Terrific Tuesdays: My Design Process

Hi Lemonheads, it’s me, Kelly. Today, I am going to share a little different Terrific Tuesdays post. I have been asked about my design process, so I decided I would share a bit about it today. My design processes for various tasks are different, so today I will focus on designing some recipe cards that I posted on my blog as a freebie.

Don't you just love that George Harrison quote?

I use the whole Adobe design suite (ie. Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, etc) to do all of the tasks at hand as a graphic designer, but for this particular project, I used Illustrator. I use this most when designing Purple Lemon Designs items. So, my process…

I started by sketching my cupcake. Then I scanned it into my computer and opened Photoshop.

As you can see, I sketch on just about anything...

Then I cropped out the “junk”.

That's better!

Now for the fun part. I open it in Illustrator, and start tracing the scanned image with the pen tool.

It is starting to take shape now!

Lemonhead Tip: I draw the different parts of the cupcake onto different layers to make it easier later to select certain parts of the illustration.

One I finish with the initial drawing, it is tweaking time!

Let's do the tweak everybody!

Now that the outline is pretty much final, I have usable artwork. For this particular project, though I will need some color.

Fill 'er up!

To the top

Was yellow the right color? I am not so sure…

A cherry on top!

Now it is perfect for the recipe card! This cupcake was a pretty universal image that I could use for a kid’s stamp…

purplelemondesigns.etsy.com

or even a recipe stamp.

purplelemondesigns.etsy.com

So that is my process for design when I sketch an object. I also sometimes just start designing in Illustrator without a sketch. It just depends on how I feel that particular day, and how the images are floating around in my head.

Are you an artist? How do you design? I would love to know your story too. Maybe you would even like to share a guest post. If so, let me know in the comments!