Welcome artists, art lovers, patrons, muses and just you. All or Nothing Design is an art power house ready to light up your most stubborn creative doldrums. Please peruse my ever-growing collection of art & design pieces, and feel free to ask about my many creative services. Some of my skills are listed below:
Navigating the many options available for print can be daunting to the layperson. There are countless online options, but do you know who will deliver the best product for your needs? All or Nothing Design can be your best friend if you have any questions about where to go for printing.
Getting creative with paper scraps I’d pick-up after work at the print shop turned into one of my favorite hobbies, crafting useful or just plain fun items out of, well, trash! Talk about an easy way to be green.
Tell someone in your life how much they really mean to you with All or Nothing Designs free printable card and envelope template. This adorable “Little Chrissy” girl snuggling her beloved teddy bear will warm every ones heart. Share the love by printing out the card on standard US letter paper, signing it and addressing it to someone in your life who you care about. Your Mom, your brother, your best friend, or your significant other. As a matter of fact, give one to all of them!
Print out your card and envelope template on standard US letter size (8.5″ x 11″) paper.
Feel free to color in the card however you like! Then fold it in half longways, and then in half tall ways, so that the illustration is on the front, the text is inside and the All or Nothing Design logo is on the back.
Fold your envelope template along the straight dotted lines to score your envelope folds before cutting.
Cut out the envelope on the solid lines.
Using the smaller dotted line as a guide, cut out an envelope liner from a decorative piece of paper. I like to use old magazines or the Sunday Comics.
Glue the back side of tab A and B and fold the bottom of the envelope up, affixing the tabs to the inside of the envelope.
Glue the inside of tabs C and D and fold them over, affixing them to the outside of the envelope.
Glue the top half of the back of the envelope liner, slide the liner in over tabs A and B and position it so that it lines up with the smaller dotted line.
Let dry.
Now you’re ready to make someones day! You don’t need a special occasion to share the love, share this project with your friends!
Not too long ago my father, a Floridian for 50 years, decided to move to the mountains and asked me to paint a few quaint things with rustic mountain scenes to sell in his shop. Since then we thought we’d just start with canvases, but the project stalled, probably because I don’t generally get inspired to paint rustic mountain scenes.
So this Christmas, being quite crafty and festively frugal (ie: broke), I thought, “What sort of gift is good for Dad this year.” And quite probably, like many daughters, I have a very solid standby that is pretty much always involved in gifts to Dad; in my case, coffee and all things related. So this year, I thought I might paint some rustic mountain scenes on some coffee mugs and ship them up to Dad to see if it was what he had in mind. Since I had already purchased some Matte Spray Gloss for a decoupage project, and I own a kit of watercolors, all I needed were some plain, light-colored mugs and an idea. So I went to my local Goodwill and found the perfect set of 3 plain white ceramic mugs (obviously at Goodwill because they were 3, not 4, so a perfectly used set, LoL.) Now, my stepmother Anne is just the sort of person who donates these dish trio’s, so I knew my illustration would have to tie them all together, making the 3 a whole instead of a gimp. So I made this sketch:
First, I made a rough sketch of the scene I wanted to paint.
This rudimentary thing became my muse, if you will, or my blueprint for the mugs. As you can see, I thought of a rustic mountain winter scene, and I stretched it across the 3 mugs in my mind. I figured the tricky part would be getting the snowbanks to line up so that the scene appeared seamless. As it turned out, that was a very simple effect to achieve, just by eyeballing it!
Now it was time to take out the watercolors and see if I could pull this off. The watercolor paint worked remarkably well on the glossy, ceramic surface. I hadn’t ever painted on that substrate before, least of all with watercolors, but the quick-drying color and easy spot-removal via water made it simple for an amateur painter like me to create some nifty effects. I Painted the sky first, a blue, and I used it to “frame out” the whole illustration. Then I’d speed up the already quick drying process with my blow dryer and paint the mountains, majestic purple of course, right on top. Then the happy little fir trees were planted in atop the trees layer, but the paint underneath would just make way. If I liked the random mix of color, I kept it drier, if I didn’t, I’d wash it out and the new layer of color would be vibrant. Now I needed to use water to wash off the blue on the bottom of the “frame” and make the negative space appear to be snowbanks. I found out that if I used a wide brush to clear off the bulk of the pigment, then I could dab a sopping wet brush along certain areas (holding the mug in the direction I wanted the water to roll) and as the water dripped it would make these very natural, snow bank looking wisps of color. Total success!
Here is the gallery of the final paintings, click on an image to view the gallery.
Final painting of the sledders, the center mug.
Final painting of the first mug, the snowy mountain scene.
Final painting of the the lake scene on the third mug.
Aside from my rudimentary grasp of painting techniques and unashamed brushstrokes, I think this project met my expectations, and even exceeded them. Let’s hope Pops likes them, and if Annie likes them, then I’ll know they’re a hit!
Want to make your own? Here’s all the stuff I used:
