MyFursona.com

May 16, 2008 4:52am

As some of you might know, I'm a sticker fiend. When I was little I tried making my own stickers by drawing on scotch tape with ballpoint pen, and back then I was pleased with my products! =D But I'm a big girl now, so my stickers are looking a little better after practicing for over twenty years. I started making my own with a Xyron 510 (a powerless craft machine) and a pair of scissors in late 2007. But I had to cut them all out by hand with scissors, which hurts my hands, takes too much time, and ultimately raises the price of the stickers because I have to pay myself for my time.

So I started getting them made through other companies so I could do the art and not worry about the product making. I've seen a mixture of success and failure. My first attempt at getting vinyl stickers made of my Elemental Animals series was a disaster. The result was heavily green varation of each image that was printed WAY too big, and on a material only good for putting on large white surfaces (clear vinyl). The image on the vinyl itself was also transparent, so you couldn't see squat if you put it on a window, and if you put it on a coloured surface it would show through the image. Not only that, but they weren't even dicut as I wanted, they were cut in squares. Lame!

Unhappy with the result, the printers agreed to redo them the way I wanted. 4.5 inches across, on white vinyl, and dicut (I had to design the outline for the dicut myself in illustrator for them). I picked them up today, and they ar the right colour (the fox is still a little green, but it looks ok), dicut, on white vinyl and 5.5 inches across! *anger face* I wanted them to be big and pretty, but small enough to go in a person's laptop or notebook or something. I know it's only one more inch, but it's not what I wanted, and it's still too big for certain applications. They offered to reprint them again in the right size, which I am grateful for.

I may or may not keep giving them my business... It's local, so it's convenient, but they can pretty much only give me white vinyl, and they mess up a lot. I need someone who can do this stuff on a variety of materials, and NOT fuck up all the time.

So smaller stickers! My second sticker project was rainbow doggies. That's right, RAINBOW DOGGIES! I love how they turned out, and I decided to try a different sticker provider for these. After all, for how small the designs are the vinyl wasn't the right material for them. I needed something just as durable, but hold detail better and is more suitable for sticking in your notes or in letters to family.

So I went with paper-forest.com! I'm a really picky customer and I ask a lot of questions, and the poor owner of paper-forest.com has put up with a lot from me. But I got my stickers in the mail yesterday, and they are simply lovely. They are exactly what a wanted in material, I can order in bulk for cheaper than the average place, and the owner has been working with me closely so I get what I want. The stickers I got printed a little dark, but they are still REALLY lovely. The only reason they ended up that way is because we decided to skip the sample approval stage so I could have them in time for Rocky Mountain Fur Con, so I just got my order in full right away. Next time I'm not going to rush the poor guys!

I've spent the last full day cutting the stickers off the sheets and putting them together in little rainbow doggy sticker sets. Because of the excellent service and prices of paper-forest.com, I'm able to offer the stickers for pretty darned cheap for the size, number and quality of product. They are dicut (cut around the edges of the image, but come on little squares of the backing paper so you can peel them off easier.



New projects in the works! I plan on doing rainbow kitties sometime after Rocky Mountain Fur Con. I have them all sketched, but I want to wait till I can afford the giant bulk sticker order of these designs before I color them. I also have a seasonal animal series in the works, for the larger sticker designs. It's going to be North American wildlife themed, because the Colorado rocky mountains are my home turf. Probably doing Rabbit for spring, Cougar for summer, Black bear for fall, and Wolf for winter. I have some concepts sketched out for them, but between commissions, taking and mailing sticker orders, preparations for RMFC, and my sister's wedding next month, I have had SO little time for all these ideas.

So many ideas, so little time... I have more in my head, and eventually want to have a bunch of fun sticker sets and designs to choose from. Someday my website will have a shopping cart feature on it where you can go and buy these things super easy, instead of emailing me and my inbox being all clogged. ><

I also may open a cafepress shop soon for all this stuff. I know their base prices are super high, but they offer SO many products that are high quality, and they take production and shipping out of my hands completely. If anyone is reading this (which I doubt, due to the lack of a message center on this website), what products would you like to see my art one? T-shirts for sure, and likely mugs... but what else?

That's all for my super sticker rant! For some reason, I just really had to write that down, and this place only had three blog entries so far, so this is a good space filler. =)