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Christmas Market #2 - Galumptious Goodies from all over the World!

Today more artists and designers from all over the world present samples of their exclusive 'Galumptious Goodies'  to make your Christmas shopping more enjoyable!

Beginning with:

Countrymouse Studio from British Columbia, Canada

I create watercolor paintings of birds or animals. Love of nature drives me to create and humor makes the journey worthwhile so if you love nature and have a sense of humor you should enjoy your shopping experience. 

My store has unique, customizable giftware: T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, travel mugs, stickers, tote bags, shoes, ornaments etc.

Countrymouse's Zazzle Store

  

Custom Watercolor Dragonfly Kindle Keyboard Cases by countrymousestudio


.......

Diana Ting Delosh from New York


Diana is an illustrator living in the suburbs near NYC. She loves animals and nature which is why they are the subject of many of her whimsical ink and watercolor illustrations.

Diana's Zazzle store

2014 Animal Fair Calendar by deloshdesigns

.......

Mi Jung Lee from Seattle, Washington

I am a surface pattern designer living in Seattle, Washington.  I love to create designs with a unique feel for beautiful living.  Antonio Gaudi, Parisian iron work and Spanish tiles have propelled inspiration for much of my work.

Mi Jung Lee's website

 

'Swish' Coffee Mug


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Carol Allen Anfinsen from Florida, US

I have had a lifelong career as a freelance writer and a second career as an artist. I sell prints, giclees, greeting cards and originals online.   I have also been an avid Popeye collector and adore the charming characters and toys created by King Features Syndicate, Inc. If you’re looking for something fun and unusual for holiday gifts, try an Olive Oyl Puppet, or an original inlaid Popeye Puzzle or a bendable Popeye doll. Christmas and Valentine cards are also available in my Etsy shop.

Carol's website

Popeye and Olive Oyl

1978 Twister Dolls

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Boriana Giormova from Sofia, Bulgaria

CUTE and STRANGE CREATURES

I draw funny creatures and design stuff. 

I have two wonderful kids which inspire me and I love to read books and to play video games.

Boriana's Zazzle store

Evil Christmas Bug With Present Cards by borianag

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Andrea Rincón, from Mexico, living in Spain

Hello!! My name is Andrea Rincón, my friends call me Anchobee. I’m a Mexican designer living in Spain. I’m passionate about surface pattern design and illustration. I would describe my work as hand drawn, contemporary and bold, organic patterns. I hope you enjoy my work as much as I enjoy doing it!

Anchobee's website

http://www.posterjunkies.com/product/anchobee-honey/

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FLORALS by FRED from Southern California

I’m a 50 something retired municipal worker who decided to do something with a lifelong passion, photography. I enjoy many different styles of photography, florals and landscapes are a specialty. Choose from a large variety of floral and landscape posters, wall art and canvas photo art, T shirts, greeting cards and many other products to enjoy and treasure for years to come. I also take requests.

Fred's Zazzle Store

Merry Christmas Snowmen Card by FloralbyFred

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Jessica Lewis from Swansea, South Wales

I am a Graphic and Surface Pattern Designer who loves traditional crafts like knitting and crochet. I particularly like creating items for little people and each item is made to order with love and care. I like tea and Ballroom dancing when I'm not curled up with a crochet hook.

   Jess's Etsy Shop

Toddler or Baby Cute Crotchet Bear Hat in cream and brown

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Sherry Harris from the High Desert of Los Angeles County, California

I'm a stay at home grandmother, awaiting the arrival of my first great-grandson any day. I've been married for 41 1/2 years to the same man. I have two children and six grandchidren...five on earth and one in Heaven. I sell Digital Collage Sheets for Busy Crafters. I find images so they don't have to. I've been selling digital collage sheets on Etsy, Artfire and the Website for over five years as well as greeting cards, as below. I've been a crafter since childhood and love helping others find what they need.

Snowman Christmas Card by kreativesentiments
 

.......

Fliss Braham from the UK

I am a digital designer; my work is on many products, phone cases, fashion bags, wedding and party invitations, art posters prints, personalized gifts and more. I have designs in many styles but tend to go for quirky, cute and whimsy; think it must be because I am still a kid at heart.

Fliss's Zazzle Store - Flissitations

Cute Carol Singer Snow Scene Company Holiday Cards by Flissitations


.......

Judy Adamson from Abergavenny, Wales, UK

I am an English grandmother, living in beautiful Wales and enjoying working as a self-employed painter, illustrator, surface pattern designer and blogger. 

Even after nearly four years of selling online, I still find it ridiculously exciting to see my patterns on products in stores such as Zazzle! My newest store, 'Posh & Painterly' focuses on shopping by 'collection'. If you see a pattern you like but it's not on the product you want, just contact me through the store and I'll create what you need in double quick time and at no extra cost!

Posh & Painterly on Zazzle

Giftwrap Magenta, Blue, Purple Stripes Pattern Gift Wrap Paper by poshandpainterly
 

I hope this selection of Galumptious Goodies, brought to you by artists and designers from all over the world, has given you some ideas for your Christmas shopping!

The Triumph of Persistence over Rejection

Three years ago when I started out designing greeting cards, I read that there were 3 ingredients needed to succeed in the business. 

Firstly, you must be Prolific, secondly you must be Persistent and thirdly you must be able to take Rejection.

‘Prolific’ is something I don’t have a problem with, possibly helped by the fact that I’m not a perfectionist so I don’t labour over my work for hours on end – not often, anyway!

And the subject of rejection seems to have come up several times recently, both in the Surface Pattern Course and elsewhere on the internet. I have written blog posts on the subject here and here  and Carol Anfinsen wrote about it more recently here.

But what about ‘Persistence’?

Partridge in a Pear Tree

In my case, and I suspect in many artists’ experience, the two, Persistence and Rejection are inextricably linked.

To get almost anywhere in our lives, to reach our goals, to live our dream, we often need to show Persistence when we encounter setbacks. Of course sometimes, ‘Adaptability’ is a more appropriate response but today I have a little example of where Persistence paid off!

I began to design Christmas Cards in the Autumn of 2009 and I submitted some of them to a publisher for feedback late in the year. I love colourful borders and I was quite pleased with the cards I made that I hoped had a slightly mediaeval look about them, with their brightly coloured borders and a lot of outlining in gold gouache. Gouache is not my favourite medium and at that point I was having a hard time adjusting to painting so small; so, as I said, I thought the designs had come out pretty well, all things considered.

But the publisher rejected them out of hand!


When I had recovered enough to pick myself up and try another route – this time the online print-on-demand stores, I uploaded the ‘rejects’ along with a few cards in other styles. After all, I still liked them so I believed that someone else might like them too.

 In the 2009 Christmas period not one of those cards was ordered.

And Christmas 2010 was a repeat ‘non-performance’ as far as these cards were concerned.

In the run-up to Christmas 2011, I sold some of these – all told, I’ve sold 99 of them to date!

But the sale that has prompted me to write this post, to urge you to persist in spite of rejection, was this one  -

I saw Three Ships come sailing in . . .

Last week a Zazzle customer ordered 230 of them and this week a Greeting Card Universe customer ordered a further 125!


So – if it sometimes seems as if you aren’t getting anywhere with your sales, but you feel in your heart of hearts that your art is worth buying, don’t give up. It may take a little time but –

Topsy Turvy Seasons and Christmas in April!

No, I haven’t got the seasons mixed up, though our recent weather might well have caused some confusion, with very low night temperatures and forecasts of snow in May!

My new poinsettia design for the December birthday cards did, though, get me into the Christmas spirit, even though it's April, as it was easy to adapt the birthday design to make it Christmassy! From the search engine point of view, it’s a good thing to upload Christmas cards some months in advance so it’s nice to know that I have my new collage design for Christmas 2012 ready and more than 50 cards waiting to be uploaded!

I’ve never actually been very fond of poinsettias but I think collage was a good medium to choose and I ended up more enthusiastic about these designs than I expected to be!

Festive Christmas Tote Bag, Poinsettias by helikettle

Back to April and CardGnome have announced a promotion for Mother’s Day.

In the UK, Mother’s Day, or Mothering Sunday, has a slightly different provenance from that of the US 'holiday' and it's on the 4th Sunday in Lent, so it invariably occurs some time in March. That makes it feel very odd for me to be preparing Mother’s Day greeting cards in April! But CardGnome have asked for greeting cards for their Mother's Day promotion to be uploaded by the end of this week and that has been keeping me very busy.

I sold a lot of cards as a result of CardGnome’s Easter promotion so I decided it was worth ‘burning the midnight oil’ to get the Mother's Day cards I’ve made from my recent floral designs uploaded in time.

Here they all are, together with some I made earlier!

Mother’s Day Cards in my CardGnome shop.

As a result, I haven’t got very far with this weekend’s new design!

Can you guess what sort of card this design will turn into?

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The Future of Christmas Cards

 

Each year I intend to send fewer Christmas cards, to stop sending them to people I haven't been in touch with, or even given a thought to, for years - apart from the annual Christmas card! But then they send me one and I hastily return the favour and so it goes on...

Thinking about this, my curiosity has just led me to revisit the statistics about Christmas card sales on the UK Greeting Card Association website hoping to discover whether Christmas cards sales are increasing  - or not! I didn't find and answer but I noticed that the most recent figures for the sales of Christmas cards are as follows:

• Christmas cards accounted for 45% of all the total volume of greeting card sales.

• Christmas cards accounted for only 18% of the total value of greeting card sales.

I wonder whether this is because most of the Christmas cards we send are in packs of 5,10 or even 50 and work out at a much lower price per card than other greeting cards? I know that I only buy the more expensive individual cards for my immediate family and send everyone else a card from a pack, which keeps the cost down considerably!

Many of the cards we buy in packs are Charity cards and they are generally excellent designs, good quality card and very good value! Apparently £50,000,000 is raised annually for charity through the sale of Christmas cards.

I assume that this means that I am more likely to sell my birthday cards and greeting cards for all sorts of other occasions locally at £1.80 each than my Christmas cards at the same price. My experience so far has been that a Christmas card needs to be particularly special if it’s to command a higher price than the cards sold in packs. For instance, a local newsagent - not the one who sold my Red Dragons! – quickly sold out of the cards that I made from my photos of the snow in our local park and around the church and tithe barn, probably because I added greetings ‘from Abergavenny’. (By comparison, there seems to have been a far smaller demand for my other Christmas Cards, even when I added the greeting in Welsh, as below, though I've yet to discover how many have been sold in our local Art Shop and Gallery!)

So should we be sending so many Christmas cards?

The Royal Mail delivers an average of 17 Christmas cards per man, woman and child! The staggering figure of 150 million Christmas cards and packets are handled by Royal Mail each day in the run-up to Christmas, resulting in an estimated 1 billion greeting cards being thrown away after Christmas! To me this seems an awful waste of some beautifully designed cards and I always do my bit for recycling by trimming the best of them to make into gift tags for the following years.

In recent years we have all been urged to recycle our Christmas cards by taking them to various recycling schemes such as the ones provided by the supermarket, Tesco. Another suggestion from those who are trying to reduce the post-Christmas refuse mountain, is that we should send more e-cards instead of paper Christmas cards. I think this could be a good idea in some cases, though there are still many people I know who don’t use a computer at all – and I do think that most of us still enjoy having ‘the real thing’ on display at Christmas time.

But when I’ve watched children – grandchildren and pupils – opening their Christmas cards, I’ve noticed that for the most part they are barely afforded a glance before being discarded in favour of getting on with opening the gift! At such times, the thought has crossed my mind that we might as well skip the greeting card, saving both money and paper to be recycled! But of course, such thoughts are verging on heresy to a designer of Greeting Cards, who enjoys creating them and depends on selling as many as possible of them!

Maybe, sometime in the future, e-cards will completely replace the real paper cards and the best of them will be paid for, like these gorgeous animations from Jacqui Lawson?


What do you think? 

Would you be prepared to do without paper Christmas Cards for the sake of the environment and to cut the cost of Chrismas?


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Christmas Traditions -

Christmas Cards

with a lighthearted look at some

Christmas Traditions

These Christmas Cards are also available from UK company,
yoodoo.com

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Handpainted Christmas Cards from GCU Artists

As I said in my previous post, on joining GCU a year ago, my impression was that most of the card designs were digitally produced. However, there are still plenty of wonderful designs available that were painted using traditional methods and here is a selection of them for Christmas.

The small size of these images makes it difficult to see  just what'is so special about these handpainted designs, so click on the images and see the larger version.

Susan Alison's watercolour 

'Dog' Christmas Tree  

Myrna Migala's watercolour

'Twelve Days of Christmas'

Diana Ting Delosh's watercolour and ink

'Polar Bear, Cub and Christmas Wreath'

Sharon Eyres' Folk Art Style

'Christmas Snow'

  
Steve Delmonte's watercolour and ink

Ho Ho Holiday!

Brenda Thour's 

'Cardinals'

Amy Reges'

'Christmas Yellow Labrador tugs Santa down Chimney'

Robin Chaffin's coloured pencils
'Snowman Friend Merry Christmas'





Judith Cheng's
'Tis the Season to believe in Magic'




Mary Harris's aatercolour and iInks
Nativity Scene - the Angel





Christie Black's
'For friends - Lion and Lamb - Merry Christmas'




Cindy A Teresa's acrylic
'Christmas Peace - beautiful, snowy Winter Scene'




Lane Cobb-Combs' acrylic on canvas
'Silent Night'




Barbara Schreiber's watercolour
'Merry Christmas Card - Robin with Hat'
 



Harriet Masterton's acrylic
'Merry Christmas'



Lyn Norton's watercolour
'Angel Harpist'

 And here's my favourite from the handpainted paper collages I made for this year - with a Welsh Greeting!

 

When you click on an image to take a closer look, you will also find the link that enables you to explore all the cards in the artist's store.

Enjoy!