Housewarming Gift (Home)

I was debating about whether or not to post this one. It was meant as a gift to some friends, and it seemed to somehow diminish the sentimental value to post it to the site. Ultimately, I reached a compromise with myself by deciding to post it, but changing the floral design. My friends seemed to love it, and my fiance suggested that I begin selling similar designs. I figure that I could post it on here to test the waters and see what the general reaction would be. Let me know what you think, and I may make some of these available for sale.

The original idea was to create a housewarming gift for my friends whom I had spent all Saturday restoring their apartment after a falling out with a roommate. Since my friends now had more creative control over the interior decorating, they decided to go with an oriental/ zen garden theme with a blank, white, and red color scheme.

I wanted to make them something personal that would fit with the new design scheme, so I started with some of the new high contrast pieces that I have been having so much fun with lately. It seemed wanting though, and not quite fitting with the theme, so I decided to attempt to add some Kanji (Japanese characterizes) to fit the oriental theme.

This proved a little more difficult than I thought. I wanted the symbol for “home,” and began by consulting my Japanese/ English dictionary to be sure that I had the right Kanji. Finding the set of symbols closest to what I wanted to convey, I then double checked that combination with Google Translate just to be sure. I then copied the Japanese text from the Google Translate, and into a Microsoft Word document. After it was word text, it was easy to work with, and I was able to play with a variety of different fonts before finding the right one. Once that was completed, I had to find the right size to make it fit with the Photoshop file, since it copied the Kanji as an object, rather than text. I eventually had to enlarge the size of my document to accommodate how large the symbols had to be in order to fit the layout. It took a fair amount of trial and error, but I think the result was worth it.

 

 

 

 

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