Of retro bananas and anteaters

Bwhahaha, the result for the Retro contest came out today and yep, it was as I expected; my erect candle salad placed dismally. S'ok as I added the erect banana at the last minute because I couldn't come up with a good solid design so I went for the laugh factor. I loved my design once I added the banana...wanna see it? It's here: click here and then zoom on the design to see the detail. It got a decent number of views (which only means people were curious about it) and a number of comments from designers and regular Spoonflower members. But I guess there aren't enough Amy Sedaris fans or Charles Phoenix fans that came out to vote! Dang it!

Onto the Spoonflower hand drawn contest. The criteria is it must be hand drawn. Basically anything goes. You can color it any way you want. To me the better ones are those that are not colored digitally and not converted from hand drawn to vector. I like that somewhat rough look if it's going to be hand drawn. I mean, because I hand draw ALL of my designs...I just draw them with a wacom tablet and pen and in Illustrator. Totally hand drawn. Eh, doing that makes me feel like I'm cheating so nope, it's going to be totally hand done with real materials.

Tough not having a specific theme so I tried watercolor flowers...looked great but too boring as there will be lots of florals. Ditched it. Did a different floral with pencil and used odorless mineral spirits to melt the wax. Nice but still too boring so I ditched that too. Anteaters have been sort of on my mind since the Not Owl contest so last Monday at lunch I drew out my anteaters in ink no less and then started coloring them with colored pencil. I didn't have time to do 3 or 4 of them in diff poses since I had to enter the next day. Drew one, copied it and colored them with different color combos.

That's one of the combos. I love it, it cracks me up. I've watermarked it so if it looks a little uneven it's because the watermark is there. Wanna see the seamless repeat? Go here and check it out. Wanna vote for it so it doesn't have the same dismal showing as my candle salad? Go here and page thru the millions of entries (I do so apologize for the time you'll take going thru them all but really there are some good designs in there!)

I'm thinking anteaters might look good on my couch. And I might just be the only person in the world with anteater pillows! Woot!