it (it’s harder than it looks to get a perfect letter), and to be inspired to keep creating.
I was in Peru last month and some of the signage is crazy amazing. They hand paint a lot of them and the ones I especially love are made of metal. They are fastened to the building with little metal posts and if you catch them at the right time of day, they make the most ridiculous shadows! The one of Cicciolina above is my favorite. I can’t even begin to understand the physics of this shadow at all at all.. I love how Restaurante gets all twisted at the end.
Here’s Part I of Peru signage. These ones are from Cuzco, such a beautiful city. Enjoy!
Another ridiculous shadow physics phenomenon.
Like this simple wire-inspired “font.”
This is where we stayed in Cuzco. You can see the steel posts from this angle.
After some glitches in the server world, we’re back online. And I’m letting it go……….
A good one for a Friday, this is my new print. Not sure if I like the blue or green better. I wanted to (definitely) give one to my mom and she doesn’t like blue, so I felt like I had to make a green one and now I can’t decide which one I like better – any opinions?
And here’s my initial sketch.. well, my 5th initial sketch.
Here’s the Happily Ever After final card! The colors surprised me.. I started with red and gold but it was starting to look a little too much like a neon Las Vegas sign. I like the dark purple/blue and gold.. it still seems fairytale-like to me.
I also tried to turn it into some wrapping paper. For the girly-pink-lovers, this should please the blushing bride. I love a good happily ever after story. I find myself not enjoying the movies that don’t have happy endings.. are you one of those people?
Here are some gobbling turkeys we ran across in Peru:: TurkeyGobble. A week before Thanksgiving, so I’ll just pretend these turkeys have happy homes now.
Enjoy! If the preview doesn’t work, here’s the link.
It doesn’t really sound like “gobble gobble” to me. Here’s a list I found of what other countries think it sounds like:
Afrikaans: Kalkoen kloek.
Albanian: krrull krrull
Danish: Kalkunen klukker.
English: gobble gobble
Esperanto: glu-glu-glu
French: glouglou
Hebrew: Tarnegoley hodu mekarkerim.
Montenegrin: glu-glu
Portuguese (Portugal): glugluglugluglu
Turkish: glu glu
Ukrainian: glyu-glyu
In Japanese, it’s goro-goro.. which also means lazy and lying around. Perfect for Thanksgiving! Happy Turkey day!
I like thinking about Happily Ever After. What do you need in your life to live happily? What are steps you can take to get closer to that?
Hola from Costa Rica! After 3 crazy weeks in Peru, we’re finally settled into an apt for 2 months. Peru is amazing, beautiful and cultural, but I can’t say it was the most relaxing trip we’ve taken.
To sum up, we planned a whirlwind of a trip including many hours on buses, a trip to Islas Ballestas (an island with sea lions, penguins, and a million birds), going to the Colca canyon and saw some condors, going to Lake Titicaca and saw the floating island communities, then ended up in Cuzco where we camped on a 2-day hike to end up at Machu Picchu. The altitude got to us at times, we got sick along the way and were tired most of the time trying to sleep on buses and planes. We might’ve crammed in too much but needed to see a lot. The next trip to Peru will be spent in one or two places. Actually probably most trips from here on out.
The next 51 glorious days in Costa Rica are not planned at all. We have a couple things to see around Quepos and Manuel Antonio (like a national park and 4-5 beaches) but the rest of the time will be trying to relax and devoting time to my cards and art! Above is the first thing I’m working on. Happily Ever After. I’m thinking of making it a print and/or a wedding card. I really need to beef up my wedding and new baby lines.
I’ve been making many risk-taking steps – quitting my secure job, getting some traveling done, setting up my life so I can work from home and have the time (and energy and motivation) to do it. However, I’ve been feeling more stressed. My next steps are to focus on relaxing and not stressing about not having a paycheck at the moment and living happily. When does happily ever after kick in? Probably when I’m happy with what I have and what I’m doing and really enjoying life. Some security that I’m going to make it as an artist/business owner wouldn’t hurt. I’m a huge worrier — also working on that.
Here’s a guy who looks really happy. Our first monkey-sighting on day 2!
Sorry the quality isn’t the best – he was moving quick! He’s a squirrel monkey. Maybe he’ll make it into some cards.
My first print!
How exciting! I loved making this – I incorporated the Empire State, Chrysler, Freedom Tower, Twin towers, subway, fire escapes, taxis and more. I love being inspired by NY and taking pictures everywhere I go. It’s one of my favorite things about living here – never a dull moment.
However, I do have some news.. I’m taking a “leave” from NY and traveling with my husband in Central and South America! I’m starting CYNLA full-time in November! I’m super excited to give this business my all. It’s been a struggle trying to work full-time at 2 jobs really.. and I don’t know when a better time would be to take this leap! I’m making my debut at the oh so exciting, giant National Stationery Show in May. I’m overwhelmed and putting all of my effort into this one. I really want Cynla to succeed and want to be able to support myself and my family doing something I really love.
I’m going to miss my job at Crain and hope to keep in touch with everyone! You know who you are!
NYC art print
I’ve been working and living in NY for almost 8 years! We’ll be back in 3 months so I can prepare for my tradeshow, but haven’t decided on where to settle down yet. Hopefully we’ll be inspired on our trip and all of life’s answers will be clear – right?
I’ve been dreaming of owning my own business since I started designing.. it’s finally happening. We’re living our dreams. Yes, we are living on a beach for a while, so it will feel dreamlike, but we’ve decided to live how we have always dreamed of living, learn how to not be stressed, creating art everyday and being inspired instead of drained. I’ll update you on the other side of this soul-searching vacation/mission : )
And here’s Mali who jumped into my photo shoot to play with the camera lens cap. Always a kitten at heart – even though she’s becoming cat-size.
I will continue to blog until I leave and hope to be posting from my travels!
If you like the NYC print, please click on this link and “admire” it on etsy, share it on facebook, or buy a print! I appreciate your support. You can use coupon MALINYC at checkout for 20% off your order. Offer good through October 19th.
Everyone deserves a day off.. including reindeer. Don’t you think?
However, a friend posted that santa should be saying something more along the lines of – will you pull my sleigh tonight. What do you think? Maybe I’m just projecting my desire of a vacation onto this dreamy reindeer. A possible inside message would be — Have a wonderful holiday vacation! Happy Christmas. Any thoughts?
I also made a reindeer dreaming of a pretty female deer who brings him presents – coming soon!
What would Santa say in a reindeer’s dreams? Check back for the answer later this week.
Leave a comment with what you think..
first found Jessica Hische’s work through an article about the Daily Dropcap – a blog she started that illustrated drop cap letters that people can download and use on their own blogs. See this pretty letter I?? Genius idea that catapulted her freelance business and got her a lot of work.
I have a ton of ideas that I want to accomplish so when I saw her site and all of her side projects, I was awed and amazed. She taught herself web design and now spends her free time creating resources for other designers, and just visual eye candy. She has the most amazing engagement site you’ll ever see, an enourmous, helpful roundup of printers, a community of people helping one charity a week, and Mom this is how twitter works – which I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve learned a thing or two from that one. Discovering her sites made me realize that I can work on all the ideas I have and not starting is really what’s holding me up.
Jessica Hische’s portfolio is a designer’s dream portfolio – that makes it sound like I can just order one – but she is so talented and works really hard. She calls herself “a robot.” Jessica has done work for some serious clients and worked on everything from magazine covers, book designs, to fonts that were dipped in chocolate. She focuses on hand lettering and type design – things I’ve recently fallen in love with since my lettering class. You’ve probably seen her work before. Images of her work above and below.
The top is a font she designed, which was 3D printed and dipped in chocolate for Dove. The love stamp selling this year. The font for Moonrise Kingdom. The bottom is a TYPE rug that she exacto-ed (probably not a word). See all of her inspiring projects on her site. I can’t get enough of them.
I was in Kinokuniya (pronounced key-no-ku-knee-ah) yesterday. It is FILLED to the brim with inspiration and cute things. The stationery section is amazing, the book selection is very artsy including a huge 3rd floor filled with photography, graphic design, manga, artsy books, etc. I could spend hours there. It’s located in NYC along the edge of Bryant Park – 41st Street and 6th Avenue. Go there and be amazed.
I also discovered teNeues‘s new gift-wrapped GreenNotes packaging in the gift section. It is so adorable and is my dream packaging. I’ve been on a neverending hunt on how to produce eco-friendly packaging for my cards that is recycled and affordable where I don’t have to order 10,000 pieces initially. TeNeues’s packaging has a cute little tie, a tag which tells you what’s in it and a space to write who it’s for, and is already gift-wrapped. So smart.
teNeues has an amazing collection of stationery, calendars and books. Good site to pickup some gifts.
I had first heard about teNeues on Jessica Swift’s blog. She’s one of my design idols and she licensed this design to create this box of cards above. So cute! I’ll write more about her later.
I’m not sure if these pictures do the packages justice. You’ll have to see them for yourself.
I’ll leave you with a catalog image from Kinokuniya, the paintings in the store, Star wars tengui towels. They made Star Wars pretty! ::
Kinokuniya photo found on pinterest.
Star wars tengui seen here.
It happened like this..
My mom went to meet a friend for lunch. They sat down (after buying some Quickdraw lottery tickets), and a dragonfly “parked on my opai.” (Which might be the Japanese word for chest or her own word – she makes words up.) Anyways, her friend Jerry told her not to chase it away – it’s good luck.
The dragonfly was hanging there for 15-20 minutes. My mom finished her meal, and her game came up. “I bet 6 numbers.. right, and they all came out and then I got 3x [the winnings]. I never play 6 numbers, I only play 5 numbers.” All of her 6 numbers came out.. the dragonfly flew off and she won over $3,000.
Morals of the story – keep an open mind and be nice to bugs. Maybe buy 6 numbers instead of 5 sometimes.
* For her birthday after this happened, I made my mom a lucky clover turning to dragonfly card – they’re similar in basic shape and I love seeing nature repeat itself. In this case, the luck aspect of clovers and dragonflies was also repeated. The pieces were handcut from origami paper.
Campbell made a limited edition of soup cans that resemble Andy Warhol’s original paintings. They are available only at Target for .75 cents! And also already on ebay for $10 for a set of 4. Might have to go to Target just to see these on the shelf. How cool.
Did you also know that Andy Warhol ate Campbell’s Soup everyday for lunch for 20 years? That’s probably why I make cards with coffee, cupcakes and ice cream on them..
[Image] [Original story found on Creativity]
I never thought I’d be making fish clouds, but here one is! You can probably guess who will be dreaming up this cloud if you’ve seen my Starry animal cards. Does it look real? Clouds are harder to make than they look. My technique is to paint them in photoshop. My other idea was to stare up at the clouds until I can get a photo of a fish cloud, but I wasn’t getting any work done.
Stay tuned for some cloud-gazing animals!
Oh and this is my 50th post! How exciting. I think I’ve come really far on my website and blog, and am hoping to focus my topics a little more in the upcoming year. I would love suggestions on what you want to see and hear about – so feel free to email me or comment. Thanks!
I’m sticking to it! The first Wireless Wednesday was great and so free-feeling. I knew I was spending a lot of time on the internet, but didn’t really realize how much time it would free up to do constructive things – things like cleaning my desk or making clouds.
I have a line of Starry-Eyed Animals, and it’s been on my to-do list way to long to make cloud animals. Above was my first attempt to make clouds digitally but I found a new, exciting way that will take a while and I haven’t had more than an hour to sit down and do it. Today’s the day! I’m putting it out there in the world (on the blog) so that I’m held accountable by someone (you) and will hopefully post some previews of my cloud cards tomorrow..
Have a good Wireless Wednesday and get some good stuff off the to do list!
[Again, to be clear I will be briefly checking work email and fulfilling orders – so keep ’em coming!] : )
Today, I thought i would share my business card designs. The top one is my very first design for my card business. I only did a run of 100 to start and I’m out! I thought I would do a new design every 100 cards. If you want to see the new design, you’ll have to order something : )
The bottom one I did for my mom’s sewing business. I sell her crafts in my own shop here. She makes amazing fabric goods and can sew just about anything. We’re selling her fabric envelopes and pea pods right now and pretty soon we’ll have bags and owls – you’ll have to see it for yourself. Check back next week!
I’ve been wanting to do a “wireless” day for a while.. a day when I don’t frantically check email, read every email that shows up, don’t get distracted by facebook or twitter or the millions of sources of great design that I can’t help but read and drool over, don’t turn on my tv.. I’m sure there’s more.
Today is the day! Wireless Wednesday. I’m going to try to make it a weekly thing. Don’t get me wrong, there are exceptions – I am checking my email and etsy non-frequently (business must go on), will answer customer inquiries, however I have an inbox full of messages — mostly of things to buy or make me say “I wish I was as successful as this designer” — and I’m just not reading them today. I’m not getting caught in the spiral of design candy that usually takes up most of my day.
I’ve been able to get a surprising amount of things done so far and it’s still the morning as I’m writing this.
- I cleaned out my purse – there’s a surprising amount of room in there when I threw out the collection of napkins, card ideas on scraps of paper, and receipts! oh the receipts.. I once read that women spend 7 years of their lives digging through their purses (sorry, can’t find the source but this has stuck with me).
- Organized my desktop of files
- Wrote this fancy blog post
- Working on my very own font! (sneak peak above – Wireless Wednesdays – what do you think?)
- Planning on drawing on my lunch break
And the day’s still young! I feel like I have a new, whole day in front of me.
According to those tic tac ads, people spend an average of 13 years watching tv.
I just read an article called The ‘Busy’ Trap fron the NY Times. It closes like this:
I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.
It makes me want to cry that I spend so much time online, at work, worrying, rushing.. when at the end of the day, those are the things that are the means to get to what really matters to me. These Wireless Wednesdays are going to make more time for me, to get my business stuff done so I can have that drink with a friend, go on more dates with my husband, and not have to say “I’m too busy” all of the time.
Where can you find the time you need?
Get my Unplug bear birthday card here for some motivation.
“I am committed to rainbows. I cannot escape the persistent call to use every single color in the crayon box.” by TulaPink
I love this quote. In a world where everyone’s trying to be more simple, I struggle with this. I like to add color and patterns to everything.. when I see a blank wall or shirt, I want to fill the white space. My designs seem to get more and more colorful the longer I spend on it. Sometimes I just have to start over because my brain and page are swarmed in colors and patterns. Sometimes that’s a good thing.
I find myself trying to limit my color palette, because that’s the “thing to do.” Simplify! Less is more! But sometimes it’s not, right?
TulaPink is one of my new favorite artists I’ve run across. She’s a fabric designer to say the least. She’s clearly not afraid of color or putting multiple subjects into a pattern. And if that’s not enough, she often hides other images in her work. For example, you’re looking at a ship, but it’s really a hat for a woman you didn’t see at first.. It’s so inspiring to see her fabric collections. Here’s some of her new work.
Isn’t it beautiful? Check out more of her patterns on Tula Pink’s website. Here’s a single pattern below and my favorite – I love turtles and little made up worlds and this just makes me want to go play inside it. I’d like to create more patterns like this, playing with scale and imagination. My next assignment (and yours if you choose to accept it) is to use all the crayons in the box!
Quote is from a blog post from TulaPink here.
Some inspiration for today regarding art..
and here’s some beautiful lettering by Lindsay Letters.
both of these I found on pinterest, posted by Poppytalk who posts a great amount of great things.
And this really resonates with me. Also found on pinterest here. Originally posted by Lavendar and Lillies but they didn’t include the original artist.
—–***—–
If you put all of these together, I will be seeing and designing 24/7.. not caring what people are thinking (instead of trying to incorporate people’s opinions and please everyone), traveling the world while finding my style and voice in my art, visiting my family and friends and really spending time with the people who matter. This sounds like a good lifestyle to me.
Follow me on pinterest for more inspiration.
http://pinterest.com/cynlacolla/
New boards I’ve added are “type,” “love tins,” and “tutorials I’ve tried and liked.” So much in life to see.. maybe start with my pinterest boards.
about me
Hi! Thanks for visiting. Drawing and creating has become a way for me to de-stress. I'd like to do it more often. This is a space for me to share my art and inspiration, my card designs, and to remind myself to stress less.
My card business and moving outside of NYC [gasp] is a new adventure in my life and I'm happy to be able to share it with you. Feel free to drop me an email cindy [ at ] cynla.com, leave a comment or two, or visit my website (www.cynla.com) and shop (cynla.etsy.com).
Happy de-stressing!
~ Cindy
