WIP Wednesday

Hello how are you today? This week is flying by so quickly for me, but I think that's because I've been so busy taking new photographs of every product I have for the shop! I decided the black and white photos weren't really working out - sales decreased, people always asked to see colour versions and generally the interest in products had gone.

So - I didn't waste any time in looking for inspiration and and started to look around for a new angle to try styling the photographs in. I wanted to make sure people knew that they were buying a papercut unframed and I wanted to show the delicate details without distraction. I ended up finding a few pieces of this wood and decided to use them. They had slight wear and tear and a nice texture, with some great typography to boot, so I was sold as soon as I saw them - plus I think the texture adds just enough interest as to not distract from the papercuts.

So after a full two days taking photographs and editing most of them, I am now just editing photographs of all the Mr Yen greeting cards - which should all be uploaded by the end of the week.

Hope to se you back here tomorrow for a Thursday Finds post!

weekend goodness

Hello! I hope you're all having a great weekend so far. This morning I had a quick visit to my Dads house to have a rummage around for props for some new photographs and I found this piece of wood and lots of others like it in his shed. I love the typography on it and the wood has a great texture to it, I think it will definitely have to be used in the new photos, what do you think?

Enjoy the rest of your weekend and I will see you back here on Monday!

WIP Wednesday

Hello!

All this week I have been taking new photos of all the Mr Yen shop products and business cards. While updating the Mr Yen website in between uploading and editing photos (more on that later this week!) I have decided to have all my product photos black/white/grey now as they are the only colours of paper I use - so I thought I would go with it and create all my photos in the same way to create a more coherent look to my shop and my products.

You can see all the new photos in the Mr Yen shop here or the Mr Yen Etsy shop here.

New Branding Imagery

To go with my new product photographs I have decided to add a few tweaks to some Mr Yen branding elements (as you can see the blog header above, the Mr Yen Big cartel shop and my Etsy shop header too). In each of my papercut product photos you can now see ribbons, my scalpel and a piece of crystal (smokey quartz).

I would like to explain why I chose these things as they could appear to be random prop choices, but the piece of crystal was chosen as each piece of crystal or semi-precious stone is always a one of a kind. Each crystal has natural unique aspects to it, just like my papercuts and I also feel using a semi-precious piece of crystal/stone is a nice way to show the delicacy, detail and value of my pieces.

The ribbon used in my product shots is a reference to my logo, which I have had for quite some time now - the Mr Yen logo uses a banner/ribbon element, which I feel represents luxury and thoughtfully wrapped presents/gifts, which is something I feel my papercuts would be great for....and the scalpel/blade is the exact knife I use to cut all my papercut artwork!

New Way of Listing...

Each individual pattern and product is now listed separately - before it used to be: product listing > choose pattern > purchase and now it's pattern & product listing > choose option if there is one (lined, gridded, plain paper) > purchase. I think the method of listing each individual pattern for each product makes it easier to understand what product is available with which pattern, as before it looked as though there was only one pattern available - which was the main product listing.

Hope you found it interesting knowing all the 'behind the scenes' reasons for why I do what I do. I will be back tomorrow with the first Thursday Finds post!

{WIP Wednesday}

This week I've been working on some new products using all my paper that I have collected over the years.

I thought I would recycle it - instead of throwing it away, and I thought the best way to recycle it would be to create a small range of products...which will be revealed soon!

Here's a little peek...

{Monday Morning}

{image: new and improved Mr Yen notepads, with more pages - available soon!}

Good Morning!

Well after my relaxing weekend off work from Muji, I feel recharged and ready to take on the week. Today I will be focusing on photographing some of my new printed products and tinkering with some packaging designs too.

Over the weekend I finally set up a Facebook page for Mr Yen, which you can find here. I also got around to setting up a sign up form for a Mr Yen mailing list, which you can find in the side bar or you can click here. If you would like exclusive information on new designs & sneaky peeks you won't see anywhere else - plus other fun things to be added later, then just sign up with your name and email address. The first newsletter will be sent out when my new products are released and my shop is open again.

Anyway, time to get back to work...

Hope you have a productive day!

{Monday Morning}

Good Morning!

Over the weekend I received some of the new printed products (postcards) which I have recently been working on & will be releasing soon, and I am really pleased with the outcome - I can't wait to reveal them!

This morning I thought I would give you a little look at some of the paper goodies I created last week that will be used in my new product photos. I made some tissue paper pom poms, some paper garlands (using nice bright sunny oranges), paper pyramids and some origami boxes.

**Oh and the 50% off mrYen Etsy sale ends tonight at midnight!**