Note Card - The making part 2

So here's the making part 2; the printing and cutting stage.

I print them out on a inkjet printer, I use a HP Officejet, which does most of my in-house printing.

After both sides are printed, it's time to cut them individually.  I use paper trimmer to cut straight and clean lines on the sides, sometimes I use X-acto knife and a ruler too, whichever is convenient.

Then this is the most difficult part of the whole production - Cutting.

Complicated designs will be very difficult to cut, so in the design stage (Part 1) I have to plan it well.

I use small scissors and x-acto knife to cut them, this can take up to 5 to 10 minutes.  

To finishing, use a scoring knife and gently score the middle line for folding.

Note Card - The making part 1

I'm going to show you the steps on how I create my Kawaii Note Cards, separating them into 2 parts.

First is the design stage.

Since the note cards are rectangle-ish shape, the face and body will have to be in one block.  That leaves the creativity for ears and tails.  I draw quick sketches with pen and paper, nothing fancy. 

Then moving on to illustrator.  Open a new horizontal letter size canvas.  I use illustrator mainly because it's a great vector program to create sharp lines and shapes, I like to tweak around using the lasso, pen and selection tool, be warned...this part can be hideous sometime.

Just keep building the shape and adding couple more details.

After the front side is finished, I made two other copies placing next to each other.  

The back side is much simpler, depending on how complicated I want the "writing" side to be, usually couple of lines will do just fine.  The back side will be a separate file, but because we don't want any design on the back to be cut off, have a front side design on top of it as guide.

And now we are ready to print and cut!

Update

I was up in Victoria, BC over the weekend.  Weather was nice, scenery was beautiful, it was a small little weekend getaway and I really enjoyed it :)  

Right now Orange County is over 90°F and how much do I wish I can stay up in Victoria until this crazy weather dies down... 

I'm making these cute buttons as novelty gifts for the upcoming product, they will be out early next week so please just wait a little longer! :) 

Pink

Work has been super busy ever since WonderCon, I went on a business trip for a few days, and we are currently working on another out of country trip that needed to have all the materials ready, so I did not have much time to do convention / store related art...until last night!  I started  do several Sylveon faces in Illustrator, so stay tuned for finished look! I think it's gonna look really cute :)