I purchased my first font today! Normally I just gaze longingly at them, as they’re usually too expensive to justify buying for personal use – but this one was on sale for $9! Take a gander at Thirsty Rough:
I love the old-school, retro style of it. I can see this used in many a project.
If you follow in an RSS reader, you probably didn’t see the new design. Here’s a screenshot for reference:
I’m very happy with it! One of my goals for 2012 was to learn how to write WordPress themes from scratch. It’s not perfect, but I have a pretty good grasp so far. Next challenge: Write one for others to download.
What do you think of the new design? If you notice anything wonky, please let me know. I’ll even take constructive criticism. 
Another flash-inspired tattoo illustration – this time, of a Robot Heart.
Sketched in pencil, then inked and colored digitally.
I found a vintage atlas at my favorite local antique store for a few bucks, just begging to be ripped apart and used in all kinds of amazing projects. I scanned in some pages and created this set of 12 3″x4″ journaling cards for Project Life or any other scrapbooking/papercraft project your heart desires.
This download is in .zip format and consists of 12 individual CMYK .png files at 300 DPI – perfect for printing. Two have transparent backgrounds for framing your own images – to use, simply place over your photo in your favorite image editing program and crop. The photos in the preview are for example only and are not part of the download.
   Wanderlust Journaling Cards by Natalie Matz are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
For more than a decade I have been a borderline-obsessive Ben Folds fan, not something I can say about many things. One of my favorite albums since high school is Whatever and Ever Amen. Using gypsy girl tattoos as inspiration, I drew this based on the song Kate.
I’m still trying to find my style as an artist, but I’m pretty pleased with it.
If you’re a Ben Folds Five fan, Â check out their new album: The Sound of the Life of the Mind. It’s awesome!
(as always, this is copyrighted material – you are free to share it but you MUST link back to this post.)
I’m absolutely infatuated with this font from Emily Lime Design.
It’s available at MyFonts. Anyone want to buy me a present?? (Now off to practice my handwriting…)
The Inkling digital sketch pen captures a digital likeness of your work while you sketch with its ballpoint tip on any sketchbook or standard piece of paper. Designed for rough concepting and creative brainstorming, Inkling is ideal for the front end of the creative process. Later, refine your work on your computer using an Intuos4 tablet or Cintiq interactive pen display.
I love my Wacom Bamboo, so I wonder how this would compare. It’d be very interesting – probably better for someone who does more pen sketches to begin with.
via mocoloco
I’m a sucker for planners/notebooks, and I was inspired by various blog planners on Pinterest (of course).
Here’s my attempt – from various scraps and papers in my stash and my Zutter Bind-It-All (I seriously love that thing – and on Amazon it’s $53.30- I paid almost $80 for mine at Archivers!)
It definitely involves a vast assortment of washi tape. I designed the pages and printed them at home – I used to hesitate to print my own pages for notebooks because I didn’t like the paper quality – then I “splurged” and got the expensive printer paper instead of the cheap copy paper. What a world of difference!
I honestly haven’t written a word in it yet! I’m kind of stumped, haha. Blank-page fright.
What would you put in your ideal blog planner?
UPDATE: As of now, the winning design has TWELVE votes. TWELVE. That’s right. So please go vote for me – I’d be forever grateful!
Well, I have been down and out for the count with a possible case of Pertussis (whooping cough) for the past four days. I haven’t gotten the test results back yet, but I’m on antibiotics, so cross your fingers I feel better soon!
Since all I’ve been doing is laying around and feeling sorry for myself (I’m the biggest baby about being sick), I noticed a contest from Colour Lovers to design an iPad sleeve on Zazzle.
I’m a big fan of my iPad, so why not? Here’s my entry:
THERE ARE ONLY 52 ENTRIES SO FAR – I THINK I ACTUALLY HAVE A SHOT!
If you enter the contest, let me know! I’d love to see other entries!
Guys guys GUYS. There’s a really cool site I want to tell you about.
I’ve been a long-time fan of Colour Lovers. Mostly because I love colors. Thank you, Captain Obvious. Â SO when they started talking about their very own digital resources type of site, I was intrigued.
Basically, Creative Market isn’t unlike any other digital/designer resource site, but it’s from the good people at Colour Lovers.
Here’s the best part: signing up gets you $5 in free credit (and the resources aren’t terribly expensive, so $5 is significant!) and if you’re an “early subscriber” (their site hasn’t officially launched yet), you can download all of their current resources for FREE. Yep. Free.
It gets better. When you refer people, you get credit, too! $10 for 5 referrals, $30 for 20 referrals, and $200 for 50 referrals.
You don’t have to enter in any personal details to join and download the free resources; just your email address.
I’ve already used a bunch of the stuff I downloaded- they have everything: brushes, textures, web design templates, .psds, vectors, UI’s, fonts, etc etc. Here, I took a screenshot of a few of them!
I have absolutely no idea how long the offer lasts, but I’d take advantage of it asap. There are TONS of things that would be useful for bloggers.
Yes, I will get some credits if enough people sign up. But, like I said, YOU’LL GET CREDIT TOO! It’s really a win-win. 
