August 2024 | shop update!

It was very hard making art this month. It was a mixture of having too much going on and not being motivated enough. I got over it a little, though, at the end of the month, when I was making some new stuff for a shop update and virtual market!

Packaging stickers

We decided to get a small upgrade by getting a small sticker book to use for packaging. I printed my letsgetarty logo on some of the stickers, and then printed From the Witch’s Scullery-related images on the rest - 2 versions of the logo and a couple of witchy froggies. These will be used to seal goodie bags at markets, as the home-made stickers we currently have are very awkward to unpeel in the middle of a sale! We may throw some of the froggies into orders as freebies, though…👀

Even though I wasn’t making much art I really enjoyed my collaging theme for the month in my journals. It was very fun putting together stickers and washi tape for this astral theme.

I did lots of other private collaging and journalling throughout the month too.

The spread in the above image uses our free downloadable moon calendars, which you can find here;

and our journalling calendar, which you can find here (a 2025 version will be up soon!).

FTWS Webpage

From the Witch’s Scullery now has a website! Well…a webpage. It’s part of my emilyrandall.co.uk website, but it has a completely different look to it. I had fun putting it together and making it interesting to look through. It’s good to now have one solid base for all our links and information. You can have a look at it here.

BAQZF2024 prep (+ new products)

My application to a week-long online zine market event in California was accepted! So in the last couple of weeks of the month I got to work preparing for it. This is an event where artists’ information will be placed on BAQZF’s website with links to their online shops. I made sure my Etsy shop was updated and also added some new products!

I created a couple of new downloadable products that people can print up at home. I made another zine, to go with the 2 I already have available, and a sticker sheet sampler.

The sticker sheet sampler is just that - a sample of most of the stickers I have both on letsgetarty and From the Witch’s Scullery. You can print it at home on normal paper or sticker paper if you have some, cut out the stickers yourself and use them wherever you’d like!

The downloadable zine was a silly activity mini zine idea I had. It’s something you fill out to give to someone else! Namely, your significant other. Fill in the gaps and confess your feelings, try your hand at drawing (or cheat and use a photo) and write a list of the pros and cons about your favourite person. You can make it sweet, silly or mischevious, it's up to you! (The zine is not liable to any fall-outs.)

There are some physical items I added too. Most of them were things I had yet to add to the online shops after selling them for the first time at Swindon Zine Fest in June. My ‘Rainbows’ digital art piece, the 2 ‘BE PROUD’ mini zines I made as part of my That Zine Thing challenge, and the Witch/Cottagecore Drawtober prints I made from the pieces I made last October (can you believe that was 10 months ago??).

One new physical product I made was another silly one. A ‘Wanted’ poster with the text ‘The loml - anyone seen them?’ (‘loml’ means ‘love of my life’!). I decided to make several different colour versions of it to represent some of the LGBTQ+ flags too.

The Bay Area Queer Zine Fest 2024 website will be live between the 2nd and 9th September. Go have a look at all the zine artists listed! (The list might still be available even after the dates, but the links may be taken off by then.)

Shop Update!

So, having said all that, my small shop update is now live! I have all the things mentioned up on my Etsy shop for you to have a browse through :)

Longtown Castle

On the very last day of the month we visited an old castle ruin in the village of Longtown (which got its name from the length of the mediaeval settlement once there!). Unfortunately we found out when walking up to it that it was under repairs and you couldn’t go into the keep itself, but we could walk around the inner bailey walls all the same. I sat down and took the time to do some plein-air sketching after such a long break from drawing outdoors. I was pleased with the outcome.

On the way back we stopped at a church, so I made a quick sketch of that too, liking the layers of building sections from the position I was stood at.

Thank you for reading my August blog post! It was a short one. Before reflecting on the month I thought I would have very little to talk about, and considered not posting at all, but it’s still good to see what each month brings. It’s okay to have periods of time where you’re not making as much as usual!

If you’ve read this all the way through, consider going over to my Etsy shop and having a browse if you like zines, stickers and prints mostly based around nature and travelling. You will also find my pet portrait commissions there! letsgetartyshop.etsy.com <3