Exhausting Days + Behind my Kickstarter + New Designs / Doodles

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the quiet few..days? weeks? 

As most of ya'll know, I've been doing cons most every other weekend, whether it's in my hometown or the next city over. It gets pretty exhausting! And then when I come home, I have to work on getting weekend orders out or restocking inventory or reordering inventory, which ends up taking up a lot of time. On top of that, we have the Kickstarter going on right now! 

That being said: I thought it would be fun to share the birth of my idea for my Zodiac Kickstarter.

Almost two years ago (I kept thinking it was 1 year ago, 'cause time goes by fast when you're a grandma), I worked on my original wheel concept. Since then, it's been on the backburner for me to design an updated version that would fit my brand. Because I had the first version done, I kept trying to emulate the old style, which kept making me super unhappy 'cause I couldn't really figure out why things weren't really clicking into place as they usually do.

I still love my old design, but it's just not fitting to my style anymore. This is what it looked like 2 years ago! 

From there, I went on to re-conceptualize each animals' design and turn it into a pin. This is where I scrapped the designs over and over until I was finally happy with the current version. I kept the sketches to show you guys, I figured it would be fun to see the process.

The first one was a direct copy from the wheel, and something just kept looking off about it. It just wasn't who I am anymore as an artist, so I decided to change it up a little bit. Overall, I simplified the designs (because it wouldn't have worked out with that much detail) and made my animals a little rounder 'cause round = cute. I was actually pretty satisfied with this design and the ox.

And then I got to the tiger, and well, I got so frustrated, I didn't think to keep the scribble to do a comparison. I just didn't finish it at all, ha. After my tiger, I completely scrapped the original 2 designs and started over! 

That being said -- if you guys haven't kept up with my Kickstarter, I have 5 new designs out:

I have one new-new design finished, and I've been sitting on it for a really long time. I was going to launch it during Chinese New Year of 2020, but honestly, this Kickstarter is the perfect place to debut it. I haven't publicized it; I'm working on 2 more designs before releasing these final 3 to the campaign backers.

I made this design a spinner pin because of the pun/meaning behind it. Often times, you'll see the word "fu" upside down. One day, I asked my parents, why is "fu" always facing the wrong way? And they said, it's because "fu" is here. Of course, this doesn't make sense in English. In chinese, it's "fu dao", which "fu is here", but if you said it with a change in the stress for "dao" is means "to tip or fall over" - thus, the play on words here! 

And just for funsies, here are some new sketches I've been working on! 

But yeah! Just wanted to keep you guys updated on everything that is going on over here.

Oh! And August's pin came in. 

It's stinkin' cute!!