Photoshop fun

Since getting into poster and stationery design, I've almost entirely switched over to Illustrator for my artwork, although much of my previous artwork and design was done almost exclusively in Photoshop. Since it's been a while, I thought it'd be fun to make a quick and easy image of my hamster to mark her arrival in Santa Fe (based on our Hamster Across America project).

My original idea was to put her in front of a Santa Fe landmark or some pueblo buildings, but after doing a bunch of searching all I could find were pictures of streets and buildings. Places like the San Miguel Mission were nice, but she would have looked super tiny next to them, not to mention she's the same color as the buildings to boot. Annette had a great idea of putting her with some Indian pottery instead though, so a few photo shoots later and some Google Image searching and voila! Annette put up the picture on the Hamster Across America blog.

New Zazzle gallery

My latest long-term pet project has been making informational posters for a new Zazzle store of mine called Infographic. Here's the latest poster I've made:It took about 2 days of research and work to put it together. I admit I got a lot of my facts from Wikipedia for the estimated heights, weights and time-periods for each of the dinosaurs, but a lot of it I also got from the Natural History Museum's website.

The Beginning

Lately I've been up to so many different projects and initiatives that I've decided a blog would be the best way to keep track of them and share them with my friends. Most of them involve graphic design for my Zazzle stores, but I enjoy doing jewelry, sewing and random construction projects. Many of these I make as gifts, but a decent number of my projects focus around my pet hamster. My friend and I run a website that records the distance my hamster, Victoria, runs each night and we've been mapping her progress with a Google Maps mash-up on Hamster Across America.

Over the Martin Luther King 3-day weekend I put together a new loft addition for Victoria's cage. Her previous owner had a bunch of tubes she liked to climb in, but the cage I had for her didn't have anywhere to put them, so I decided to make my own custom cage roof to attach them. I dimensioned out the roof using Adobe Illustrator and cut them out on a laser cutter over at Techshop. The whole thing is held together with some acrylic glue and epoxy. The tubes came with interchangeable locking rings so I can attach different things up on top to keep her from getting bored. Right now I have a loop that I like to call "The Observatory" set up. It kind of reminds me of the walkway suspended over the Grand Canyon. :)

Also I put together a little shelf for her to hide under and climb on to replace a similar wooden toy her previous owner had for her but was really chewed up and covered in splinters. You can see the shelf and her new digs in the pictures below.