Pint-Sized PRINTS

East Dallas neighbor JulieAnn Bever wanted to preserve her three children’s prints to remember the size of their sweet little hands, so she picked up an impression kit from the nearest crafting store and gave it a valiant try.

“It was such a mess,” she says. “It was hard, and it was frustrating, and the result doesn’t look good either.”

She tried again with the same result and thought, “There has to be an easier way.”

She consulted her artist sister and found out there was: Ditch the kits and go for the real stu — white modeling clay.

While experimenting with that, she started to wonder if other parents had run into the same issues, a thought that eventually led Bever to create her business, Pint-Sized Prints.

She began asking her friends if they were interested in preserving their kids’ prints. The response was so enthusiastic that Bever determined that her business idea probably had a market in Dallas.

“So I did it with my friends first, practiced a lot and then decided to start doing it as a business.”

Through trial and error, she found out the clay cracks if it dries too quickly, so her dad built her several airtight bins to keep the pieces in while they dry, so they will harden without cracking.

“It really turned into a family a air,” she says, adding that her mom helped her decorate the studio and sometimes assists with the glaze or other tasks. Plus, Bever’s grandfather originally built the studio. He used it for woodworking before he died.

“It’s kind of neat that I get to work in the same space that he worked in,” she says.

The concept behind Pint-Sized Prints: Parents bring their kids by her studio, press a handprint and/or footprint (Bever says she has just about perfected the art of wheedling wiggly babies into handing up their prints), and — voila! — the parents’ job is done; Bever does the dirty work.

“And then they just get a nice, pretty impression in a box. So they get the end result, and they don’t have to deal with all the mess and the frustration.”

Her two biggest seasons are Christmas and Mother’s Day, but if people don’t want to deal with the Christmas rush, they can buy a gift certificate and book the studio visit for later. And it doesn’t have to stop at handprints. Bever also makes impressions for dog paws, thumbprints for the whole family and keys for people’s first homes.

“Now, I’m always on the lookout for what I can make an impression of,” she says. “And it’s all because I wanted to preserve my kids’ prints, because I just love the way little hands and feet look.”

Sonja Quintero’s art form is a familiar one: photography. But her style is her own.

“If you look around at Flickr and Etsy, the trend for several years now has been kind of vintage-looking photography, which I do admire, but it’s not really my thing,” she says. “It doesn’t feel quite genuine to myself.”

Most of her work is whimsical with a touch of angst and ranges from urban decay to knick-knacks to haunting graveyard images. Certain pieces seem to catch consumers’ eyes more than others, without much rhyme or reason.

“One of my most popular pieces is this picture of a little Kewpie doll I found at a flea market. This lady had a huge table full of all these Kewpie dolls, and he looks pissed. He looks majorly pissed. I took a picture of it, and it ended up being one of my most popular pictures. When I look back at my Etsy, it just always seems to be weird, quirky stu like that.”

Quintero has an interior design background. She received her degree from the University of North Texas and worked in the field until she quit last year to pursue photography full time. It was through interior design that Quintero found photography eight years ago.

“As designers, we had to go out and take pictures of the projects as they were going along, so one day I came back, and I was showing my boss some of the photos I had taken, and she said, ‘You know, these are really good. Maybe we should send you out to take pictures all the time.’ It was weird, because around that same time I had a friend who started doing some photography as a hobby, and she told me, ‘I think you’d really love this, and we could go out and shoot together.’ So between my boss saying that and my friend, it made me think, ‘Maybe there’s something to this.’ ” Quintero bought a film camera and started “the old-school way,” with the darkroom and the whole bit. She stocked up on a few how-to books and eventually took continuing-education classes.

“It was something I was passionate about from the very beginning, but always as a hobby. It was never something where I thought, ‘This is what I want to do with my life.’ I just didn’t see that I could do it financially anyway. I was doing pretty well as a designer, and even though it was stressful, I was making good money. Who’s going to give that up?’ ”

But then in 2010, cashing in wasn’t sounding so bad.

“I started thinking, ‘This is the only thing I really love doing anymore.’ ”

She started easing out of interior design, until finally calling it quits last year.

“My photography is just now getting to the point where it’s really picking up — almost to the point where it’s too much — but I love it.”

Jonathon Kimbrell