This year’s giveway for Podcasters Across Borders (PAB) will be 1” buttons I had made by the fine folks at Mad Cow Buttons. I really love how these came out! The photo above doesn’t do them justice. The images are sharp with vibrant colours and the teeny tiny fine print of my url on the side is easy to read. When you hold the buttons in your hand, you know you’re holding real quality.

Some of the images come from Twitter avatars I created for friends. Good thing I created them in Pantone colours. I didn’t want to use up too much paper and ink printing out test after test making sure the colours are right.

Mascots

The tiger in the orange button has his own website which is a project I’ll begin working on soon. The yellow button comes from my Spud comic series which I’ll be debuting this summer. And the 3 white buttons are mascots from yet another web venture of mine.

The dog with the flower, the tiger and girl in purple and rusty orange are the Twitter avatars I made and the rest are paintings I made a while ago. The girl in red is one of my popular art works I’ve included in my Moo cards in the past.

Crowdsourcing

What I like about making Moo cards and buttons out of my art for the conventions that I go to is it’s a great way to find out which works are most popular. I usually let people choose the ones they like or I simply leave a bunch on a table and see which are left over at the end of the day. Not scientific but a great lesson in learning that the pieces YOU like doesn’t necessarily mean your audience likes.

I also had a new run of Moo cards made for BookCamp Toronto since I was running low on my current batch. I included the popular pieces as well as some new ones. The challenge was getting my paintings to present nicely within the Moo card dimensions while also accommodating the safe area and bleed. My paintings weren’t originally made for a long rectangular shape (nor circular!), so I used the cloning tool in Photoshop A LOT.