Selling my art on-line (2)

Continued from the last post.

Another direction that I am exploring is to sell the images, rather than the art, which also includes photographic images. I take many, many photos with my digital camera and this boosts the number and scope of images I can use on my Zazzle stores. Zazzle ia "print-on-demand" site which means that you can buy anything from Tee-shirts to tote bags, mugs to mouse mats, and even posters and wraped canvasses. Mny more products are available. A Zazzler ( like me) can upload images and design any of the available products then put them up for sale. Each sale earns a royalty ( from 10 to 50%) and it is also possible to earn referral fees for linking buyers to the site. These are actualy higher than the royalty payments, a better way of earning money for those with an associate account. All free to set up, no selling fees - only royalties to you, and no hassle with posting or buyers. Sounds like heaven!
My latest sale is a Tee which I designed for a buyer who liked one of my ATC's on Bonanza. A humerous look at pole dancing lessons.

Todays lesson is over ladies by artyfax
Browse more Mixed media T-Shirts

Just another taster, my latest product is a wrapped canvas designed using an old pastel painting which I have slightly modified in photoplus, my digital manipulation software of choice. It's cheaper than photoshop!

Down on the farm by ArtyfaxProducts
Browse other Multicolor Canvas Prints

OK, that's it from me on selling, it hasn't changed my life style but every little helps; now where have I heard that before?

Selling my art on-line

I have not been active in this line for a couple of years, too many distractions and other things happening. In fact my last sale of a piece of art on Ebay was 2 or three years ago. I came to the conclusion that I was not getting a reasonable price for the work. You know how it goes, Ebay is an auction site (??) so you put someting on at a low start price and get ONE bid - aaarrrggg!!! What a catastrophe, and then there is the packaging and post; many people complain if you try to recover these costs fully. Always the possibility of items getting lost in the post - or that is what a minority of buyers claim. Do you believe them? Paypal certainly does! Well I had had enough, I packed it in and concentrated on trading my ATC's. No more items lost in the post, amazing!

However, recently I have been looking again at making a little cash from my hobby. I have been writing about my art on Squidoo, A site which shares advertising revenue with the top (few) web pages based on an on-site ranking procedure. These pages are called "lenses" the idea being that they are single pages which focus down on to a very tight niche. Squidoo provides lots of help in creating a lens and there is a very active community associated with the site. I will not become rich without learning a great deal more about SEO ( I do hate that subject) but I have been making a regular few dollars a month for the past 12 months or so. Many authors seem to make enough to live on doing it full time, with lots of SEO, LOL. But I am reasonably happy with a small income from a couple of hours per week, enough to buy the odd book and art materials to keep me busy. An example of one of these lenses is, Making Artist Trading Cards - 1001 Techniques

Just to keep things ticking over, I have started selling (or rather I have posted for sale) a few items on Bonanza. It has not been a very successful venture so far but again, it is all about getting buyers to your site. This is where Ebay scores of course since it has so many "users", and is often the first (possibly the only) site that prospective buyers go to. But Ebay no longer seems to cater for the small independent trader, fawning over the large (money earning) enterprises that can afford the high selling fees. see my next post for another way of earning cash on line with your art.

Free images for collage

I have been collecting old books for a while now, nothing exceptional just ephemera for my artwork and making use of the ocassional useful image. You can see some of these images which I have posted on my Flickr account. there are a number of sets on this page which contain the images. Last week I came across a book published in 1913 called, "Modern Musicians" which I thought was exceptional in that it had many B&W images of musicians of celebrities of the time. Some of them are still quite famous! I will be posting these on Flickr over the next few weeks but as a taster here are a couple of examples.

You can find larger, high resoloution versions of the images on Flickr and downloading from there - select ACTIONS - VIEW ALL SIZES. There will be many more in the coming weeks.

An Altered CD case

I have made another altered piece for the PDA Designer group, it is an altered CD case ( jewel case). Lots of altered CD's have been shown on pDA recently and I wondered what happened to all the cases. Hence this piece, "Lord Rosebey's Gentlemen's Club".

As always larger images may be seen on my Flickr account. All images are from collage sheets supplied by Kim Newberg.

The photos of the victorian (?) rooms and one or two game pieces that I had lying around were perfect with the challenge subject  - a sheet of cigar adverts which showed gentleman smoking... cigars, of course. The idea of a gentlemen's club was a no-brainer. The name of the club was from one of the adverts.

I have been quite busy recently with a number of projects including adding products to my Zazzle Store and my Bonanza Booth, why not check out some of the items I have for sale.

ATC's and Book pages

Seems to have been a little while since my last post and there are a few things which I have been doing in the art/craft line. First of all, I entered a couple of ATC's into the PDA ATC challenge swap. The theme was fantasy / magic / etc and I made one cared based on something I did a couple of years ago. At the time i liked it very much and made a second very similar card, I thought, "magic, why not use the same idea again?". So here is the "Magician & the Spell".

The fun part is thinking up nonsense words for the spell which seem to be in a "latinate" language.

The second card was made using an image I have also used mmore than once before. It is a statue of an angel from a tombstone. I think it is just great.

You've  just gotta like the child's image as well!

the other thing that I want to show you in this post is a couple of pages which I have done for a hand-made book which is another project on PDA. ten artists are creating pages and swapping with each other over this year ( one page a month to swap and one on the same theme to keep). The first here was on the theme, Stained For Life. I call it, After That Incident, Her Character Was marked With A Very Dark Stain. Don't ask!! And note the second appearance of the statue in this post.

The second page for the same project ( I was catching up, LOL) was called,  "Although ripped apart at an early age, the girls kept in touch by the magic of the automatic telephone, to talk about thteir favourite things". A loose interpreetation of the theme, Ripped.

I have also been busy with other things but I will leave them for anothertime, but there are new posts on my blogs which deal with painting and photography. Why not have a look and see if there is anything to interest you.

Collaged Row Houses - Home Tweet Home

Here we are again, another challenge from PDA. A set of five little row houses with a theme of "Home Tweet Home".

I was stumped by this at first, of course it had to be about birds - didn't it? Animals in  general and birds in particular are not something that I would use as a main subject for my collages. I am far more at home with people. I like to be able to tell a story based on their actions or facial expressions. So the theme gave me lots to think about and not a few sleepless nights ( well OK I am exaggerating a little for litterary effect, LOL). I was unsure how to go with this theme until I had the idea of using a window. I would view the birds thru a window and put people in front of the window as if they were carrying on their real life. In fact I turned this idea on its head for one of the pieces for humerous effect, I have a strange sense of humour at times. Here is a shot of the little row houses lined up on my stairs at home.

The stairs forms a great background for this as the carpet is a darg green, but that's another story, as they say.

each little row house was to be within a particular size, no more than 7.5 inches tall and 5.5 inches wide and no less than 5 inches tall and 3.5 inches wide. I made my set a mixture of sizes between these limits. The basic shape of each house was cut out from matt board to give a good rigid basis for the piece. I selected some backing paper/card which I had been sent by a fellow member of PDA with a swap and covered the boards with this with a turn-around at each edge to give a neat appearance. The back of each row house was also layered with a different paper to the front for contrast.

"Buy My Flowers"

I found some creative commons licenced pictures of windows on Flickr, and printed them from my PC, enough for all the row houses. I also downloaded images of birds from the free images available on PDA, and printed them also. The other images are mostly from free collage sheets which I have collected from those offered by Kim Newberg on the PDA site or other sites and blogs by Kim.

"I Did Pay The Rent"

Most of the set had birds layered between the window frames and a backing paper for contrast. However the above piece was different. The birds were "outside" and the person was "inside" the house.

"Yes, I Will Phone"

Most of the titles are chosen to reflect the people in ront of the window frames. As I said I like to tell a story and to this effect, I select elements which are in some way ( often tenuously) connected and then arrange them in a way which I find pleasing and taking note of composition. The geometry of the space I had for placing the images below and around the windows made this a little more difficult than usual for me here.

"Hello Beautiful"

I also used a little stamping here and there to fill in a few little spaces inconspicuously. A pity this image is spoilt by the effect of the flash on the young girl's face, it was a glossy image.

"The Farmer"

You will notice that all of the set have a metal charm at the apex of the roof line which is itself emphasised by various complementary ribbons / papers.

I said I had a few problems with this theme but at the same time as it took me at least a little out of my comfort zone I really enjoyed the challenge. Of course most of my mixed media stuff is around ATC's so the much larger size also gave me a little more scope than usual. Thanks for the challenge Kim!

A shadow box assemblage

I was given a (for me) very hard challenge by Kim in the PDA Designer's group last month. We had to create an artwork using a collage sheet which depicted lots of small flower images. Not my cup of tea at all. Straightaway, I knew I would be using some of the images as decoration, but not as a main image for my piece.

After lots of deliberation I had some ideas and in a spare moment started a rough sketch of what it might look like, and how it would go together. To be different I was going to use a sardine tin ( used!) to form a shadow box, or at least that is what I think it is. For my regular readers, you may remember the first use of a sardine tin. The top cover, forming a frame around the tin, would be in matt board and I would use collage to complete the artwork. My initial sketch, looked something like:-

I.e. it was to be a wall hanging, with lots of danglies including beads and charms However, the best laid plans "gang aft awry". Also, I had intended that the flower images would be layered to a stiff baking (?) and would be placed on the frame to overlap the edges and break up the lines. I later decided that this would mean the images would be difficult to cut out and leave unsightly edges which would spoil the clean effect I usually search for.

The first step was to cut out the shape of the frame and remove the opening behind which the tin would be placed to form the shadow box. Secondly, I cut out a board to fit inside the tin and which would be collaged to form the interior image. I layered a backing paper to this to this in the usual way, and then added the images of the child, butterfly wings, a clock and one of the flower images. The whole board was then inserted into the tin and a black, woven, fabric edging strip was bonded around the sides to (1) prevent a viewer from seeing the shiny sides of the tin and (2) hold the decorated baseboard in place.

The frame was covered with a craft paper backing and images were added, including two more of the flower images. As an aside, the backing paper had been sent to me as a gift with a trade but I cannot remember the name of the friend who sent it. I file images/papers under several different headings but but often forget where they come from, so need to keep making apologies. Does anybody know how to crossfile source with colour / topic / theme / size / etc. If so I would love to know.

Back to the shadow box...

The two parts were then bonded together, using a strong rubber cement to give an instant adhesion, the piece then looked like this from the back:-

The last step was to paint the whole back with black acrylic, before adding a lable with a title, and other details, from an angle the front then looks like this:-

And I had arranged the bottom of the frame so that piece would be stable when standing up right. In a position on a window sill, I think it looks quite attractive and am very pleased with it.

Just to finish this post, here is a closer view of the finished piece from the front. I have not yet come up with a title for it, this is unusual for me as I do not often find any difficulty because I work to a theme. However I think my only issue with this is that I concentrated too much on using the flower images to the detriment of an overall theme. Any suggestions for a name would be very welcome, thanks in advance. So here is the promised close-up :-