Author Archives: Nancy Haberman

Spend your time creating—we’ll do the print work

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greeting card assortment

Let us print your art on greeting cards of any size. All our prices include scoring, folding and envelopes. Colors are water-, scratch- and fade-resistent, unlike non-archival inkjet prints.

We also print bookmarks and print reproductions to 12 inches x 18 inches. Our high quality, low cost laser prints make a stunning presentation when matted and packaged as a print combo.

Westlake Village Art Guild newsletters

We’ve been printing the Westlake Village Art Guild newsletter since 2005.

Does your art club print a newsletter? We can help. We specialize in printing everything for artists and crafters from newsletters and booklets to business cards, postcards and product tags.

Don’t see the print product you’re looking for on our website? Give us a call at 805-522-5475. We quote custom orders.

Following the Dream on Throwback Thursday

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back-to-school

Very few people understood what we Mac Fanatics were up to in 1987 (let alone 1985), but I was following my dream of designing and printing from the desktop. The following month I made the business official and called myself Desktop Design. Today is little Joey’s 36th birthday. He currently works for Disney Studios as a Global Analyst. Happy Birthday, Joey!

Jumpin’ on the Throwback Thursday Bandwagon

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Reporter's First Place WinI thought the day would never come when I would start posting old photos, but here I am in 2019, and mysteriously, this 35-year old gem rose to the top of my flat files.

For weeks I’ve been seeing Throwback Thursday images sneak into my Facebook and LinkedIn feeds. Old photos continue to pop up, so what’s the point of making the excuse that all my photos are old? Of course they’re all old—it’s just a matter of degree.

Throwback Thursday can really take you back. The photo I chose to post shows me being hoisted by the Three Bearded Men early in my Photojournalism education.

While Editor-In-Chief of The Reporter, Moorpark College’s student-published newspaper, our staff grabbed a First Place General Excellence trophy at the Journalism Association of Community Colleges southern California conference.

That was the spring of ’84 when journalists were still using typewriters, film cameras, Compugraphic Editwriters and the old process camera.

Just one year later in the spring of ’85 Apple introduced the LaserWriter, the first desktop “type and image setting” machine, changing My World and The World forever.

Finally a Way to Offset High Shipping Costs

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TAKE10Take 10 percent off your total product purchase!

At Oak Creek Printworks, you always have a shipping choice, and now, for a limited time, we’re discounting your product purchase in an attempt to wipe out your shipping costs, or at least reduce their sting.

We’re on a mission to help stamp out high shipping rates, which are fed to us live from the USPS or UPS. Rates that appear on the shipping page at checkout are based on a number of factors.

These include your exact delivery address, the total size and weight of the products ordered, and the how quickly you want your products delivered. We have worked for years to perfect the system on our end, but as you know, shipping rates keep going up.

So for now, we’ve developed the famous “workaround” and extend this discount offer to you. Just enter the code TAKE10 at checkout to take a bite out of your shipping charges!

 

 

Broaden your vision with panoramas and apps

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Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah takes on an other-worldly landscape, captured here in 11 different photos. I walked away from the computer for a couple of hours while Photoshop’s Photomerge toiled away. The composite yielded a file nearly a gigabyte in size with a remarkable amount of detail. The sweeping landscape’s curved edges may bother some, but, in my opinion they add to the drama.

Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah takes on an other-worldly landscape, captured here in 11 different photos. I walked away from the computer for a couple of hours while Photoshop’s Photomerge toiled away. The composite yielded a file nearly a gigabyte in size with a remarkable amount of detail. The sweeping landscape’s curved edges may bother some, but, in my opinion they add to the drama.

Looking to make your images unique? Want to see things from a new perspective? Try experimenting with Photoshop’s Photomerge feature or AutoStitch app to combine numerous images into a single wide angle view. It’s all automated. Just select the images you want to merge, sit back, and let Photoshop do the rest.

buckwheat and beePerhaps you’re looking for something a little more retro. Thanks to the new digital cameras and Smartphones, we’re able to capture well-lit, sharp focus images, so what’s the big deal? Anyone can take “nice” pictures these days. So, let’s look at images differently and carefully mess them up like we used to do by accident.

After reviewing my photos of the busy bees, I realized that the plants they were all attracted to were buckwheat plants. So, I decided to grunge up the photo with an app and create the masking tape label with “B is for…”, surprise, not bee. Two apps were used in the creation of the photo—Pic Grunger and Labelbox.

Want to learn more about the phone apps? Check out former OCPW featured artist, Holly Higbee-Jansen’s Photographic Explorations. Here you’ll learn about Holly’s favorite phone apps, as well as online and in-person workshops and photography coaching.

Our Etsy store is growing—new products are up!

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blog-post-image-with-new-etsy-products

Now available from our Etsy store are our greeting card boxes, elastic stretch loops, gold seals, adhesive foam pieces and glue tape—all great tools for making and packaging handmade note cards!

Several weeks ago we announced our Etsy store was live, and that we were selling a new kraft note card set; now we have five more products available, and we’re excited about reaching out to more DIY aficionados!

We’ve listed more tools for cardmakers, scrapbookers and other crafters alike: soft fold clear plastic boxes (in standard A2, A6 and A7 sizes), 10″ elastic stretch loops (in 18 metallic and matte colors), gold seals (in 1″ and 1-1/4″ sizes), adhesive foam pieces (squares, strips and circles), and the glue tape pen. Although our regular readers might already recognize these products from Oak Creek Printworks, we hope you’ll share the news with those you know who already use Etsy and might be interested in shopping from us.

Check out our Etsy store, and stay tuned for more updates as we continue to grow our Etsy product offerings!

Oak Creek Printworks is on Etsy

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24 packaged note cards and envelopes

Our blank kraft paper note cards and black envelopes, sold in a set of 24, is sure to help inspire your creativity and showcase your own unique artwork. This product is only available through our new Etsy store!

4 sample cards

To help display the blank cards, we created some of our own sample designs using products that are already available from Oak Creek Printworks.

Design and create personalized greeting cards using products at our new Etsy store, where shoppers will find select items that aren’t available on the Oak Creek Printworks website.

A set of 24 blank kraft paper note cards and black envelopes is our first item in the new Etsy store. The black, square-flap, announcement style envelopes are uniquely paired with 80 lb. kraft paper cards for an acid-free, environmentally friendly card with a more formal look.

We’ve used some of the products already available on Oak Creek Printworks to create the examples shown here: gold seals, adhesive foam squares, black elastic stretch loops.

We hope these cards will inspire our readers to bring their own creations to life! To learn more about the blank kraft paper cards with envelopes visit Our Etsy Store.

We pride ourselves in helping artists market their cards and prints. Send us your creations by snail mail, or 300dpi .jpg,  and if we publish your art on our blog, we’ll link back to your website.

Drawn to Color

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beach front property

Just what was it about this old, weather-beaten shack that kept pulling me back to it, as if by some mysterious, invisible force?

It is one of my favorite photographs from a recent trip to the Caribbean. Okay, I know that seems a little weird, at least I thought so, because in the Caribbean there is a beautiful landscape-seascape at every turn, and so much Color.

In addition my work here at Oak Creek Printworks, I teach Publishing and Prepress as well as the Adobe Create Suite at Moorpark College, a local community college. This prompted me to sign up for the Adobe Creative Cloud. For a flat monthly fee, I now have a “virtual desktop” on the Adobe Creative Cloud Server. There I have access to, not only all of the latest versions of the programs in the Adobe Creative Suite, but easy access to a myriad of tools and videos that help with all things Adobe.

Adobe Creative Cloud Dock

One of the tools on my Creative Cloud desktop is a section labeled “Colors,” where Kuler (pronounced “cooler”) performs an “extraction” on the uploaded image. The extraction draws colors from the image and displays a color palette like the one in the illustration above. The new swatches can then be downloaded and used in the Creative Suite programs. I loaded the Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) file into Photoshop and used the new color swatches (the last 4 in the palette) to quickly work color into the “Beachfront Property” headline and background. I selected a typeface the felt like it belonged to the old shack…and that’s when it dawned on me.

Not only was this the identical color palette I had recently chosen when redecorating my kitchen, but it is a color palette that has been recurring in many important ways since my earliest memories, beginning with summer beach vacations, and the colors of my favorite room in my early childhood home. I relate to these colors in a profound way. You might say I’m drawn to them.

So I think these particular colors have just a little to do with my emotional attachment to this out-of-focus, tightly cropped image, which I intend to make into, well, something. Beyond that tiny bit of subjectivity, I will not critique this photograph any further. I’ll leave that to anyone who has read this far!