Last we spoke, I was within days of leaving for Seattle for Design Camp. After running around like crazy to wrap up all loose ends before departing (including finishing a portfolio submission for a really amazing class at school and getting my finalized business cards printed in time for Design Camp — see which design I picked below!), I arrived in Seattle on Wednesday, May 1,  around midday and took a train from the airport straight to a station at the same intersection as my hotel. Super easy! I spent the afternoon walking around downtown Seattle and doing a little work in a little local coffee shop in Pike Place Market. That night, we had a getting-to-know-you mixer and I got to meet some really amazing people right from the start!

Sorry for the awkward selfie. This is the only photo I got of the cocktail party… my attire. Oops.

The next two days were absolutely amazing. Taking place in the Seattle Design Center, the seminar was comprised of a series of lectures on various topics (from design trends and materials, to business and contracts, to universal and lighting design, to money and billing, to social media and blogging, to being a television personality…. I could go on forever!) every 45 minutes. I could write a blog post on each one if I had the time, but to get a basic idea of some of the things I learned, take a peek at these Decoist articles I wrote following the seminar:

Forecasted Design Trends for 2013

Forecasted Design Trends for 2014

The Future of Lighting, Universal, and Kitchen Design

Top 10 Tips on Designing a Space

The experience was incredible (minus the hotel disaster, as many of my Twitter followers know!). I got to learn from and with people who are also students, those who have just started their own firms, people who are five years in to their business, and a bunch of people who had been doing it for 20+ years. Getting to know everyone’s individual stories about where they are in their careers and why they came to Design Camp was really valuable. Besides the awesome people, the lectures were fun, informative, candid, honest, encouraged collaborative (rather than competitive) designers, and downright inspiring.

See that?! VIP, baby! ;)

Me with Kelli Ellis, Nathan Turner, and Lori Dennis!

At our Saturday cocktail hour with some of the lovely ladies I met! :)

I wanted to pretend like I was presenting a lecture! ;)

As I was leaving the hotel on the last night, I finally met Linda, the other Design Camper who won tickets through Kandrac and Kole!

I’ll be really honest: after announcing the big news that I was leaving my job to work as a freelance blogger and crafter, the panic really set in. I didn’t get any string art orders for the first week and I started to think, “WHAT did I just DO?!” Design Camp came at the perfect time because it put me in contact with 200 other people that had to take some of the same risks in order to get to where they are now, including some of the celebrity and superstar designers you watch on HGTV. Design Camp was exactly the inspiration and motivation I needed to start looking at my grand adventure as a risk worth taking and something I can be successful at, despite some of the “downs” between the “ups.” Design Camp changed my mentality… and I got my first order that very day. :)

While I could really go on forever about Design Camp, I will just say that it introduced me to some wonderful people who had a lot of helpful and encouraging things to add to my perspective and outlook. One of those people is Lori Dennis, co-host of Design Camp with Kelli Ellis, who is based here in Los Angeles. Not only was she a fabulous Design Camp host, but she also offered me the opportunity to do an internship with her, which I started a week later! I have already been to two architects meetings for an awesome commercial project and on two residential install days after only four weeks! I am learning a ton and having a blast working for Lori!

Other than interning for Lori once a week, I have been working my butt off at school for two other days a week. Work-wise, it has been a busy quarter on par with the last quarter. However, as I mentioned above (and have mentioned a ton on Twitter), I was also applying to be accepted into this awesome program at school that really does deserve its own blog post. All I will say was that the application and interview process was rigorous and took up a lot of “spare” time! Stay tuned for more on this later in the week. This week is finals week (yikes!) but most of my big stuff was due on Thursday. So, thankfully, I have a few things to finish today for tomorrow but then I have three weeks off! WOOOO! I will share all of my work soon!

Let’s see… what else am I missing from my hiatus? Walker’s well. Bo’s well. I’m well. Rent’s paid. Car’s dead but I’m working on that. I think that about covers the basics! I’m sure I will think of a million other things to share with you but this blog post is long enough for today. I apologize for being gone so long but I didn’t want to start back up again until I was sure I would be able to recommit to blogging regularly. No more of this sporadic posting crap, Erika! ;)

I’ve missed you all a ton! I have big plans to sit for hours and catch up on lots of blogs this Thursday so I can see what’s been going on in your lives as well! Thanks for sticking by me! Xoxo <3

What didn’t I cover here? Is there an update you’d like to hear that I missed? Let me know below!

So instead I am just here today to say “Happy Friday!” and share a few more lovely flower pictures of a bouquet that my handsome man got for me. I hope you all have a nice weekend! :)

P.S. Thanks so much to all of my Facebook & Twitter pals for their feedback on my business card designs. I will share the final design soon!

I am so excited to share our April sponsor with you today: Bertie’s Closet! Specializing in handmade, lightweight, affordable sleeves and cases for all of your electronics, Bertie’s Closet goes way beyond just function. I mean, these things are GORGEOUS. Would it be weird of me to go out and buy an iPad today so that I had something to put into one of these beauties?

Every item in the shop is handmade by the shop’s owners, Jeff and Bertie. To tell you a little more about how they got started and how they run their business, I will turn it over to Jeff!

We both quit our day jobs (software engineer and production assistant/odd part time job worker) and now work full time from home in Los Angeles, California. Bertie’s Closet is a handmade shop for laptop sleeves, iPad sleeves, and gadget accessories, and May will mark the completion of our fourth year in business. Before we started in 2009, we purchased a netbook that came without a sleeve or anything for protection. So we made a netbook sleeve, and a friend suggested we try selling them. Both of us, Jeff and Bertie, are now home everyday, making espresso and/or kale blueberry smoothies in the morning, making sleeves during the day, and packaging it all up with a handwritten thank you (Bertie’s “Thank you” looks a lot nicer than mine). Everything is made to order in our home, and it usually takes 2-5 days before shipment (though we do our best to ship everything out ASAP). We sell to everyone and ship worldwide.

You absolutely must go check out their shop to see more of these lovely sleeves. My personal favorite? It is a toss up for me between the adorable clothesline (and the owl flying off with someone’s unmentionables!) and the gorgeous brown herringbone with lace leaves.
A massive “THANK YOU!!” to Bertie’s Closet for sponsoring Our Cozy Cubbyhole this month. It is always amazing to collaborate with nice people that do stunning work! :)

Which is your favorite sleeve from Bertie’s Closet? :)

Rest in peace, Uncle Rick. I love you.

This is the cover of a 1970 vinyl album from my uncle and dad’s group. Uncle Rick is at the bottom with the microphone and guitar (and my dad is at the top with the guitar and the hair).

I know a lot of you have been waiting in suspense for me to reveal my big news so get excited because today is the day! In fact, there are three really amazing things I want to share with you today so let’s get right to it!

1. I am super, super lucky because I was chosen by the amazingly talented and kind women, Joann and Kelly, at Kandrac & Kole to receive a ticket to Design Camp in Seattle in two weeks!! Hosted by celebrity interior designers Lori Dennis and Kelli Ellis (you may know them from HGTV or TLC), Design Camp is a two day seminar packed with workshops in all things interior design, portfolio creation, forecasts/trends, design blogging, social media, branding, and becoming a television personality! I seriously jumped up and down for like 45 minutes (great cardio, by the way) when I found out that I would be attending this incredibly valuable and fun seminar. Many of you know that my dream job would be to be on HGTV, so add in some blogging and some advice for starting an interior design career, and the result is literally my perfect dream conference. AND I GET TO GO!! Eeeeeee! I fully intend on being in sponge-mode, soaking in any and all information that I possibly can. The best part is that the conference is limited to 300 people so there will be some incredible networking opportunities and time to really get to know the other campers! Time to get my business cards printed… ;)

2. I am super, super lucky because I received a message through my Etsy store just before Christmas from a woman inquiring about selling my string art to a wholesale distributor. She asked to send me an email with more information, and when she did, the first thing I saw was that she was a buyer for UncommonGoods! I LOVE THAT STORE! So once again, I jumped up and down for 45 minutes like a madwoman.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the store, here is info from their website:

“UncommonGoods is an online marketplace offering creatively designed, high-quality merchandise at affordable prices. At UncommonGoods, we believe that creativity and the expression of individuality represent two great human treasures. We have set out to create a business that makes uncommon goods accessible to everyone.”

After several months of phone calls, emails, samples, and soul-searching on my part, the listing went live today! I am offering three versions of my string art with nails exclusively through UncommonGoods (thus the reason they have disappeared off of my Etsy store), one on the natural wood round, another with bright red paint, and another with bright turquoise paint. When the customer places an order, I will fulfill it and ship it directly to them. For those who are thinking, “Erika, you have the smallest apartment of all time. Where do you plan on making these?” The answer is: my garage space and I are going to be spending a lot of time together. Sorry, Walker’s car.

Photo source: UncommonGoods.com

So what does this all mean for me? When I got the original email, my first thoughts were, “This is amazing but with school and everything going on, I don’t have time for this.” However, after doing some number-crunching based on their sales estimates, I realized I was roughly in the range of what I am bringing home working 3 days a week at my current job. If the actual number of orders per week was lower, I would need to find other income to supplement. If the number was higher, I would be making more money and working less… from home. Since there is no way to predict the orders until they come in, I decided to err on the side of caution and make all financial decisions based on a worst-case scenario every week. Which brings me to…

3. I am super, super lucky because when I started looking into other forms of income, I decided to ignore the voice in my head saying, “You have practically no experience. They won’t even look at your work,” and applied to a few paid blogging positions. I was so wonderfully surprised when I was offered both a copy-editing position at Lifehack.org and a daily DIY blogger position for Decoist.com!! Lifehack is “widely recognized as one of the premier productivity and lifestyle blogs on the web. This site is dedicated to lifehacks, which is a phrase that describes any advice, resource, tip, or trick that will help you get things done more efficiently and effectively.” Decoist is “an interior design and architecture blog that promises to deliver fresh new inspiration everyday.”

Once I was offered both writing jobs (which are paid by post and should be enough to cover any gaps in income for weeks with fewer orders), I decided that this whole UncommonGoods/Lifehack/Decoist path was one I needed to take. While the financial risk is much higher than staying at my current job, the benefits of working from home and having more time to work/focus on school were too huge to ignore. I felt like this amazing opportunity fell onto my lap and I would be silly not to try.

So that is what I am doing: trying! I put in my notice at my current job a little while back and my last day is this Friday. The listing went live on UncommonGoods today and I start with the writing positions on Monday (I have already been editing articles, as well as did one sample post for Decoist last week). It is so exciting! I want to jump around all over the place. I want to sing and shout. I want to dance. I want to cry a little because I am terrified of the financial risk. I want to pat myself on the back for taking this leap of faith. I want to hug everyone who has supported me and told me to go for it, especially Walker (who has listened to me go on and on and on and on about every bit of this).

To my lovely blog readers, thank you all for your support as well. Check out the listing, pass it along to friends, TWEET N PIN THAT SHIZ… whatever you do, I appreciate it all! Love you guys! xoxo

Have you ever taken a big risk? Worked as an entrepreneur and/or from home? Any tips on making a rented half-garage not feel like a spider-filled cave?

For the final (tiny, I promise!) installment of Erika’s school updates (the previous ones are here, here, here, and here), I gathered a few pieces of work from my sketch book. Disclaimer: drawing is one thing I really struggle with… I have historically been a terrible drawer. I swear, a few months ago I could not have sketched my way out of a paper bag. However, I really put in a lot of effort and made some serious improvements from where I was in January. Still, you won’t be blown away by this post haha! I debated not even posting about this class but I decided to be brave and say screw it! I want a true record of my progress around here! ;)

Our sketching class was mainly made up of exercises to help us understand drawing in perspective, shading with pencils and markers, loosening up our drawing techniques, and improving our sketching speed (since the most useful way to quickly communicate your ideas to a client in a meeting is to draw them!). Therefore, most of the pages in my sketchbook are made up of various short, timed sketches, along with lots of quick doodles to warm up my drawing hand. I really didn’t do any “finished” drawings besides the final one (which was also partially timed so I wouldn’t work on it forever!) so I am just going to give you a quick overview of my experience.

This is not, but very well could be, a page out of my sketchbook. It is composed of:
1:  15-second warm up using markers to help express 3D space
2:  30-second doodle of flowers I did while testing out a new marker I discovered in my supply kit!
3:  15 minute pencil sketch of a tufted ottoman in a space (notice the vanishing point — I need to see it… I haven’t mastered just visualizing the point yet!)
4:  10 minute pencil sketch of my awesome mustache corkscrew shaded with markers
5:  2 minute pencil sketch of a bottle shaded with markers
6:  1 minute blind (i.e. I couldn’t see the paper) contour line drawing (i.e. I wasn’t allowed to pick up my pencil) of one of my classmates. We laughed so hard! :)
7:  5 minute pencil sketch of a planter shaded with markers

Toward the end of the class, I managed to produce a few sketches that looked a bit more finalized. My favorite was a perspective sketch of the trellis in the park outside of the school. We sat out there for an hour sketching and listening to a man play Beatles songs on a guitar. It was really therapeutic, actually! And I was happy with the drawing. Maybe I always need to be serenaded when I draw…

Our final project for the class was to take a picture (that had at least one, if not two, point perspective) out of a magazine and recreate it using all of our perspective drawing techniques.I began the assignment by creating a pencil sketch. Note: some lines are strangely darker than others because I had to make certain lines darker for the next step! This by no means looks like a finalized pencil sketch… just a tool for step 2!

I then used a semi-transparent marker paper and traced the sketch onto it with ink. Finally, I shaded the ink sketch with markers (and stuck it to the board with double-sided tape… that you can totally see. Boo.).Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Does it look better than a kindergartener’s doodles? Yes! So progress is happening, my friends! I was very happy with the way it turned out, although there are things I would change if you could erase ink (you can’t. Boo.). But a huge part of my learning process has been to admit to myself that I literally cannot achieve perfection in sketching… imperfection is what makes hand drawings so beautiful. I pushed myself to NOT erase pencil lines and to loosen up! I think I made big steps towards that!

Have a great weekend everyone! :)

One of the first assignments was to draw four iterations of a logo for any company we wanted (real or made up). I chose to do a made up design company. The only requirements were that we could only use three colors and that the logos could either be totally different logos (still for the same company) or could work together in some way (i.e. a main logo, a stationary logo, a website header, etc.).

Since I was enjoying myself, I did two more versions that broke the three color rule just for fun!

Another assignment was to watch a movie from a provided list and make a concept board about the set design of the film. I chose to watch The Ladies Man (1961), which took place in a woman’s boarding house.

Photo Source: www.jonathanrosenbaum.com

As you can see, this was obviously a comedy with its over-the-top color-themed rooms! My first impression was that it looked like a dollhouse, since they would show shots of the set from so far back that you could see multiple floors/rooms at once. So I made a dollhouse concept board with Photoshopped collages for each area of the house. Since it is hard to see on the big picture, I have included the pictures for each room below. Each room took me about an hour… 10 rooms later, I was exhausted!

Our final assignment was to design a room inspired by a painting. Walker (I love him!) got me a gorgeous Toulouse-Lautrec (I love him!) book for Christmas, so I chose one of the paintings from there that really jumped out at me called La Rousse (La Toilette).

I love the gorgeous blue and yellow tones, as well as the scratchy texture. I also like the way the linens are pooled around her like water and how her hair glows like fire. This painting to me feels like I accidentally walked into a private, quiet moment in this woman’s life, and because her back is turned, it is easy to project myself into the painting. I can feel that serene moment and that deep breath one can finally take after all of the activity of the day. On a more literal level, I love the grey barnwood floors, twisted wicker furniture, and metal wash pail.

Once I picked the painting and decided what spoke to me in that painting, I needed to translate that to a pretend client and a designed space. Therefore, I chose to create a client who was a 34-year-old aspiring chef and food blogger. The client decided to buy her own home last year and immediately remodeled the kitchen for her career. However, after a year of working from home, she was feeling a little trapped in the four walls of her house. She wanted a space just out her back door that would function as a sanctuary and mini-getaway.

The space I designed was a back porch area that could function as a breezy reading/napping spot by day and a cozy, romantic, warm space to have a glass of wine by night. The first thing I put in the room was the rustic yellow daybed porch swing (duh) because napping outdoors is obviously the best thing in the entire world. I added some pillows in various patterns from the blue/yellow/grey color scheme inspired by the painting, all of which had amazing texture to the fabric. Next, I found textured but incredibly light drapery fabric that would be used to line the space and puddle on the floor (like the linens in the painting), creating the ability for privacy if the client wanted it. Finally, I discovered the wicker peacock chair that had a twisted bottom like the one in the painting and I had to include it! :)

In order to achieve the beautiful balance of water and fire from the painting, I added a few things that were representative of both. To achieve a sense of water, I added a slate water feature, a rustic metal watering can full of flowers, and a metal wash pail to hold books. The water vibe is the breezy, fresh, light daytime mood of this room. To achieve a sense of fire, I added a fireplace, a rustic chandelier with candles, and some glowing mason jar lights. I also pictured some additional candles and perhaps some string lights to really make the place glow. The fire aspects give it the enclosed, sensual, warm nighttime mood of the room.

I used the Illustrator line technique I showed Tuesday to create this line drawing of the space, although I only traced a small part of it from a photo. Most of it was freehand mouse. :)  Also, I intended on coloring it with colored pencils but ran out of time. Perhaps I will still do it before putting it in my portfolio to give a better color sense of the room. Thoughts?

I start school again today so I am very much looking forward to getting back into my creative mindset!

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to comment below! Also, if you are ever looking for a great gift for me, I’ll take that porch up there — thanks! ;)

Which is your favorite logo? Favorite theme room in The Ladies Man? Favorite part of the porch space?

I am so excited to say that I have been featured in another article (the first one was here) on My Move!! This one talks more about design inspiration and my decision to pursue interior design as a career. Check it out! :)

Have a nice day!

 
 
 

While I already know Photoshop pretty well, before the start of last quarter, I could not say the same thing about Illustrator, a vector-based program. Although the class used a bit of basic Photoshop, it mainly focused on using Illustrator to create presentations and layouts. One of our first assignments was to recreate a page from a magazine. Here is the original page from House Beautiful:

And below is my recreated version in Illustrator. We had to do everything from finding similar fonts, creating the lines and shapes, and even adding the smallest details like drop-shadows and font textures. Another fun (but time-consuming) assignment started with a photo from a magazine (thanks again, House Beautiful! P.S. This kitchen is designed by Chris Barrett for her personal home in Brentwood, CA. It is one of the few house tours I have ever seen that has multiple rooms that are practically perfect reflections of my taste! I could move right in… this woman is my kind of designer.).Next, we used the Illustrator pen tool to trace the room and create vector paths that formed a line drawing of the room. When I made the picture in the background invisible, I was left with a line drawing of the space! How cool is that!? I was able to later use this technique for another class. :) The fun part is that, since the lines are vector-based, I can play with brushes to change the look of the drawing. Our final project in this class was a group project (I worked with the beautiful and talented Michaela from Michaela Noelle Designs, as well as another awesome classmate). We were to use Illustrator to create a 5 page design presentation that included a perspective rendering, elevations, a floorplan, inspiration photos, fixtures, accessories, and furnishings. We designed the entry and living room for a large home in Savannah, Georgia. The rest of the assignments in the class were exercises to learn the program and aren’t very interesting to look at out of the context of the class… so I won’t bore you with any more!

I have one more school update for you and then we will be all caught up (just in time for school to start again on Thursday). It’s about time… I have a million other things that I am excited to blog about! So stay tuned. :)

One class I took this quarter was called Color and Design Theory. It was mainly a study on color and how it applies to the world of design. We used Gouache paint in this class, which is actually quite difficult to work with since it is water-soluble like watercolors. Most projects were made by painting clean, smooth (harder than it looks!) swatches of hand-mixed color onto painter’s paper. Then I cut the desired shape out of the swatch and mounted it on the artboard with rubber cement.

So, without further ado, my work! I know I already shared the first assignment but I feel like it is easier to see the progression if I show it again in sequence. The first project was to learn how to properly mix and create specific colors by creating a color wheel. Contrary to my original thought, you don’t get “green” by mixing half blue and half yellow. Each paint has it’s own characteristics (i.e. blue is actually the weakest paint and requires a little extra, yellow is SUPER vibrant and the color stains everything, red is ridiculously concentrated and a little goes a LONG way, etc.) so it was a big experiment working with these three colors (plus magenta for the the three violet hues because it is warmer than red) to produce 12 accurate hues for the wheel.

The next assignment was to understand the different values of a hue. In order to do this, we were asked to make one grey scale using only black and white, followed by one color value scale using only one color (I chose magenta) with either black or white added in. For those who are curious, pure magenta is located in position number seven.The professor emphasized that the grey scale and the color value scale should really match each other in intensity/value and that, if you took a black and white photo of your project, the scales should look almost the same in an ideal world. So for experiment’s sake, I desaturated the picture above and I think my scales are pretty darn close! *Pats herself on the back* The third assignment was a fun one, but I destroyed about 43 magazines to get it right. We were supposed to cut little swatches of the color wheel hues and make a collage that demonstrated the idea of warm to cold colors. You didn’t have to use every hue (I didn’t use any violet hues), but it had to seamlessly flow from one color to the next. The hardest part was finding color-accurate, solid, intense colors in magazines… so many of them were shades or tints of the color wheel colors or had a pattern/texture to them. Back to the Gouache paint! The next assignment was the toughest for me because it seemed to defy my rational thought. We had to create this design that showed how to create neutrals by mixing complementary colors. We started by making accurate swatches of all primary and secondary colors. Then we took compliments and tried to get a color that looked “neutral.” Ummmm…. what? It didn’t make sense until we started making the three little squares off to each side, which is the middle “neutral” color with only white added to it to make a nice grey. AHA! I get it… we were trying to make similar greys in the end. It was a TON of trial and error because I would add white and the grey would look TOTALLY different than I expected. Yellow/violet was the most difficult for me, followed by red/green then blue/orange. Once I had my middle neutral and its corresponding grey, I made the other two in-between neutrals by adding just a smidgen of the compliment to a color. All difficulty aside, I was very happy (as was the professor) with the accuracy of the result.The next assignment was a lot of fun! We had to used colored paper to cut out shapes to demonstrate various designs using the elements and principles of design.
Box 1 – A symmetrical, balanced design with a central focal point
Box2 – An asymmetrical but balanced design with an off-center focal point
Box 3 – Positive/negative design that creates an interchange of form (i.e. your eye jumps back and forth between the two colors/spaces)
Box 4 – Pattern using repition
Box 5 – Illusion of three dimensional space
Box 6 – Illusion of motion

And finally, the one many of my Twitter followers have been waiting for (I posted a sneak peak!), my final project! The idea was to use the Gouache paint to demonstrate various color schemes in the boxes. When the professor described the project, I immediately thought of Andy Warhol and decided to create a design inspired by his art. Naturally, I chose Bo’s face as my subject (HOW COULD I NOT?! HE’S SO CUUUUUTE!). Contrary to the other projects, this one was hand painted straight onto the painting paper in one shot (no cutouts on this one).

Before you praise me for being a crazy artist, I have to admit I helped myself out by creating a template on the computer that basically broke up the photo of Bo into 5 color zones. Then I managed to create only outlines of those areas, essentially making myself a paint-by-number template of sorts. So it wasn’t all freehand, since I wanted the paintings to look identical with the exception of the colors (like good old Andy). Maybe I will do a DIY tutorial of this one later on if anyone is interested.
Okay, so the color schemes are as follows (in this order): monochromatic (using only one color from the color wheel: blue), analogous (three-five hues next to each other on the color wheel: red, red-orange, orange, yellow-orange, yellow), complimentary (blue, orange), triad (three hues equally spaced on the color wheel: blue, red, yellow), split complimentary (a color and the two colors on either side of its compliment: blue, yellow-orange, red-orange), and double complimentary (two hues next to each other and their compliments: blue, blue-green, orange, red-orange). You could also use black and white in each scheme to create different values of each color but I only used white. I had a lot of fun with the rough texture on this one! We spent the entire quarter trying to make our swatches perfectly smooth so I intentionally went for a rough, hand-painted look. We love it so much that I think we are going to get it framed for the house! :)

Which is your favorite Bo? Let me know in the comments below!

There you have it: round two of my schoolwork update! I’ll be back again tomorrow with more. And as always, feel free to leave any questions below!