I hope you all are enjoying a lovely weekend! The Comstocks are.
So, today I will tell you all about the creation of Chalkboard Cheer. Eric was out of town when I started this line. It all began with an idea to try my hand at creating chalk art. I say creating, instead of drawing in chalk, because I was pretty sure that most of the chalk art I was seeing wasn't actually drawn in chalk. A quick internet search revealed the process.
I took a dark, really soft, pencil and drew my design elements onto paper. This totally took me back to my college commercial art classes where my professor would tell use not to make our hand-drawn typography look too perfect, it was suppose to look loose and easily done. (You have no idea how hard it can be to make something look easy!)
Anyway, I consciously left little gaps, a few wayward strokes, etc. You know, just quick and easy like. Then I scanned my pencil drawings.

After the snowman was drawn, I realized that a long scarf would make a fun image. No worries, I told myself, I'll just draw it and add it on in Photoshop.
Oh Photoshop, how I love you!
I changed the contrast on my sketches to make them dark, and I did clean up a few things here and there.... until I had something like this.

A few more steps in photoshop and my blacks became white and my whites became invisible.
I dropped this new "Chalk Art" layer over the top of the chalkboard backgrounds I also created in Photoshop and did a happy little dance.

In fact, there is a friend that can verify this. I was chatting with her on the phone as I created the above paper. I remember our conversation went something like this...
Friend: What are you doing? You're breathing really heavily.
Me: Oh, nothing that exciting, just concentrating on a drawing.
Friend: Chat, chat, chat. Talk, talk, talk.
Julie: MMMmmmm Hmmmm..... I know..... yep.... exactly.............................
OMGoodness! It worked, it actually worked!Friend: Are you even listening to me?!?!
After that phone call, I created more designs. Here's just a few.




I hope you like it, even if you're in hot summer weather like me! Maybe it will help us feel cool... ('cause I always need help feeling cool!).
AshleyC who pinned many of our newly released images.
And Danielle Higginbottom-Brown who liked our post on Facebook.
Ladies, please email your info to me (julie at cosmocricket dot com) with "CHAS2013 Winner" in the subject line. We will get you some of the goodies ASAP. I'm not sure the status on some of the products, but I have a feeling we may be able to ship these out pretty quickly.
See the full release in yesterday's post.