Cone of Shame

The next batch of images is already underway! The clip art-ing has begun again in earnest during my newly-regained free time. In celebration of finally earning my Veterinary Technician credential, this set will be veterinary/medical themed.  I'm already having a blast!  Enjoy this first taste: a pup with a grin, despite his cone of shame.

I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was a kid, but my goals changed as I got older. I spent a few years studying to be a teacher, major-hopping from Russian to Math Education to Family and Consumer Science Education. It took prompting from my husband to remind me where my true passion lay. He could see my pursuits in education weren't making me happy, and asked me one day, "What are you doing? You love animals!" He was exactly right! I took a year off school, then applied for a Veterinary Technology program. As soon as I began my classes, it was obvious I had found my calling. I love more than simply working with animals; the science aspect of the field absolutely fascinates me. I desperately miss school, and look forward to every scrap of new knowledge I can gain from journals and continuing education.

I hope a little of my passion for the field shows through in my next batch of clip art!

The Creepy Crawlies are Finally Finished!

**New set sale through 2/7/18**

After a long hiatus spent on schooling and getting my Veterinary Technician license (think veterinary nurse), I'm back at clipart-ing and the Creepy Crawlies are finally finished!  Find it in the Silly Pillies shop, on sale for the first few days. Enjoy!

This set has 26 items, including color and line versions of each image:
• Ant trio
• Butterfly
• Caterpillar
• Dragonfly
• Honey bee
• Ladybug
• Pill bug
• Praying mantis
• Snail
• Line art for each image (13 total!)

In celebration of finally getting my credential, keep your eyes peeled for a veterinary-themed set next!

Don't Bee Afraid!

I was wet-my-pants, top-of-my-lungs-ugly-sobbing terrified of bees as a child.  A few of my cousins and I inadvertently disturbed a hornet's nest when we were very small, and I watched myself get stung in slow motion.  He got me right on the web between two fingers of my outstretched hand.  My grandma was with us, along with an uncle or two.  They dragged us screaming kids back up to the family cabin we were visiting and slathered our stings in baking soda.  A soul-wrenching phobia was born that day.

Some of my most embarrassing memories involve being at some kind of gathering in a park, a bee landing on my soda or near my paper plate, and mini-me breaking down into ridiculous hysterics until the little monster finally decided to move on.  I laugh at the memories now, but at the time I truly believed I was about to die.

By some slow-working miracle I completely overcame my fear as I grew up.  Today I love looking at bees, and am perfectly fine going about my business if one decides to investigate me.  They really are fascinating creatures, and they're so beautiful!  Their "culture" is extremely interesting, too.  I love watching them perform their dances in nature documentaries, telling other bees how to get to delicious, nectar-filled meadows they discovered in their wanderings.

Ants go marching

Life has gotten so busy!  With work and school, I sometimes feel I barely have time to breath, let alone draw.  The craziness of life has me feeling a bit nostalgic this morning.

I attended North Kindergarten in Heber City, UT.  It was a single-grade school that served all the kindergarteners in the little valley.  My time in Mrs. Tolley's class was wonderful, even if I was sadly missing a peach crayon and all drawings of family depicted orange or yellow skin.

My favorite memories of North involve spending time in the cafetorium with other classes to watch Doctor Seuss cartoons or sing at the top of our lungs.  One of the songs we learned was "The Ants Go Marching." That song marched through my mind as these three ants came into being.

As I have mentioned before, I was fascinated by bugs as a child.  I loved letting ants crawl around on my hands, rotating my wrist and elbow to keep them in view.  I would stare, entranced, at their investigation of the little hairs on my arm as they tickled their way across my skin, waving their tiny antennae.  I'm ashamed to admit that when I learned about the magical properties of magnifying glasses, I did fry a few of my little friends.  Thankfully, my now-overactive conscience kicked in as I got older and returned to watching, rather than torturing.

Today I seem to have lost a bit of that awed wonder, and am more annoyed than entranced by the little creatures when I discover them indoors.  It's good to time travel in daydreams to recapture the innocence (and sometimes mischievousness) of childhood.  It helps us realize that though we may have changed with age, the world around us holds just as much magic as it did when we were small.  We simply must slow down and re-learn how to see it.

A mustache and curly toes

It's been quite a while since I was able to work on my clip art!  After taking a long hiatus to deal with a family tragedy, followed by a busy semester, I'm ready to get back into the saddle.  This image was mostly completed a few months ago, but I recently added the finishing touches.  It's a pill bug (or potato bug or roly poly...), and he's happy to meet you!

When looking at pictures of these fun little creatures so long ago, I noticed their antennae were below their eyes.  It makes sense, once you realize they're crustaceans, rather than insects.  I decided to stay true to that in the clip art, and give my little friend a mustache.

The feet were originally straight, but my husband suggested curling the ends up, and I love the way it looks!  It adds a bit of fun and gives the impression of tiny little feet.

I've also nearly finished the ladybug, and plan to start on the next creepy crawly in the next few days.  Hopefully the set will be complete in a month or two!

Potato Bugs and "Insects"

School is keeping me quite busy, but in my spare moments I'm working away at a new set: Creepy Crawlies!  So far these two kids have come to life, soon to be followed by a ladybug and a potato bug.  The ladybug sketch morphed into being quite easily, but the sketch for the potato bug turned out to be challenging.  I turned to an image search for inspiration.  I knew the cute little creatures had many nicknames and "potato bug" wasn't the most common, but I was surprised when my screen was flooded with this creepy guy:

Image by Franco Folini
Wikipedia: Jerusalem Cricket

I got distracted reading about this fascinating, alien-looking creature, but eventually a search for "pill bug" turned up the familiar little armadillo of the insect world and the sketching resumed.  This image, in particular, has been a wonderful inspiration for his face!

Image by Peter J. Bryant
UCI: Pill Bug (Wood Louse)

Thanks to this experience, "potato bug" is definitely not in consideration for naming the image in the finished set!

I have always been mesmerized by (friendly) insects.  As a kid, I loved finding them under rocks and letting them crawl around on my hands.  Pill bugs were easily my favorite creepy crawly, and my love for them continued into adulthood.  I didn't think they could get any more fascinating, but recently I learned that while roly polies play the role of insects, they are actually crustaceans!  It's easy to see, now, thinking about their armor and that of a lobster, but at the time I was quite surprised.  That discovery lead me on a path through Wikipedia, following breadcrumbs and links through more and more distantly related species, until I discovered the giant isopod:

Image by unknown photographer
Wikipedia: Giant Isopod

Now, that thing is cool!  Look at those fantastic eyes.  It looks like he's smiling, too.  His face would be perfect on an alien.  I'm thinking future set?

Well, that tangent aside, keep an eye out for more posts as the Creepy Crawlies slowly find their way out of my imagination and into the next set!

Colorful Teddy Bear Playing Cards!

***New set sale through 11/16/15!***

It's been a while, but I'm back!  I've finally wrapped up the finishing touches on the teddy bear cards and uploaded the set to the shop.  Check it out:

Add some fun to your lessons and games with this teddy-bear-themed playing cards clip art! Want to print the deck out, but having trouble getting the fronts and backs lined up just right? Included in the set are digital papers you can print on the reverse side of a sheet of cards, thus avoiding the frustration! Each of these 118 pieces was a joy to create. I hope these silly teddies bring you and your students a little joy, too!

Contents:
• 54 colorful playing cards with teddy-themed royalty
• 4 teddy-themed card backs
• 4 matching 8.5 x 11 inch digital papers
• Black & white versions of all images (56 total!)

I'm ready!

What an inspiring week!  I am beyond grateful for the encouraging and exciting atmosphere of the 2nd annual Teachers Pay Teachers conference.  I came away with some great advice and ideas for how to improve my clip art and my TpT store.  The main points from the workshops I attended were: 1) the importance of treating a TpT store like a job, not a hobby, 2) be a person, not a salesman, when interacting with customers and 3) find a niche and stick to it.

I've been very casual with the creation of my sets, putting time into them only when I felt the urge, and creating things based on whims, rather than clear plans.  The wonderful conference, and the discovery that my clipart was used in a recent TpT blog post, have inspired me to change the way I think about Silly Pillies.  If I put in the effort, exciting things will happen!

On that note, here is a (raw) taste of the next set: Teddy Bear Playing Cards!

Happy Valentine's Day!

The Valentine's Day Clip Art pack is finished, just in time for the holiday!  Check it out in the Silly Pillies shop and add some Valentine's Day fun to your projects with this 26 piece set!

The set contains:
• 13 curly hearts
• Pink mailbox
• Valentine
• Beautiful rose
• "Bee" mine bumble bee
• Cute butterfly
• Snuggly Valentine's Day teddy bear
• Line art for each image (7 total!)

"Bee" mine, Valentine!

My latest images have been Valentine's Day themed.  It's not my favorite holiday as an adult, but I do love the cute decorations!  Making this clip art is reminding me how much fun the day can be for my creative side.  I liked it much more as a kid, when teachers gave us supplies for creating little mail boxes or pockets for valentines.  Mine usually ended up covered in paper doilies.  I also loved picking out valentines and figuring out which ones to give to whom.  It was important to be careful that no card could possibly make the recipient think you "liked" them!

Candy is one thing I still enjoy about the holiday.  I hate cheap, gross American-made chocolate, like the kind that takes over at Easter.  For some reason, though, I absolutely love those $1 heart boxes with four really cheap chocolates inside.  I buy several of them every year!  Conversation hearts, on the other hand, are absolutely disgusting.  If I wanted to eat chalk, I would go for a regular stick that wasn't pretending to be candy! ;)

Clipping in a Winter Wonderland!

Life has been quite crazy lately, but I've finally managed to squeeze in the creation of another set.  Check out the new Winter Clip Art pack in the shop, on sale for the first two days!

Winter is one of my favorite times of year.  I've lived in Los Angeles for the last few, which means I missed out on all the fun (and frustration) of snow.  I still love it, and the season just doesn't feel right without it.  I have so many memories of creating paper snowflakes in school and for fun at home, and I'm absolutely fascinated by photos of actual snowflakes taken with powerful microscopes.  Nature is full of such beautiful art!  As an adult I still love cutting little shapes out of folded paper, then opening it up to see what amazing patterns I unknowingly created.  I've discovered that the more I cut out, the more intricate and beautiful the snowflake becomes.  The trick is to leave as little paper behind as possible, while making sure you never cut all the way across.

For Christmas my mom surprised me with an Adonit Jot Touch with Pixelpoint, and I love it!  It allows me to use my iPad to create my clipart, and I then refine it on my computer.  I made paper snowflakes over the weekend and loaded photos of them into my favorite drawing app, ProCreate, then used my new "toy" to trace over them and create the four snowflakes in the set.  I hope I've done justice to these wonders of nature!

Super Cyber Savings!

I haven't been able to work on images lately because school has demanded all my time and my computer chose to stop working a couple weeks ago.  I'm back from cyber-death, though, and as soon as finals are done in a few weeks I'll be able to spend time cranking out the clip art!  In the meantime, check out the Cyber Monday sale coming up on Teachers Pay Teachers.  Everything in my shop will be 20% off, and if you use the promo code TPTCYBER, you'll get an additional discount!

Enjoy your weekend and your holiday season!  Keep your eyes peeled for updates near Christmastime!

Spooky Clip Art and Free Candy!

Just in time, the Halloween Pilly Pack is complete and available for download!  As usual, this new pack will be 50% off for a limited time.  The sale goes through Halloween, so click here to get the discount before it's gone!

To celebrate my favorite holiday, I've also decided to give out candy!  Download your deliciously free Pilly Present here, but don't eat it all at once!


The Halloween Pilly Pack contains 26 spooky images:

• Frankenstein's monster
• a cheerful ghost
• a musing mummy
• a wistful witch
• a batty bat (I've had the song from Sesame Street stuck in my head ever since I drew that one!)
• a clever kitty (2 versions, one with a glittery hat!)
• a jolly Jack-O-Lantern
• colorful candies (10 Halloween-y colors!)
• and transparent line art for each image (8 total!)

The Candy FREEBIE contains 7 tasty pieces:

• 6 colorful candies (cream, blueberry, chocolate, lemon, cherry, and bubblegum!)
• 1 transparent line art image

Enjoy your clip art and have a happy Halloween!

Yay Fonts!

Coming soon eventually: Fonts!

I am beyond excited to learn how to create fonts.  I finally earned enough from my clip art to justify purchasing font creation software, which is something I've wanted to do for several months.  Today I created the first rough draft of a font from my handwriting.  So far it only has the alphabet and a few punctuation marks, but it turned out much better than I thought it would!  I was sure it would clearly look like a first attempt.  I think I've discovered a new hobby!  Now I just need to study up on how to tweak a few things, and I'll be able to start working on fonts to put in my shop.  The most exciting part: now I can actually type on my product thumbnails, rather than placing images of each handwritten letter by hand!  (Yes, using an installed font would have been much less tedious, but it was so fun to see my handwriting on the screen!)

In the meantime, I'm still drawing away for my Halloween clip art pack.  Here's a happy Jack-o-Lantern to brighten your day!

This is Halloween!

I absolutely love Halloween!  I have been swamped with homework and studying for exams, but I just couldn't let this month go by without creating an appropriately themed clipart pack!  As someone with a late October birthday, I always felt like the nearby holiday was an extension of my own celebration.  Nearly every single birthday party I had as a kid was costumed and full of witches, spiders, and creepy things.  Though I'm too old to go trick-or-treating, and don't yet have kids of my own to take around (in exchange for a modest candy-fee), I do enjoy answering the door and greeting all the cute little monsters begging for sweets.  

I still remember my 3rd or 4th Halloween, being carried around asking for candy, dressed as a parrot with green dye in my hair.  I have never been the typical trick-or-treat-then-binge-till-I'm-sick kind of a person.  Even as a kid I would eat a few candies at a time, and frequently have to empty a few pieces out of my bag every year from the previous haul.  I love candy, and I like it to last!

Not only do I love Halloween candy, but I just can't get enough of the cute decorations!  (I hate the creepy stuff.)  If I could, I would decorate with adorable pumpkins and grinning monsters all year long.  And, speaking of pumpkins, have you ever made a pie from a fresh one?!  There are no words...

There is so much to enjoy about this fun holiday, and so many great ideas and opportunities for creativity!  I can't wait until I finish school and someday have kids of my own to dress up as little mummies and Frankenstein's monsters.  I hope I'm able to help them love the holiday as much as I do!

Shoot for the Stars Pilly Pack!

I've gotten quite busy with school, so my clip art creating has slowed down a bit.  I snatched up every spare moment I could and the star-themed set is finally finished and uploaded!  Check it out and Shoot for the Stars!  Now available in my TpT shop.

Celebrate your students with this 33 piece star-themed clip art pack! Show them they're special by framing their cute faces among the stars!


This out-of-this-world pack includes:

• star-shaped picture frame, with and without a transparent glow
• 5 star-themed phrases to pair with the frames:
• "Super Star!"
• "Math Star!"
• "Spelling Star!"
• "Science Star!"
• "Reading Star!"
• 5 large images designed for banners or poster/bulletin board titles:
• "Super Stars!"
• "Math Stars!"
• "Spelling Stars!"
• "Science Stars!"
• "Reading Stars!"
• shooting star
• smiling star
• smiling rocket ship
• "Shoot for the Stars!" image
• transparent line art for each image (15 total!)
• Bonus! Star field digital paper in 2 sizes (8.5x11 and 12x12)

Shoot for the stars!

The next pack is going to be stellar!  Full of stars, a rocket, and fun star-related phrases to inspire and praise the super stars in your class.  My favorite images in the pack, so far, are the cute star picture frames.  Kids will love seeing their faces shining in the stars with titles like "Math Star!" "Reading Star!" and "Super Star!" congratulating them on a job well done.

I've always been fascinated by stars and space.  As an adult I can't get enough of science and nature documentaries, and the majority of the ones I truly love are about space and animals.  As a kid I enjoyed looking up at the stars and identifying the handful of constellations I knew.  My favorite has always been Orion.  Every time I left home, seeing that same group of stars helped keep the homesickness at bay.  The sky was the same, no matter where I went.  On long drives I was fascinated by how the stars seemed to follow us.  I would lean as far as I could against the window and stare at them as we zipped down the highway.  I wished on them, too.  I had such a happy childhood, and I wanted every kid to be as happy as I was!

Bookworms are in the Shop!

Computer sluggishness and my inner perfectionist couldn't stop me from getting the bookworms finished and in the shop today.  This new image pack is 50% off through Saturday, August 23!  With the big sitewide sale today you can get it for even less!  Click here to check it out!

These cute little bookworms come in 7 different colors. Add some color and smiles to your presentations with this 36 piece set. I've been an avid "bookworm" for as long as I can remember. I hope these images help ignite the inner bookworms in your students, too!

Contents:
-reading bookworm boy in 7 colors
-reading bookworm girl in 7 colors
-smiling bookworm boy in 7 colors
-smiling bookworm girl in 7 colors
-2 bonus reading students! (1 male and 1 female)
-transparent line art for each image (6 total!)

I'm a Bookworm, and I'm Proud!

Bookworms are coming, just in time for the big Back to School Boost sale tomorrow!  The price will be extra low, so tomorrow will be the time to buy!

This set will have several colors of these cute worms, stacks of books, and students excitedly reading.  Make lessons about reading colorful and fun!

I have always been an avid reader.  As a child I kept a huge stack of my favorites on a shelf over my bed, and I would stay up hours longer than I should have cycling through each one.  My favorite series growing up was J. K. Applegate's Animorphs.  Every month I used my allowance to get the latest book.  I wished with every beat of my little heart that I could gain the ability to morph into animals and join Jake, Cassie, Rachel, Marco, and Tobias in their fight against the evil Yerks.  The most memorable books always involved animals.  I absolutely loved disappearing into those worlds where anything was possible and talking animals could be my dear friends.

To this day science fiction and fantasy have a special place in my heart.  Nothing beats transporting myself into a fantastic world full of strange creatures and courageous heroes.  I no longer dream of the ability to morph into a guinea pig, but I do think it would be quite enjoyable to live as a hobbit in the Shire.  (Post Return of the King, of course!)

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Zoo Animals Clip Art Now Available!

It's finished!  Remember, all clip art packs are 50% off for the first three days they're in the store.  Get this one for only $2.00 through Tuesday, August 19th!

Add a wild side to your projects with these 12 zoo animals, available in my TpT shop!  I tried to strike a balance between making them look realistic and a little bit cartoony.  They turned out wonderfully!  I look forward to creating expansion packs in the future.  Except for the gorilla, who was a bit camera shy, every image in this set is based on a photograph or video I took at the Los Angeles Zoo.  I thoroughly loved creating these critters; I hope you love using them!

This clip art pack contains:
-Koala
-Masai Giraffe
-North American River Otter
-Greater Flamingo
-Hippopotamus
-Sumatran Tiger
-Asian Elephant
-Grevy’s Zebra
-False Gharial (a relative of crocodiles and alligators)
-Western Lowland Gorilla
-African Lion
-Meerkats
-transparent line art for each image (12 total!)

There were many other animals I wanted to draw, so keep your eyes peeled for more zoo packs in the future!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin