New Floral Phone cases on Society 6!

This summer I wanted to finally order a phone cover from society 6. I thought, I actually really love the floral elements from my whale floral series, maybe I could reimagine those as phone covers. Here’s how they turned out!

What’s actually really nice about these is that the quality of the image comes out a lot more clearly then I expected. They seem like a really good quality case and hopefully they hold up. Here’s a link to one of the cases on my Society 6 shop.

Find the mini video of this new case on my Instagram page here.

Update from three months later: They really did hold up. No scratches and the quality of the image is still intact.

Whale party!

This was such a fun piece to make. The idea for this piece has been been on my idea wall for weeks and I was glad to finally achieve it. Humpback whales are magical, and I love the pure joy they express when you watch them dive and breach.

Look closely for the following Easter eggs:

• a sunfish

• a starfish

• an orca

• a self portrait (a crab!)

• a girl swimming

• bull kelp

• fucus

Process

It all started out as an experiment on various kinds of watercolor paper:

After painting, I scanned each whale and then drew the blossoming portions by hand on an iPad. I then transferred it over to my laptop to add the gradient layer.

Through trial and error I learned that the Illustrator Live trace tool does not do well with sketchy style tools, it did not like my pencil or my shale tool! When I traces it it lost a lot of detail and created thick lines. (To see the difference, look closely at the whale on the right. The lines are thicker.) It was unfortunate because it’s of great benefit to be able to have my floral layer as a vector, in terms of easily adding gradient and in terms of having a design become scaleable.

In the end I redrew the floral whale, this time by using the eraser shale tool and erasing the design on a white layer. Then I imported into Photoshop and applied a gradient underneath. Downside: not scaleable. Upside: got to keep all my file details and texture.

Here’s some individual shots:

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Some combined florals for fun:

Later, Edit: I realized a little later that creating a white layer and erasing into the layer was just a sillier way of drawing on a clear layer and applying a layer mask in photoshop, something I’ve done a million times before but it didn’t occur to me for some reason. The one upside to the erase-into-white technique is that you can place a spray tool style gradient behind it to watch the colour as you draw. However, now Procreate has the function of allowing a layer masks too, so you could equally do it that way.

New shop on Red Bubble

Hi guys,

Because I was having some issues with Society 6 not displaying all of my designs, I decided to also list some items on another online site called Red Bubble.

I’m super excited about some of the different options they offer, including cute kids items and especially the extra women’s clothing items. I am in love with how my whale shark pattern looks on this dress below!

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Or how cute is this onesie?

One fun feature that I appreciate is that I can design my pattern, and their upload tools allow you to click a button and you pattern is duplicated. No extra template work required. So cool.

Anyways, I hope you’ll check it out. They often have 20% off sales, which is a great time to take a peek.

My shop: www.redbubble.com/people/jesschampagne

As always, if you’re in Canada or local to Victoria and would like to shop for prints, check out my shop right here by clicking on the link above!

Cheers,

Jess