We've got our winners for the Squshify My Pet 2015 contest so now it is time to show you what they won!
Last year we did a custom ornament for our first place winner, which is by far our most popular custom request. We have a selection of dog breed ornaments and a few cat breed ornaments in our shops, but sometimes they just aren't the right match for your pet.
Recently we've started doing more with felt illustrations, both a cartoony style with the Squshies characters and more realistic portraits. We really enjoy making full on felt pictures and they've gotten a good response at shows so we thought for this year's first place prize we should do a felt portrait of the winner.
The first step in any custom order is the sketch. The goal of our sketches is to you give a really solid idea of how the finished product is going to look before we dive into the felt. Anytime we make a sketch we're keeping in mind what we can and can't do with felt and using digital colors that best represent our felt colors.
All of the winners were asked to submit any other photos they had of their pet that they thought might help us in our sketch process.
The photo on the left was our 1st place winner's entry in the contest and the photo on the right is one of the additional photos we received.
This is the sketch we made from the photos for the felt portrait. The contest photo was super cute, but the additional photo gave us a more interesting angle and lighting to work with. The winner was also sent some background fabric choices for their picture, based on a few quick questions about color preference and solid versus a patterned background.
The photo on the left was our 2nd place winner's entry and the photo on the right is one of the additional photos we received for the sketch.
Here's the sketch we made. This sketch is done in the style we use for ornaments.
The photo on the left was our 3rd place winner's entry and the photo on the right is one of the additional photos we were sent.
This sketch was also done in the style we use for designing all of our felt ornaments.
With all custom orders, once we have a sketch, we send it out for review and feedback. We sent each of our contest winners the sketch of their dog so they can let us know what they think.
Next up I'll be posting about the revisions process for this batch of winners!