Personalized Kids Cups

This is the front view of my “I’m sorry cups” that I made for the kids enrolled in my after school clay class.  Our last class of the session was yesterday and we always have a party to celebrate their clay successes.  Luckily, despite my substitute teaching session last week, I managed to finish their cups in time for them to use at the party.  The extra effort was worth it – they all loved their cups and since I put their names on each other cups they’ll have a permanent reminder of the class and a cup of their very own.  (The one without a name is an extra I made just in case anything went awry – which didn’t happen in this case, so I gave it to the art teacher in appreciation for letting me use her room.)

Back side of cups with decals

The surprise part of the cups were the decals.  Last week, I asked every student what their favorite animal is and I had quite a list ranging from koalas, to a fennec fox, an owl and I had one kid in class who is obsessed with Denver Bronco, Champ Bailey.  (While not an animal, I decided to break my parameters for him.)

Photo decals

I have a great book titled, Animals: 1419 Copyright-Free Illustrations,  published by Dover that has a gazillion animal/fish/reptile/insect etc. illustrations that I used for most of the decals with the exception of the 3 cups above and Champ Bailey.  I had to look for photos on the ‘net for images of the fennec fox, arctic fox and the sand cat.  There were some in the book, but they didn’t work for the decals.  I figure since I’m not making any money on these and they’re a one time excursion, I’m okay copyright wise – I also looked on Flickr for the copyright free/fair use logos.  It’s still a bit of a sticky topic.

Dover Clip Art decals with exception of football player which is a photo

More cups with decals – for the photo decals such as the one of football player, Champ Baily, I used Photoshop to desaturate and then the posterize and threshold tools to get a simpler image appropriate for decals.

More Dover Clip Art Decals

My daughter’s favorite animal is the koala – isn’t this one cute?  I scanned the dover illustrations in at 300 dpi which is recommended for printing laser toner decals.  I had to clean them up a bit once I opened them in Photoshop – there seemed to be a bit of noise around the images.  The magic wand tool is great for selecting an expanse of similar color toned area and then easy to delete.

I spent a couple of hours in the studio yesterday afternoon, threw a bottle, but more importantly I started the reclaim process.  I plan to play with clay most of today after I go on a run with the dogs.

Toodles,

Cynthia