Silhouette Nutcracker die cut design

This week in the Silhouette store I'm working on a bunch of pretty complicated diecut designs. The first is a hopefully not too scary nutcracker... I always find them really creepy! My kids seem to like them, though, so this would probably be pretty awesome on a children's t-shirt or tote bag for the holidays.

I think this one would be difficult to figure out, so I created a quick color key (below; right click to download) to help when cutting the shapes from the different colors of cardstock. I recommend American Crafts or Michael's Recollections brand cardstock, and avoid the textured kinds. I'd love to see what you make with the design!

Silhouette swing card tutorial

There are several swing card available in the Silhouette design store like this one, and I've finally put together a tutorial showing how to assemble them so they actually swing when opened. (I put them together wrong when gluing on the pieces the first time... should have made myself a tutorial to follow, ha!)

Date Nut Cake

Trying out a vertical format for my illustrated recipe -- see the original on They Draw & Cook!

Desserts

I think a new They Draw and Cook illustrated recipe is in the works... guess the theme!

Teeny tiny art

I've decided to miniaturize my daily paintings for the 30 day challenge I started yesterday. Oddly it's much more difficult to produce something good that's 2.5" x 3". I thought the ease of making good art would be directly proportional to its size, but apparently that's not the case. This took me a good two hours of fiddling around to get something moderately decent!

Here's my first attempt. It may soon end up stuck on the wall of my daughter's Barbie sized dollhouse, but in the meantime it looks nice on my bulletin board.

30 paintings in 30 days? or until I can't take it any more and need to glue some stuff to other stuff.

Today I'm starting a painting a day challenge for the month of September. I know of artists doing 365 day challenges but that seems a little ambitious for me at this point in my life. Maybe in a couple years when all day school for all children in my house becomes a reality.

In the meantime I'm painting 30 garden related (floral? but not limiting myself) watercolors this month just to see if I can do it without getting completely bored. Here's the first.

UPPERCASE!

Just a short post to share a quick preview of the upcoming issue of UPPERCASE magazine. I'm one of 30 illustrators profiled in it... what an honor! Also, I thought I should point out that I don't really have pink hair at this time in real life, though I did for a short time in college. I just like the color.

New Illustration Talent section underway for the fall issue. Subscribe today!

A video posted by Janine Vangool (@uppercasemag) on Aug 17, 2015 at 2:59pm PDT