Finally Finished! Huge (39 items!) printable Totoro stationery set

Man oh man. At a certain point we had to say, "Okay stop. There's a billion things in here!" 39 to be exact. 6 PDF pages full of Totoro Goodness® . We could have gone on forever. There's so much fun stuff in the Totoro universe, it's easy to get carried away. But we wanted to get the holiday set listed before the holidays were over. Shocking concept there, eh?


The character designs are all from Miyazaki, but each illustration is original by Mona.


My favorite is the Soot Sprite Christmas Tree.






Includes:

2 Folded gift cards:
• 1 Santa Totoro
• 1 Catbus

4 Flat notecards:
• 2 Santa Totoro
• 2 Sho Totoro

9 Gift tags:
• 3 Santa Totoro
• 2 Catbus
• 2 Sho Totoro
• 1 Soot Sprites
• 1 Blue Totoro with Ocarina

24 1.5" Envelope Stickers:
• 8 Santa Totoro
• 4 Red Sho Totoro
• 2 White Sho Totoro
• 4 Green Catbus
• 4 White Catbus
• 2 Soot Sprite Christmas Tree

DIY Totoro cards.

We've been on a Totoro kick lately, and the latest installment is this set of 4 printable Totoro holiday cards. They're up in our Etsy shop. Once you purchase the PDF, you can print as many as you like! Keep them for yourself, or give out to friends, or print up a set of 10 for a great gift. There are four different colors included, so you can mix and match. Each card template even has lots of helpful tips for the DIYer, like, "CUT HERE" and "FOLD HERE." And just a tip, folding works best if you either crease or score the fold line a bit. Makes for a much cleaner fold. 

They measure 5.5 x 4" and should fit most medium envelopes (not included).



I'm finishing up some linocut prints of the same illustration. Except these are limited edition, hand-carved and hand-printed cards. I only have the hats to print and then I'll post pics. I really like how they came out, the ink has a mind of its own. Pretty much the opposite of computer-drawn work. Except it started on the computer. Which makes me like it even more. I'm big on that whole computer/handmade/mush-em-all-together thing, if you haven't noticed.

My first stamp!

I finally decided to try carving my very own stamp last night. Since Nathan keeps churning out awesome stamp after awesome stamp, how hard could it be? Turns out, it's kind of a pain in the ass at first, but so worth it once you get the hang of it.

As an illustrator who works almost exclusively on the computer, whether using the dreaded pen tool in Adobe Illustrator or drawing on my Wacom tablet in Corel Painter, kickin' it old school and actually making something by hand was a challenge for me. You see, linocutters do not have an "undo" command. So when you carve a chunk out of your line art on a stamp, it stays carved. Ugh! This means I had to work slower and more patiently than usual. Nathan was a big help and showed me some techniques like... carving in narrow, shallow strokes instead of deep gouging ruts (maybe I need a better outlet for my pent-up energy?) Also, in the real world, there's no "zoom" tool. Some of the details are so tiny, I felt like my eyes were going to cross and stay that way.

Gripes aside, working with physical tools and materials that don't always behave how you want them to was actually kind of theraputic for me, like putting Elmer's glue on your hands and slowly peeling it off.

Nate and I both worked on the same stamp design (a little Totoro) so I could compare my shaky job with his rockin' one. It was hard work, but once I saw my finished stamp, it made me want to make more.

Totoro!

I'm trying to get back into the habit of drawing outside of work, so I decided to make a few illustrations inspired by one of my favorite movies, My Neighbor Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki. I also might have gotten a little distracted from drawing by all the cute Totoro merchandise for sale on the web.