Hello, my friends! Wow, it’s been a minute since I sent out this Show & Tell newsletter. Happy September! To quote the great George Costanza, “I gotta focus. I’m shifting into soup mode”.

A lot of fun design news has happened since we last met here in our emails together. The biggest thing being I attended Annie Atkin’s Graphic Design for Filmmaking workshop in Dublin, Ireland a few weeks ago! My husband and I turned the whole trip into a 15-year anniversary celebration trip and also visited France, Belgium, and the Aran Islands. It was a dream trip that was mostly unplanned which led to lots of bike rides through the country, wandering into cafes, and so much walking.

Let’s jump into the workshop!

10 of us attended Annie’s 2-day workshop and it was so fun to meet other designers from all over the world who also have a niche interest in prop making. Here are some tips and tricks I learned to make props look realistic:

Butter! If you want your paper to have a translucent look, rub butter all over the paper on both sides. Then rinse it off in water. Magic! A translucent piece of paper.
Need rounded corners for a passport? Or a pocketbook? Skip the xacto knife and buy one of these.
Never start a prop without proper research. Use eBay. Scour a flea market. Pop up to your grandma’s attic!
Perforated edge: buy one of these pokers and poke away at the edges

I’ll leave you there with what I learned. If you’re a designer and have an interest, I highly recommend taking her workshop and investing in yourself. I feel so lucky that I got to go.

Post Workshop Homework!

My homework was to think of a character and create the graphic props. I chose my husband’s grandma, Barb Norling. Barb fished in Northern Minnesota every summer on the shores of Rainy Lake. So I designed what her tackle box could look like in 1967!

Here’s a look at the process:

I created templates, printed them out, mocked them up, stamped them, and even added dirt, water and tea to them.

I bought some old fishing lures and boxes from a neighbor and dressed them up with new labels that I referenced from 1967 fishing materials from ebay. Each typeface was referenced to the the era.