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!