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A Forest in the Making

I made another tree with a more oak-tree shape than my first. The ferns are present, plus a few of the little ferns that grow on the trunks of trees in the rainforest.  This oak had a large horizontal branch that needed some owls.

 

The first owls were based off a movie – but I wanted to draw my own version this time.   As it turned out the cartoon owls looked the way they did for a good reason: this is just what owls look like.  My own owls are very similar. If I change anything it will to make the eye edges more distinct from the white face and perhaps to make the feet more fuzzy.

#16-17/365

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New soap labels

I’ve been making soap for about 10 years now, and selling in a local shop for close to one year.   I’ve decided to step it up a little and next month I’d like to open an Etsy shop.   Clearly this calls for new labels.

I’ve created 4 so far, two using the ginkgo pattern.

 My original labels were all vertical like this.  And my first ginkgo label was too.  But I’ve since decided to go horizontal.  The handmade soap tops can be uneven and by going horizontal I can still get a fairly crisp wrap around the soap edges.

Much better!   And I don’t have to look at my ingredients upside down.  But I’m still playing with Inkscape, what else can I do?

I can make star mandalas.  I will talk more about these later because they were just fun to make and I want to make some in glorious rainbow colors just because I can.

And I’m going to make a Dragon’s Blood soap; this requires a special label. (No dragons will be harmed).

This one was fun.  I took the dragons and text from the 19th C Japanese print by Utagawa Kunisada II.