my first studio vlog! what i got up to in May 2021

Hi everyone! Here’s my first studio vlog! I thought you might like to see what I get up to behind the scenes in my studio, and as the title says, there were a lot of activities starting with P! Enjoy!

You can also watch on and subscribe to my YouTube channel. There are subtitles available, and the transcript is below if you need to read as well as watch. I’d love to hear what you think, so leave a comment here or on youtube, or email me. Sign up to my email list as well for more at www.aratidevasher.com

00:00 Introduction
01:10 A Delivery!
03:58 Packaging Products
09:12 Experiments with Product Photography
10:14 A Lovely Walk
11:22 A Layout for a Commission
15:26 My Logo Stamps Arrive!
17:27 A Little Bit of a Tidy Up
22:17 Chit Chat and Beginning my Commission
25:27 Ironing and Photographing
28:12 More Chat and another Delivery
33:47 Packing Orders
38:31 Gilding my Commission
40:38 A Garden Tour
45:57 Samples and Goodbye!

I am not sponsored by any brands and nothing has been gifted either; just ask any questions you might have in the comments! I’ll do my best to help you out.

Transcript:

Hi everyone, I’m Arati Devasher, welcome to my studio!

As you probably saw from the clips just ahead of this one, it’s going to be a studio vlog.

It is my first studio vlog, and I’m not quite sure how much I’ll show you because a lot of what I do these days ends up being admin and not a lot of drawing. So, things like packaging stuff, designing packaging, making sure I’ve sent stuff off to the printer correctly. All that kind of stuff. So if you find it interesting, keep watching and let’s see what I get up to. So I’m just going to put in the clips of me unboxing the cards that have arrived and then after that we’ll get to packaging them.

Oh my goodness guys! This giant box has just arrived, and it has my new cards and my new postcards… so excited. Oh no, they’ve used plastic inside… I hate it when they do this. Well they will be getting an email from… look so much… they will be getting an email from me! Particularly when I said in checkout ‘do not pack in plastic packaging’… oh gosh this is gonna take some undoing… so give me a minute.

Oh my goodness they look so good! These are the new postcards, look how nice and shiny and glossy they are and on the back they’ve got… focus… that… plenty of space to write. Oh so nice! Look at these! Let me just get them out.

Oh my goodness… I have set them all out, forgive the mess. I’m just going to show you really quickly… so there are all the envelopes for all the cards, they’re all kraft envelopes and all the cards I ordered this time are square, so there are those. And then here are the Spices postcards… the lovely gloss on the front. I did do that because in the post they tend to get scratched, so that’s why I didn’t do matte, and then on the back… oopsies, me and my clumsiness! And the back as I showed you before. There we are… so there’s a brown, a yellow, a pink and a green, they’ve all got different spices on. And then there’s a set of three, which is one, two and three… that’s them, and then a set of ducks and an Easter rabbit. And then this is from my little Moleskine sketchbook tour, you would have remembered, there’s a set of eight postcards, so… potato, watermelon, aubergine, lime, onion, cucumber, lemon and a carrot. And then there’s the Artist card… so this is how I printed them. I’ve got the logo on the back and then I’ve got… being clumsy again! And that’s how the card will be… yay for the kraft envelope. And then here is a set of five Animal card. So you’ve seen this one as a print already… and then there’s the Ourobouros, Otter, the Fish and the Hammerhead Shark and that’s them… and then there’s three food cards, and three balloon cards. Oh my goodness, I’m so happy so happy with how they’ve come out!

Okay, so now that you’ve seen that clip and you’ve seen the postcards, let me show you the packaging. What I’ve done is designed this for each set of postcards… like the individual ones will obviously be sent as they say ‘naked’ without any packaging at all, but the postcards are going to be packaged like this; for example, Five A Day set has eight postcards, all different ones, you saw them on the table just now, but these are the eight. And it also comes in a set of four, so I guess I need to… maybe… well, actually I did a postcard set one, so I don’t really need to put… oops, focus… so I don’t really need to put how many cards there are in that, but… so there’s that… So they all go together like that and then do this and right now I’ve got washi tape on the back but I suppose at some point I will do stickers of my own and then put them on the back, I suppose that could be done, we’ll see. But anyway, so that’s how they are, and I’ve got to do all the rest of them. Let’s hop to it, shall we? I’ll turn the thing around so that you can see better.

[music]

And then that’s an extra card… um, some people might not want a snake or a dragon / ourobouros in their set so I thought I’d do a set of five with those four animal cards and then this one so actually I need to get them… some more out. Let me take you along with me.

So here’s how I keep my cards in this old set of drawers from… I think it was from Muji. So I’ve got all my postcards like this and then here are the, uh, what are they called?! Greeting cards! So I’ve got all the Christmas ones in there because I don’t really need them right now but I do have some of the foodie ones and then here the animal ones that I want I’ve already got that one I need an otter, and a fish, and a hammer head… oops a jellyfish, I do need a jellyfish, and I need a hammerhead… so that’s all four of those.

[music]

Well, it turns out I don’t have enough light to photograph and also my table is full of clutter right now so maybe I’ll do that another day, but maybe I have to do a bit of admin now. I hate doing that… update the shopify stuff and oh, my computer has decided to restart itself. Well, that tells me what I’m going to do next which is basically take the dog out for a walk so… it is only well… it’s early yet.

So… oh, why is it focusing on my phone? There we go… um, so what I’ve done is, as my computer was restarting, I ended up going on instagram (@artysubu) and doing a little poll as to what kind of photographs they liked… so I’ll kind of like move over here and kind of stick them up here so you can see the two different options… if you go to my website you’ll probably see the one that ended up winning but I did think about doing this gray background and then I thought about doing this dark brown background and then this marble background.

So I hopefully I would have been able to stick all the pictures in here, otherwise I’m just doing this for nothing at all. But, anyway, so I made that decision at least, so that when I do have enough light along with the studio lights I can actually take the photographs. But now it is indeed time to take the dog for a walk and I’ll see if I can film a few clips there. See you later!

[music]

Hi everyone, it is a couple of days later. I literally forgot to film. I’m not very good at this vlogging thing, am I?! But, um, I’ve just washed my hair… it’s quite early in the morning. I will be doing some photography later on but first I need to do some layouts for a commissioned piece, so I’ll set you up and start doing that.

So what I’ve got in my sketchbook is a few inspiration pictures. I don’t want to show you that because they are personal pictures belonging to the lady whose commission this is, but it is going to be a picture of her dogs. I can show you this much, and it’s two dogs and I’ve done it in my style. This is the sketch… I’m going to have my usual little Victorian steampunk figure and a whole bunch of… I think these will be gold lines, but what I’m actually going to do now is experiment a little with the colors so that I can then send her the layout. I’m going to put some nice music on and concentrate on this. Enjoy!

[music]

I have got an exciting delivery! Let me open it… Well I’ve already opened it but you know what I mean. It is the Trodat stamps and I’ve got them with my logo on. The reason I went for these is… this one in particular is made from recycled materials, but all of them are made, as it says, carbon neutral… they’re all made with electric energy rather than using natural coal or gas and things like that and they’re a pretty ecologically sound company as far as I can tell. But let me show you what I actually got… you’ve got these cool little cutouts at the top. I guess it’s because if you want to keep them in the boxes then you can do that. Oh let me show you this one. It’s already popped out… so it shows you the stamp inside.

So here’s one of them, that’s the stamp that’s inside, and then here’s the other one and that’s the stamp that’s inside that. So let me just use this bit of paper and… ooh! look at that! That’s awesome! And then here’s this one… isn’t that great?! I’m so happy with them. So now what I’m going to do is I’m going to use these to customize my packaging and to customize the… my… sometimes maybe even my… my… tissue paper which… I don’t have printed tissue paper because I do feel like it’s a little bit of a waste. I want people to be able to reuse my tissue paper once they’ve opened the package so I don’t want to do that. I might do like seasonal stuff which they can reuse but we’ll see. Anyway, I’m rambling on here. I just want to go test these on some stuff and I’ll see you back in a bit.

Hi everyone, it is the weekend, and today after a really, really long time we are going to have people over in the garden… just two friends, but it feels so different! Oh, super bright… there we go and I have made… let me just turn you around… I have made a nice biryani and some sides.

But they’re going to be here in about let’s say 20–25 minutes, so in the meantime I thought that I would tackle a section of my studio that… let’s just say has been collecting for a while. It is this… and that… and that. I collect every piece of packaging that comes into the house because I don’t want to waste it but I would say that I have enough wouldn’t you?! Okay, so I’m gonna clear this up if I can… I’m so ashamed of this section!

[music]

So I’m mostly done, let me just show you. What I’ve got is a… a crumpled rug from where the dog was lying! I have this box of random stuff that I need to sort out. I think it’s got a few plastic bags and a bit of random things; need to sort that out. I’m gonna put that in the shed because I don’t have time to do that right now, but what I’ve ended up with is this box of A3 sized packaging, A4 sized packaging and A5 / large letter and one random mailing tube. So all this stuff will provide me enough packaging for the rest of my days, I think! And then of course I’ve still got my A3 ones over there which I had to purchase because my A3 prints need some excellent packagingto go in. So I’ve still got those and now I’ve got these.

And then I actually found my bag of alterations of my clothes and my husband’s clothes that I actually need to do that I couldn’t find that was underneath over there, and then I’ve got this box of packaging beans and a pack of bubble wrap. This stuff’s going to go in the shed because I don’t always need that stuff, but those will stay over here, and obviously I found another thing of stuff that I need to sort out. So those things I’ll do later on, but in the meantime I have… well… a somewhat clean… let me just tuck that back in there… a nice, clean packaging section, sort of.

And I am shocked to say, that literally took me 15 minutes. I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner. It’s been lying there for months! Anyway, my friends are almost here, see you later!

Good morning everyone! It is… what is it?! I think it’s Tuesday, after the weekend. We had friends over and it was so nice and as of yesterday, Monday the 17th of May (2021) we can now have people indoors in the UK. So we’re really looking forward to that, but, with caution. I mean, I have health issues so obviously I need to be extra careful, but at least my family can come in, and we can hug, and that is amazing. For everyone else, especially our parents and family back in India, we’re still worried, we’re still stressed, but there’s nothing we can really do about it other than support them from here, so we’re going to do that. But enough of the depressing talk, and let’s get on with our day.

I am… I have got permission from the lady whose commission I was working on… you would have seen the clips just before this, so I’m going to get started on making the actual final piece, and I’m going to take you along. I’m going to show you only a little bit because I will do it as a full video, so yeah, that’s my day today, and I’m sorry if you can hear clicking in the background… the dog is walking around. This is going to be a constant in my vlogs! It’s always going to be like some noise going on, isn’t there?! Anyway let’s get on with this.

So you saw me doing the colors for this one, and this is what I’m going to do now. I’m going to use Accademia… Fabriano Accademia paper… it is beautiful. It is larger than A4, so I will be cutting it down a little bit just to make it wide enough for the size that I want. It’s about that much, so instead of cutting it down what I might do is just tape it like so. Anyway, you’ll see the rest of this, probably… I’ll put some clips in but you’ll already see it in possibly the next or maybe the video after that, after it’s gone off to the lady who it belongs to. Anyway…

[music]

Hi everyone, it is the 19th of May. I’ve just got a text that… from DPD that my tea towel delivery is arriving tomorrow, the ones that I ordered. So I’d better get the samples ironed and photographed, because, despite telling you I was going to do the photography, I haven’t actually done it! So I’d better get to it right now!

[music]

Well, I have to say that was a bit of a fail… my… I’m so upset, I can’t even talk! My camera stopped working, so I actually to use this camera, which is why I couldn’t film it for the vlog. So annoying! Well, at least I have a camera that I can use, don’t I?!

[music]

Hi everyone… oops, not bright enough, let’s just do this… there we go… a bit too bright, maybe. Anyway, I have got a delivery of my tea towels. They are all here. Sorry, ignore the chips first thing in the morning! But, yeah, now I have to iron everything, package them all up and put them on the website. Because I’m a small business I can only order a limited number of each. Hopefully they’ll sell well and then I can order some more. Anyway, time to do that! It makes me feel better about my dead camera.

I did forget to say it’s like two days after I did the… the photography that you would have seen in the last clip, but anyway, I’m losing track of time here. I have to get better at, like, noting down what day it is. I suppose it’ll be in the… in the camera. I can figure it out. Anyway, I’m going to go and continue with my commissioned piece and get on with the rest of my day. Bye!

Hi everyone! It is Friday the 21st evening and I’m waiting for… can you see? Well, I’m editing and I’m waiting for my premiere to start off… oops, can you see that? My galaxy painting tutorial!

Now… now I realise that I haven’t been able to show you so much in this vlog… it’s… I’ve been editing and it’s already like past 35 minutes, but what I’ve shown you is my drawing, some packaging and shortly I’m going to film a couple of orders that I’ve got, both for my silks business which I’m shutting down slowly – slowly – and my the tea towels that I put up that went up on my website today.

But I’ve also realised that I haven’t shown you my… the hours I spent editing, the hours I spent on my ipad, the nice things I’ve done like the cooking, and I think I put in one dog walking clip, but I take my dog out every day for walking, twice a day, I mean my husband and I. And we go walking on weekends and things… I haven’t put any of that in. I haven’t… well I haven’t… I’ve forgotten to film it in the first place, but I wonder if I could, next month, for the next studio vlog, film a little bit more of that… of cooking and cleaning… and well… maybe not cleaning, what am I saying?! A bit of cooking and a bit more drawing and a few more other things. Let me know in the comments… what do you… what do you want to see from me?

Also, I just got a delivery from Wear ’Em Out pads, which I order a couple of pads every now and again, just to like build up my stock, but I will show you, because it is actually it is a very important conversation to have. So let me just show you that before the premiere begins…

So here’s my delivery from Wear ’Em Out pads. Now you might be wondering a) what is this and b) why is it just in an empty box?! Firstly, they are reusable period pads and I have been using them for more than a year now, since the brand launched. Not sponsored, not affiliated, I just really, really genuinely love these pads and Lauren who runs the business is an amazing woman. I follow her on instagram and she’s… she makes me laugh so much every day.

But, anyway, so they have this wonderful thing at checkout where if you’re a previous customer or even if you’re not you can choose to have your order sent without any packaging. So no belly bands, no invoice, no tissue, nothing. Just the box, and I think that is just amazing, right, because the whole ethos of having a reusable pad is that your pads don’t go… apologies for my phone beeping… that your pads don’t go to landfill. So I’ve got two sets of pads… one is the medium in the original design but with the gray inside and one is the mega mega with the navy inside… these come in navy as well… with the ocean design which is the new design. Now I keep getting some of these pads every now and again just to bolster up my stock, but I really really recommend them. First of all they don’t go to landfill, they last for ages and secondly I really feel that it has helped my pain and discomfort; definitely helped with that.

Now, because they didn’t come with packaging, I saved some from my last order to show you and this is for the mega mega flo and these are the details it’s called Wear ’Em Out and here’s how to take care of them. You literally shove them in the washing machine and you air dry them. They’re so easy to care for and then they come with this little how to care for your pads as well. And here are the details of the website and the brand so please do go check them out. As I said I’m not sponsored and not affiliated but I will leave the link in the description box below. These are products that I use myself and have been using and will continue to be using. Anyway thanks for listening to my little rant! Now, back to my premiere!

[music]

So my parcels are ready for the post box, but I thought I’d show you what I did to the tissue paper. Now, I’ve said before that I don’t like personalized tissue paper, but I just wanted to test out the stamp, to be honest. So I thought I’d do that. I think it looks quite cute. Of course I would never do this because who’s going to reuse Arati Devasher Illustration tissue paper, right? So if I ever get a personalized one I’ll do a pattern that anybody can use. So that’s going for the next order, maybe and then there’s one already in there, and I’m done for the day.

So I was going to go and chill for the evening, but I’ve just got one more order in and I want to get it out in the post tomorrow, because it’s a Saturday collection and I’m having a postman come and collect something else, so two birds, one stone, and I’m gonna do that now. This is an unusual day, actually, I haven’t had orders for weeks and weeks and suddenly like… okay well it’s… I guess I’ve launched my tea towels, so that’s probably why, but anyway let’s get to this.

[music]

Plus I feel like I should do a video of this packing so that I can then make a TikTok / reel / YouTube Shorts… so many things these days, aren’t there? But, yeah, I feel like I should pack it on video… okay, I’m gonna do that but I’m not gonna film it because I’m just tired now. Bye!

Good morning everyone! It is Monday or Tuesday of the last week of May. I am pretty much spending this week doing a little bit of admin… I have to get some stickers and things made, card catch stickers and packaging stickers, and I’ve also got to do the finishing touches on that commission that I was doing, the dogs one. And I’m hoping that my gold foil… well, gold leaf bits will arrive this week, because I thought I had some and I didn’t, so I needed to order them. So hopefully those will come in and then I can finish it and send it off to my client. Other than that I took it a bit easy over the weekend. I wasn’t feeling great, just had an upset tummy, but we had a good weekend, spent with family, so that was good. And what else is up… not else is… not much else… well let’s see. There’s only one week left in May let’s see what I get up to, shall we?

[music]

Good morning everybody. It is literally 6.30am in the morning – 6.45am, must be. I just came into the studio to pick up my camera, but I just got downstairs to wake up… oh that’s super bright. I’ve just come down to wake up the dog, take him out, and I thought I’d show you the garden, because for once it’s not raining, it’s sunny, and I’m hoping to do some gardening today.

This is our lovely garden that we’re very lucky to have… all like… I leave the weeds in the in… the in the beds it’s… I mean they are plants after all, aren’t they?

Mister man has come out… still very sleepy… aren’t you? Aren’t you a sleepy puppy!

But what I wanted to show you is the unexpected beauty that you find when a poppy self-seeds itself where it shouldn’t… which is next to our fence. But it’s so beautiful that I will be leaving it where it is and it’s such a lovely color that I’ll be collecting the seeds. And it’s got two more heads coming out… let’s gently pop that out… two more beautiful heads and aphids already so let’s get rid of those… I must remember to wash my hands when I go in. Isn’t it absolutely gorgeous? Let’s move that in the sun… so you can see, yeah!

Anyway enough enthusia… enthusia… pfft… can’t talk today! Enough enthusing about the poppy… that’s from the neighbor’s garden, but I love it so much, I left it. Need to do something about the sage… need to trim all those bits. I’m not going to go down in the grass because it’s still damp and I’ve only got slippers on.

The willow’s doing well… could zoom in there, I think, there she is and then that’s our bench. Those are all red poppies that self-seeded from last year. The St John’s Wort is already getting buds. Jasmine’s growing, and I used to have a lovely plant over here with beautiful white, like, leaves and obviously the dog ate it so I had to dig it up. I need to get a replacement, but the lawn is looking better, except, obviously, for all the dog holes… but I am reseeding. I’ve just reseeded this bit. I’m going to reseed that.

Aren’t I?! All he’s interested in is in his ‘dead animal’ toys… these… I have them lying all over my house… just ‘dead animal’ toys.

I hope you enjoyed that little garden tour. I’m not doing very much in the garden, just pulling out the weeds that I don’t want like bindweed or ivy from next door that comes through the fence, finding any slugs or snails and putting them in the garden… not the garden… the field that’s behind us, and just, yeah, general tidying up and making it look nice and reseeding the lawn as well, where this fellow has been digging or, like, just ruining it, biting the grass or whatever.

But, anyway, so I finished my commission yesterday, and sent it off, and the lady loved it, so today I’m going to drop it off to the framers, have a little chat with them about what they can suggest to the client, because they’re going to have like a video consultation… what they can suggest to the client for the framing and the mat. I think it should have a really wide mat and a nice gold or maybe copper or even oak frame would be nice and then after that I’m going to do… maybe a little bit of sketchbooking just for myself, just to celebrate the fact that I’ve finished one commission and then I’m going to start on the next. But I’ll leave that for tomorrow… that’s not due for quite a while and that is for a friend, so she’ll be understanding and she has no deadline, so… but I put my deadline for myself because if I don’t I’ll never finish it! Isn’t that always the way?! But, anyway, off to give him his breakfast, and then clean the house and finally get started with my day. No, not yet! Give him his breakfast, have a shower, clean the house, take him for a walk and then start my day at like 11 o’clock! Anyway, see you later!

Hi everyone! It is Friday! My husband has the day off today. It is May Bank Holiday weekend so, yes, he has Friday and Monday off, which is excellent and we are going out for lunch today, which is a rarity these days, given Covid and the lot. So we managed to find a booking, locally, and we’re going to go and we’re going without the pup which means it’s a proper date, isn’t it?! But what I wanted to show you right now before we go is that my samples from my printer arrived for… well I’ll show you in a minute, hang on!

[music]

Not enough contrast there…I don’t know if you can see. And then there’s the other one.

And then I decided that I also would get samples of the cards that I did for the Sainsbury’s x Ohh Deer competition on instagram. So that’s one and then those are the other two… now the results aren’t out yet and I have very little chance of actually winning, but I thought I’d proof them in any case. And the colors on those are just fine. Again, need to increase the contrast on the dog… this came out beautifully, but, yeah, very happy about this one. That’s perfect. Need to increase the contrast on that and then I can send it to print. I’ll get on that on Tuesday because I’m taking the weekend off!!!

Good morning, everyone! it is the 1st of June, so I’m going to end this vlog here, because I’m going to start another one for June today.

Now, it was Bank Holiday weekend so we just spent the weekend with my family and walking around in woods and things and just basically having lots of naps and just relaxing, so not a lot of work got done. But today I’m going to start on a few new things and I’m going to film it for the June vlog.

I hope you enjoyed this one. I’m sure it’s just a snippet of all the things that I do during the month, but I hope that you enjoyed it and thank you for watching! I’ll see you in the next one.

Bye!