Featured Designer – Clever Monkey Graphics
Happy Friday Sweet Shoppers! I hope you’ve had a great week! January is always so fun – the first part is so fast (while we’re trying to be ‘good’ and follow new priorities) and then it seems like it slows to a crawl. The good news is that winter is half over, and hopefully the last half goes by quickly until Spring arrives!
Today I get to introduce our newest Featured Designer – Tracey of Clever Monkey Graphics. Tracey’s store is full of custom illustrations in every theme imaginable, and she has a distinct talent for drawing animals – you really need to check it out!
Tracey’s featured designer kit is A Wee Bit Frosty and it is so much fun! Perfect for those chilly winter days spent with a hot drink by the fire, or for when you brave the elements and enjoy the snow or clear skies on a frosty day. This kit is FREE with your $10 purchase from now until the new releases go live on January 24th.
Tracey also created these these super cute animals as an add-on, and not one but TWO packs of corresponding card sets!
Now let’s find out more about Tracey!
Tell us about your journey with digital scrapbooking… How did you find out about it? Did you start with paper first? How did you get started designing? Where was your first shop? How and when did you end up at Sweet Shoppe Designs?
In 2000 I had my daughter. About a year later I was invited to a scrapbooking party – it was my introduction. Until then I didn’t know how ‘those’ stores stayed in business and suddenly I was keeping them in business. Already having graphic design training, I began adding titles and journaling I created on the computer. (let’s not discuss my handwriting here! Ha ha.) When I discovered digital scrapbooking I quickly switched to it because I couldn’t stand my always messy office, especially with a young child looking to get into things. Well that was it, I was fully hooked. A new artistic outlet and pictures of my sweet girl – perfect. But I had a lot to learn because my skills were more like straight from school than fully broadened and I knew Illustrator far better than Photoshop back then. I think it took me a long time to truly come into my design style and it truly happened when my dad gifted me with a Wacom monitor so that I could draw in photoshop. I did not really look to join the big stores for a while at that point as my sister had just died of pancreatic cancer and I was truly mourning the loss and not looking to stretch or overburden myself for a few years. When my daughter left for college, which gave me far more time to do things, I applied to Sweet Shoppe during a call and here I am.
How do you define your style? What does that style include? How has your style changed over the years?
Sometimes I think in another life I’d have been a child’s book illustrator or just create art for their walls. Perhaps I am influenced by the Richard Scarry Best Word Book Ever that I had as a kid. I pored over that book time and again; I love his artwork. But there is also a side of me that loves the wild artsy kits and layouts so you may find that influence in smaller quantities in my kits. I love lots of color perhaps because my mom was an artist. And there is the part of me that allows for kits about college, etc. My kits always include me drawing and I wouldn’t know what to do if I can’t draw something.
Where do you see your designs going in the future? Is your focus changing in any way?
I find myself adding more ephemera in kits as time passes because I love the contrasts it creates in scrapbooking. So I’d expect you will see more of that as time goes on. AI holds no lure for me. I just can’t fully respect the idea of speaking words to a computer and it draws something for me. That does not require art talent.
How do you stay motivated or deal with the loss of mojo?
I rarely lose my mojo. It’s more like I get an overdose of mojo and don’t know which way to turn. There are so many things I want to accomplish in life and in design. So I guess when my motivation dips, it’s because I’m overwhelmed with choice and in freeze mode.
How do you know when a product is “finished”?
When I run out of time for a creative team to play with it. LOL. Truly, I have loaded new kits and collections less than five minutes from when the new products go live in the store. Yah, I’m bad. This is also why my kits are big – I want to give my customers EVERYTHING because I want everything to scrap with myself.
What’s your most memorable childhood adventure?
One of my sister’s and I read a book about a special vehicle that was made of fruits and vegetables, and this special vehicle would turn up in a neighborhood park at dawn. So one day my sister and I snuck out of the house very early and walked to the park. No, our magical vehicle was not there. But this memory has stuck with me from childhood. If I was to be led into mischief as a child, it was either by this sister or my best friend. Another great adventure my sister and I had was walking over to a property in the woods that had cool caves to explore. But that time we did tell our mom where we were going!
If you could pick anyone in the past or present to go on an adventure with, who would you pick and what would you do?
I would like to go with my mom because I adored her and she is so organized that we would have a great itinerary and I’m sure we would talk for hours about everything we saw. When I was grown and living an airplane ride from my parents, I would sometimes join them for a few days when Dad had to be in Arizona on business. One of those trips landed us in Sedona and Dad treated Mom and I to a helicopter ride to see the Red Rocks. I lost my mom in March of 2023 after many years of her suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Would you rather go on a relaxing vacation or an adventure hike?
I’d like to go on a relaxing vacation but bonus if it has a gorgeous hike that is not too long. Being outdoors feeds my soul.
If you had an hour to yourself, but were not allowed to use it to scrapbook or design, what would you spend the hour doing?
Reading or watching a good show on tv.
What is your current desktop or cell phone wallpaper? Why did you choose that image?
Ha ha – it’s a picture of me that my husband took.
If there was a meme about you or your designs, what would it look like?
Scattered brain reaching in various directions for ideas and paintbrushes, etc.
What’s the last really great book you read or tv show you watched?
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I adored the chapters where we get let into the mind of an Octopus.
To see Tracey’s products in action, check out this playlist from Cheryl scrapping with many of her kits. Here is a quick video of her scrapping with My Chronic Life bundle.
Before I show you some inspiration from the SugarBabes using A Wee Bit Frosty, I wanted to share these quotes from Tracey’s CT members:
“Tracey’s whimsical collections are a delight to work with. Her illustrated elements are full of personality and just plain cute. I am also a cluster girl and her florals are gorgeous and make clustering a breeze.”
Danica
“I absolutely love creating with CMG kits. They are some of my favorites. Tracey always has the cutest hand drawn elements. It’s so hard not to use them all. As well as having a wide variety of staple elements and papers. Her themes are fun to work with. Her kits scrap up so quickly, for me.”
Tammy Z
“I like working with Tracey’s kit because I can come back to them over and over and scrap multitudes of pages with one kit because her kits are usually huge. I eagerly anticipate every new release just to see what new layouts I can make with them. I rely on her seasonal kits and love the humor in them and how she listens to her team’s input to broaden ideas of what to add to the kits.“
Shellby
And now for some inspiration from the SugarBabes!
Check out Cheryl’s process in scrapping this page in this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/L8qhqmgcvJM
That’s it for this week – come back next Friday to see a sneak peak of the 15 products Tracey has chosen for her Featured Designer 15 sale starting January 21st. Until then – keep on scrapping!
