Wallflower and Forget-me-not Colours

I'm not very sure what to make of this one! It was intended for the American Mother's Day, May 9th.

It took a very long time to cut out and stick down all those tiny flowers and leaves, as you can imagine, and when it was finished, I was disappointed that the 'Happy Mother's Day' didn't stand out very well. I almost didn't bother to scan it but I quite liked it in a 'Flower Power' kind of way so I did. And I don't know whether all scanners are the same, but mine shows quite a dark image in the 'preview' when it's 'warming up' and all of a sudden the image looked fine, with the forget-me-not lettering standing out very nicely.

So when the scanner had finished scanning and come up with the usual wishy-washy image, I adjusted it to make it as near as possible to the 'preview' and was quite happy with it - until I transferred it to my laptop, where the forget-me-nots were suddenly  turquoise, instead of the slightly purplish blue that they had been on my PC - the exact opposite to the difficulties I've been having scanning my seaside collages! - and the lovely deep wallflower-red border was almost black! Whatever I tried to adjust to get them back to their velvety red colour just made everything else go haywire..

Which just goes to show that, just as 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', 'colours are dependent on the computer on which they are being viewed!'

I'm not sure whether it's worth all the time it takes to upload it, tag it, describe it and post it for sale on the PODstores; but I'd be interested to hear how it looks to others.

It rather reminds me of those municipal gardens along the Esplanade of the seaside resort where I grew up, where  the 'tour de force' was a flower bed with a map of the island and its coat of arms set out in flowers!

Time to make Christmas Cards to sell locally!

It really feels as if Spring is on the way today. The crocuses are out in the park and there are buds everywhere. But it wasn't just the sunshine that put a 'spring' in my step as I came back from town this morning; that was the result of a pretty successful meeting with the newsagent!

The good news is that 34 out of 50 of my red dragons have been sold in just over a week and the newsagent said that if I'd brought them in earlier, they'd have probably sold out. And the even better news is that he paid me for all 50 and has kept the ones that haven't sold yet, even though St David's Day was yesterday.

The slightly less good news is that he is already covered for Mothers' Day and St Patrick's Day so didn't want mine. He told me he works 10 months in advance so we agreed that I should take in my Christmas cards as soon as possible. Apparently anything with 'Abergavenny' on it or bi-lingual (Welsh/English) greetings sells well.

So my next job will be to add the appropriate text to some of my Christmas cards and perhaps to make cards from some of the photos of Abergavenny in the snow that I took in January. This one, for instance,  is a recognisable location in town, with the recently restored tithe barn on the left and the Blorenge in the background - and, by chance, a good space for some Christmas Greetings down at the bottom!

It feels a bit odd to be doing that now that the snow seems to have finally left us, but that's the way it works!

As for the Mother's Day cards I'd made - I only made a couple of each and I'll try my luck at the coffee shop after the Wednesday walk.

                                                                                                                                                                   
Greeting Card Universe seem to be taking about a week to approve cards at the moment but hopefully more like this one will be appearing in my online store any day now!

The Spring is Sprung....

....at least, it felt that way when I walked into town this afternoon! The survey has increased my amount of computer time, even though I thought that was becoming an impossibility since I signed up with the online stores, so I was glad to get out into the sunshine. I was right when I estimated that I'd be spending the rest of Wednesday replying to emails that I received as result of sending out the questionnaire. And it wasn't just the rest of Wednesday, continuing on into the 'wee small hours', but it spilt over into yesterday as well so that by lunchtime, I felt an urgent need to get away from my compter and make another card design!

The idea of producing greeting cards for men (to be bought mostly by women, I expect) has provided me with a bit of a challenge and I hope this one may be suitable for men and women alike.

I can't think why I'm so enthusiastic about make collage designs - I certainly don't find it relaxing! All the precise cutting and fiddling with tiny, sticky pieces of paper doesn't allow me to get into 'flow' as I normally do with my painting. It still takes me much longer than any other medium I use and I generally end up with stiff shoulders and an aching back. But there's something about the finished result that keeps me going back to it over and over again.

I was surprised how long it took me to scan it and resize it for Greeting Card Universe and Zazzle, as well as for my 'private' webpages that I send out with the survey questionnaire, for my 'dead tree-ware' catalogue and for this blog - and then to upload it to the various online stores, not to mention going through all the processes it takes to make it into cards that I can print myself. I suspect all that took me even longer than making the collage itself! (Of course, it doesn't help that I do some things on my laptop and others on my main computer upstairs and it all has to be transferred from one to the other at some point.) I'll just have to hope that GCU will approve of the categories I've put it in - one never knows for sure! Different reviewers seem to have different criteria!

The past couple of weeks have been really quiet on the sales front so I've been reading the forums and there are frequent complaints about the Mysteries of the Categories! But I was pleased to hear today that an awful lot of my my dragons have found new homes - 'I've sold two in the past hour,' the shop assistant told me in a very surprised tone of voice. So, thanks to a prompt from another artist, I've put the rest of the emails on hold and spent this morning organising and printing out samples of my Mothers' Day and St Patrick's Day cards, in case the newsagent, having got out an extra stand for my dragons, would be prepared to refill it with some of my other 'Spring Season' designs, once St David's Day has been and gone.

And yes, he has agreed that I should take in a couple of each of my dozen or so 'Spring Season' designs and see how they go - what a pity I didn't think of this before Valentine's Day!

He thought that my Pen and Wash ones -

 

- would be more popular than my oil pastels. But my survey results, so far, have illustrated just how diverse people's tastes in cards are. It probably has a lot to do with age and gender and I expect that applies to where people go to buy greeting cards as well. I think our local newsagents could be a good place to reach all ages and types of people and in terms of  'footfall', it's a real hotspot throughout the year. I don't tend to buy newspapers - not that I don't enjoy reading them. On a cross-channel ferry I will devour every inch of every column but each time I've tried buying a newspaper regularly, I ended up with a pile of unread ones. However, I do pop into the newsagents from time to time - their treasury tags, which I use in great numbers for my teaching workbooks, are by far the cheapest in town! Which is how I came to notice the stand of beautiful photographic cards that encouraged me to try my luck with my dragons.

I'll be a bit disappointed if nobody buys my oil pastel flowers - they are just the sort of thing that I would be very happy to receive - but if they aren't popular, at least I'll know what to offer for Easter. And there's always the posh coffee shop to try....