flowers & flowers all around

Hey errybody! So got to do a new design now that I’m on break (woo woo!) and I finally just finished drawing & coloring! I had a less difficult time than usual finding color schemes for this one, most likely because I *finally* committed to using a smaller amount of colors. This might be my favorite one so far, and I’m really debating buying a new case (although I’ve already bought so many…) Zazzle has been adding so many great products that I want to customize and it’s all racking up to potentially take A LOT of time. Ahh well…. can’t complain, I find it entertaining to work on this stuff, and I really haven’t been doing anything productive over the past few weeks. Anyway, here are the newest designs and phone cases!

it’s been a while…

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since I last posted thanks to a little thing called “freshman year.” I have finally taken a break from all my *ahem*…”studies”…this weekend and created a few new designs! These are a little different than what I normally do, partially because I’ve recently become obsessed with these geometric patterns and partially because they were much simpler and less time consuming than my usual design. I was able to crank out a whole bunch of different color schemes because of this too, so what you see here is only a fraction of what I really created! These are my favorite colors though. And these are all iPhone 5 cases but I’ll be creating the 4 cases shortly. Anyway, check them out at http://www.zazzle.com/surpriselilydesigns* or by clicking the pictures! I’ll try to post more products soon…hopefully I’ll get some more time!

new squidoo lens..check it out!

So I just create my first ever Squidoo lens featuring my products. I’ve read a lot about how they can increase your traffic to your store and so after spending a late night writing descriptions for a few of my iPhone cases, I posted it (at like 4:30 am). Now I dob’t really know how getting traffic for squidoo works…do I just sit back and wait for people to find the page? Or do I try to promote it? Why does everythinggg need to be promoted….ah well, it’s not like I have anything like getting ready to go to college to do or anything. ANYWAY, if you wanna check it out you can find it at http://www.squidoo.com/cute-iphone-case-designs

new (and some old) design dump

I’ve realized, looking over my past posts, that I’ve been doing a lot of posting in the product category and not a lot in the actual design category. And honestly I like posting designs more than products because they always look so much better without being applied to anything. You can see the whole design, the colors are more vibrant because they’re in RGB rather than CMYK, and the proportions match the overall appeal of the design rather than having the compostion be skewed by the cropping and turning when they are applied to a product. So I’ve decided to post a lot of my latest designs here in a sort of “design dump”. They’ll also be useful to me after this because I’ll be able to pin them on pinterest (yayyyy pintererst!) So, without further adieu, here they are! (I really hope this doesn’t max out my upload capacity for wordpress…)

DIY Metallic Animal Mason Jars

Reblogged from uglyducklingtransformations:

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Happy Sunday everyone! I hope you are all having a good weekend. I was able to get out on Saturday and visit two wonderful vintage markets and an organic blueberry farm, and had a great time! Any of you who've been reading my blog for a little while have probably figured out that I really have a thing for mason jars.

Read more… 201 more words

This is so easy to do... I have to do this to hold my art supplies!

that moment when you figure out you could have been doing something a different way and it would’ve have cut the time it took you to do it by 90%

Yeah so that was me just now. or this week I guess. So for all the products I’ve put on my zazzle site, I’ve made each and everyone individually…adding names individually, adding tags individually, adding prices, categories, changing the shape adding descriptions…all individually. As you can imagine this took quite a long time. HOWEVER, I have just discovered that if I had simply taken the time to READ INSTRUCTIONS I could’ve learned how to “quick create” 10 times the amount of products in a fraction of the time. That’s a wonderful moment. I guess I’ll just carry on and try not to think about all the wonderful time I’ve wasted in the past….*sigh*….

On the bright side, this new quick create function has allowed me to create…wait for it…. OVER 1000 PRODUCTS! I’m so excited! mostly because I’ve heard from other sellers that once you reach that number you should see a spike in sales (so bring it on!) Now I have to go through and organize all those products…..again, *sigh*……..

If you want to go check out the new products, go to www.zazzle.com/surpriselilydesigns*

Here are the designs I’ve created products out of so far!

hey do this! if you want. you really don’t have to. but still do.

Okay so do this:

-google “cute iPhone cases” and click the very first link that comes up (not the one in the yellow box…the zazzle one.)

 

-look on the 3rd & 8th row of the iphone cases on that page.

 

-RECOGNIZE THESE?!?!

 

I guess the guys at Zazzle decided to put these at the top of their “popular cute iPhone case” list…which is sort of funny considering the second one hadn’t even sold before it was put on the list (how does that even work?) but nonetheless it’s there! And I’m DEFINITELY not complaining…this is like a TBA on steroids. Zazzle had a 4 hour 50% off iPhone case sale today and my sales skyrocketed! I couldn’t figure out how people kept finding my cases so I did a little snooping and figured out that my cases were there! It was a very exciting find if I do say so myself. And since I was stuck travelling all day today, it really gave me that extra boost I needed to make it through the San Francisco airport (which is by far the busiest airport I’ve seen in a while. I noticed another one of my cases (the one below) made it into special front page category as well (I think it was called “patterned iPhone cases”) and I made a sale on this one too because of it. Thank you Zazzle for whatever you did to bump my cases to the top!

 

 

~molly

lilies, lilies, and more lilies

I don’t know what it is about lilies but for some reason I always find myself drawing them. And I supposed that’s appropriate as this is Surprise Lily Designs. In this case, I started of doodling (I just got a new wacom cintiq tablet that allows you to draw directly on the screen as a separate monitor…sooooo cool) and for whatever reason a water lily just seemed to appear in my mind! So I kept doodling and coloring and was pleased with the end result. So this is a tad different then what I normally do, but nonetheless is another design!

~molly

I caught the bokeh! hah puns.

My latest design is also inspired from a few different tutorials I found online (hello google searches!) I found a tutorial describing how to create a bokeh effect and make it into an abstract art piece on photoshop and I really liked the end results. I also found a few more that featured creating cool gradient stripes and brushes, of which I also really liked the end results. So I thought, why not combine then, add a little twist here and spice there and make my own abstract design? So I did. And here it is! Bokeh pillows, cases, stamps, and some other stuff.

~molly

geometry…I’m making it fun. sort of.

I found a tutorial on how to do this really cool pattern with Illustator’s 3D feature on Abduzeedo.com and decided I wanted to integrate it into my own design! I’ve seen this pattern a whole lot recently…sort of a hipster, geometric take on the classic chevron pattern. I personally think it’s beautiful…it’s so clean and easy to follow. I decided to add some water color effects to it and give it a worn look, and the played with the colors so that I could get the look I wanted and really make it my own. I actually wanted to add more too, but I didn’t want to take a way from the beauty of the design itself…sometimes its better to just let some things be. For one of my next designs I’m taking inspiration from this repetitiveness and going to create some sort of scale pattern! Hopefully that works out. Here are my latest geometric designs!

~molly