Last Year's Sketch, This Year's Button

A pile of buttons for this year's sketch out at the fair.

For this year's Minnesota State Fair Sketch Out, Roz Stendahl asked me to design the button!  It was fun to look back through my four years of sketching at the fair and thinking about which images would stand out best on a button.  I have to say that I ended up making three designs and that this sheep from last year's book was the most striking and my third button attempt.

A section of my 2012 Minnesota State Fair Journal, showing the sheep
drawing used for this year's button design.
Strathmore 500 Mixed Media paper, Sharpie pen, Daniel Smith watercolor

In the image above you can see the page where the sheep sketch came from.  I scanned the sheep at a higher resolution and cropped out the green tea slushy before importing my image to PhotoShop.  In PhotoShop I further cropped the image to conform with the button template constraints and began adding text.

When I started with my first button idea, I realized that my PhotoShop skills had gotten a little rusty and I had a few false starts before regaining the hang of the program.  By the time I got to this guy I had pretty much figured it all out again and I was having fun creating the design for the button.

After cropping and resizing the image, I added the text that needed to go on the button, playing of course with fonts, sizes, location, and colors.  The button still seemed boring and bland (mostly white & black) so I decided that it needed a color pop and I used PhotoShop to color in the background area orange.  This created a great graphic feel and caused me to change the 5 in the design to a nice complementary blue.  Tada! We had a winner.

My collection of State Fair Sketch Out buttons. 

So, how do you get a button of your own?  Join us at the Minnesota State Fair on Tuesday, August 27th and sketch, paint, draw, or journal.  We will meet as a group at 4:30 p.m. near one of the Ag-Hort and Food buildings (more specific info posted later) to share our work and fair stories.  For some of the folks at the fair sketching, this will be the end of their day and for others it will be the beginning.  If you can't make the fair that day but do get there to sketch in the two weeks it's open, let me know and I can work on getting you a button.
You can also check out Roz's post over at the Artists' Journal Workshop about the upcoming sketch out and watch for more details here later in August including details about a pre-fair sketch-out in Gold Medal Park for practice on August 19th at 7 p.m..
Roz's post about the buttons.