Jan 19 - Meteorologist

When you live in Rochester the weather is always changable. Around here we say, "if you don't like the weather wait five minutes and it will change." With that in mind we pay tribute to Lori's meteorologist design. As hard as they try, they can't get it right. It is a science that is subject to the "winds of change." Meteorologists predict as best they can, they model all the possibilities and the determine the most probable based on science but are always at the whim of nature.

As you see in the designs, Lori usually does a male and a female version of each design. She pays great attention to detail and finds as many facts as possible to pay tribute to the profession, hobby or special occasion that she is depicting. She will also have a content specialist review for accuracy.

To further clarify, Zachary Bear and friends live in Webster, NY which is a suburb of Rochester, New York. We have been told that there are very few cities with fewer gray days than we have. I believe Seattle, Washington was one of these.

If you have a friend who is a meteorologist, this would make a great gift in one of many ways. They can be matted and framed for the wall. They may be printed on a mug or mouse pad. They can be printed on a shirt along with a favorite saying. Just give us a call or send us an email at zachary@zacharybear.com

284 designs to go / 346 days left

New Year's Resolution - To POST...

Wow, I have been remiss on posting (but I am not sure if anyone is out there).

OK, so now I am inspired by Julie & Julia it was a fun movie about two amazing women.
Similarity ends there....
I am not going to blog through a cookbook
But I do have a goal, to tell you about all the Zachary Bear designs over the next year.

OK, first problem determining how many designs there are, I just counted 288 titles but I think that Lori has created some new art that did not get a title header. So the goal is 288 titles in 365 days. Let's change that already and say by the end of 2010. We are already into the eleventh day so make that 288 titles in 354 days.

I also want to tell you about the cool kaleidoscopes that Lisa has been making so there may be more than one post a day depending how busy the store gets. This store/studio is never static and Lori as an artist is never still so I will also be telling you about the dogs she has been drawing for greeting cards. We make cards in our studio and we license the artwork to neat web site in California called Greeting Card Universe. They sell you bulk cards or send them out to individuals for you.

As we travel through the designs in the Zachary Bear® collection you will learn more about the four of us that make up the Zachary Bear® Store and Studio.

I am Ed, the computer guy at ZB. (I'll use ZB as a way of shortening the Zachary Bear® Store and Studio.) I started doing desktop publishing in 1988 and needed a copier. At that time I saw a color copier and dreamed of the possibilities of providing a link between art and technology. In most cases the tech people don't understand the artists and at the time I started most artists didn't understand technology. I considered that link to be a segue or a transition between art and technology. I called my company Segway (long before the famous scooter) and went looking for artists. Bill Aman came to have Lori's artwork reproduced and the rest is history... enough back story.

In the beginning...

In the beginning there was a bear. It was drawn by Lori DeLeonardis-Aman while vacationing in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. Lori, an elementary art teacher, she loves kids and she loves to draw. So with the encouragement of her husband, she created a bear character and named him Zachary.

She wanted to make a storybook character and write a book. But people liked the friendly bear so much, they asked to have pictures made for their children's rooms with the child's name on it. Soon Lori was in the personalized gift market. Lori's husband Bill started a company to sell her art and gifts. He took two parts of Lori's name (Lori DeLeonardis-Aman) to come up with Loram Productions. Bill incorporated the business and together they took the show on the road. The first sales were made at local art shows in the Rochester, New York area.

The first designs were mainly storybook style settings. Some of the first designs were: Evening Prayer, Goodnight Zachary, Bubblebath, to name a few. These designs were placed in mats which were 11" by 14" on the outside edges. To mass produce these images Lori first made a black and white line drawing of the scene. This line drawing was printed on watercolor paper and all of the original series were watercolored by hand. Name personalization was added and then matted and framed. These were the original Zachary Bear® Pictures, in the beginning.