Trees, foreground leaves & Printed.com's Trucard paper

Yesterday I didn't do as much work on it, I had other things to do during the daylight hours, just blocking in the base colours for the trees.

Today I managed to get on with a little bit more though I don't think I'll finish it by Tuesday, I've got a four-day workshop with Prince’s Trust starting then and it's going to go right over my daylight hours so I'll either just have to wait or risk working on it in the dark.

I've added some texture to the trees, I'll add more later, and added in the foreground leaves. Both the trees and the leaves are a bit to opposing, I'm thinking tomorrow I'll add some more purple to each of them just to make them merge a bit better, actually first I should add in a basic ground layer. Until I do that I can't really tell how dark I can push different arias.




Thinking about it I should mention what else is going on in my life actually.

A while back I applied for the Prince's Trust and one of the things it does is give you a £200 grant to test if your business idea will work. It might have been a bit risky but I went and ordered a bunch of cards after I'd filled in the application but before  I got the check in. I was too afraid of leaving it till too late and missing all the Christmas/black Friday sales.
I got the grant in a few days ago, so that's fine.

My cards came in, I'd ordered them from Printed.com on the Trucard paper. Now a lot of my digital art is rather dark in colour...Truecard does not work well with darks, but to be honest even some of the lighter cards were in a bad shape. The problem seems to be as it goes through the machine some of it scrapes off and since darks take longer to dry more of them scrapes off. 
Seriously, don't go for the Trucard if you're going for something even a medium dark.... About 260 out of 400 cards had flakes of white where the ink had scratched off, and even though the Trucard was advertised as scratchproof I could still scratch off more of the ink on some of them.

Talked to customer service, they didn't answer questions too well and were pretty willing to go jump into what they thought you wanted. Anyway, I ended up with 260 cards reprinted in a better quality paper, uncoated with matt lamination. Mind you it wasn't the same amount of each type of card as there was ruined, just a selection of the dark cards, so in the end one of the ones I ordered 80 of I only ended up with 40.

Unfortunately I've still not seen the reordered cards yet to judge them, I got them delivered to my mum since she was wanting to sell some at a farmer's market (Thanks mum :P) this weekend but she  seems pretty happy with the quality of them so they should be fine. It helps when your mum's also an artist and has been though the whole card buying/selling business in the past.

There was also a mess with trying to get the envelopes and plastic slip bags in on time as well but that was mostly due to the start of the madness Christmas has on the postal system.

So right now I'm going through the process of putting up the light coloured cards I still have in my flat up on Etsy, I’ll have to wait till I head back to my mum's to pick up the box of the rest of them but hopefully by the end of tonight I can start selling some of these cards on Etsy.

We'll see....nothing else about all this has been that simple, but we'll see.