While it’s quite easy to ship small art prints in a flat mailer, larger prints and posters usually get shipped in a tube. This helps protect them during shipping, and makes the shipping more economical (can you imagine how costly it would be to ship...

When hanging art in my home, I almost always gravitate to a matted frame. That’s because, to me, matted art just looks better. Matted frames are a great way to elevate an art print. The added space around the print gives the artwork a chance to brea...

A customer asked me this question at a market last year. It’s such a difficult question to answer because artwork is so personal. Most of my customers immediately gravitate to one piece or another. The hardest decisions are usually which color schem...

When I first started thinking about offering art prints, I knew I wanted a high-quality paper but wasn’t sure where to start. Most of my sales came from my Etsy store at the time (I was selling downloadable digital art then), and I was still a nomad...

If you’ve ever come across the word “giclée” while browsing art, you might’ve wondered what exactly that means, and why some prints cost more than others. Let’s break it down. Giclée (pronounced zhee-clay) refers to a high-quality printing method th...

I have a bit of an obsession with postcards. I buy them all the time while traveling. We usually get a set to mail out to friends and family and another to keep for ourselves as little mementos.

With three different kinds of elements to choose from (and 22 total), each layout request is entirely unique, so each order needs to be assessed individually. Here's the general method I use when creating a new layout.

We're so used to seeing dark type on a light background. But did you know that at the same size, light type on a dark background appears larger? In this article, we'll look at how I use color to help give balance to a Custom Art Print.

When I first started designing these art prints, I had very muted colors in mind. I never thought of myself as a bold colors girl. Instead, I usually gravitated toward a neutral color scheme. Each of my first four cities were initially designed in o...

The Dodge City lettering style is a chunky, reverse contrast lettering style originally inspired by its namesake: Dodge City, Kansas. When I first developed the concept of my Matchbox Art Series, I was originally going to feature places where I had ...

This style was adapted from my original matchbox design, the one I created for my favorite restaurants in Charleston, SC. I was trying to think of a style for ‘Brown Dog Deli’ when I passed this sign for Duck Donuts in Charlotte, NC.

This style came from one of my earliest matchbox designs. I wanted an elegant serif font to convey this stately Boston neighborhood, but with a small touch of flair. I used a simple serif font as a placeholder and guide for the basic dimensions of t...

Plaza is a modified style taken from the Los Angeles Matchbox Art Print for Los Feliz. For the 'Los Feliz' lettering, I created this very angular, almost stencil-like lettering style. It fit perfectly for that specific piece of artwork, bu...

When I was creating my initial matchbox art prints, I went through a bit of an art deco phase. The Charleston, SC and Los Angeles, CA prints were the first ones to be completed. Charleston had this high-contrast art deco inspired font for ‘Downtown’...

The Charlestown style was inspired by old-world, handwritten scripts. Before we moved to Boston full-time, we visited the Charlestown Navy Yard and Bunker Hill Museums, and I found several examples of these script styles in the museum graphics. Belo...

This fun and funky, reverse contrast style was initially created while I was drawing my Los Angeles Matchbox Print. I needed a style that represented Santa Monica, but that also worked with the locations I had already created for the artwork and bal...

I originally created this style while I was working on a typeface for a client. She was looking for a script/handwritten font style with an emphasis on legibility. One day while I was brainstorming for her, I started drawing what ultimately became m...

This style was initially created for my first matchbox art print, the one I made for some of my favorite Charleston restaurants. There was this great spot called Cru Café, which sadly closed in 2024. This restaurant merged fine dining with comfort f...

When I started creating my matchbox art prints, I used place-holder fonts for the first few designs. I went to Adobe Fonts for visual inspiration to help me narrow down some styles that I thought represented the neighborhoods I had chosen for my art...