The tedious business of uploading, tagging, describing, categorising.....

I've been really busy putting age numbers on some of my birthday cards this week because I noticed that quite a few of my sales had been that type of card. It's boring work, especially all the uploading and writing descriptions and tags - though I seem to have got a bit quicker with the 'categorising' as time has gone on - and I've just had the first batch approved by GCU. I think the reviewers must have seen 100 new cards suddenly appearing and decided they'd better get stuck in!

With all that going on, it doesn't feel as if I've done much painting this week but in fact I've made four new designs, all 'creatures' of one sort or another, the last for a while I think as I seem to run out of steam with one 'range' of cards quite quickly - low boredom threshold perhaps? Just as well I have several 'styles' to fall back on!

First up my mouse and elephant again, in a birthday card or birthday button role this time -

'Little Mouse' 3rd Birthday button by helikettle
See other Button Buttons

 

'Jumbo' 4th Birthday Card by helikettle
Browse Birthday Cards

.
- followed by a kangaroo for Mother's Day in the same style -

Kangaroos Mother's Day Card by helikettle
Browse other Mother's day Cards

- also available on a T-shirt.

And today I've tried a collage again (and hoping for the best as far as my back is concerned!) for Father's Day - 

Starfish Father's Day Card by helikettle
View more greeting cards at zazzle

I was surprised how well it showed up on a dark T-shirt too - 

Starfish T-shirt by helikettle
See other Starfish T-Shirts

I still have about 80 of my new 'age' birthday cards to put on Zazzle but my enthusiasm has waned a bit because they seem to do so much better on GCU. They appear immediately in my 'store' though so if I do a few every day, they'll probably all be available on Zazzle at about the same time as on GCU!

More for Mother's Day!

Yesterday I decided to experiment. Whereas usually I design for greeting cards and then sometimes use a part of the design for other things, yesterday I made my first ever design specifically for a T-shirt-

"Best Mum" T-shirt by helikettle
Design a Custom Tshirt at zazzle.co.uk

and the more discreet version -

'SuperMum' T-shirt by helikettle
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But then - and this is the experiment - I made greeting cards from the T-shirt design that I think are nearly off the scale of ghastliness and uploaded them to Greeting Card Universe and Zazzle.

This bizarre idea was prompted by a look at the 'What's New' pages on Greeting Card Universe to see if my latest designs were on there. They weren't (and they never seem to be) even though I waded through pages and pages of what, to me, were a great many cards that I wouldn't give houseroom to! I'm not going to publicise my 'experiments' here, though I can't stop them appearing in my Zazzle flash panel. But it'll be interesting to see whether anyone likes them. One thing I've learnt in the past year or so is that there's no accounting for taste! And maybe I'm just getting old.....

I didn't waste a lot of time on my experiment - the collage was already made and I used Photoshop to make the coloured backgrounds so each one only took a few minutes.

This one, on the other hand, took me so long that I was reluctant to give up on it when the lettering didn't show up and I've spent a bit more time rescuing it, painting the light flowers that were distracting from the lettering, in crimson gouache and lightening the darker blue forget-me-nots.

'May Garden' Mother's Day Card by helikettle
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It was 'interesting' painting with gouache on top of acrylics, but the slightly 'veined' effect that resulted was just like real wallflower petals -  so a 'happy accident'! On both of my computers, at least, the message is now clearly visible; and, printed, it's the sort of card I'd love to receive! But, as I said, there's no accounting for taste!