Boxes, Card and Shoebox Cards

On Friday afternoon I took the plunge and ordered some matte card online, a bold move as I've wasted money in the past on cardstock that wasn't really up to the standard of colour printing that I need for my greeting cards. At the same time, I ordered envelopes from a supplier I've never used before as they were out of stock with my usual supplier. A brave move and it was unfortunate that I placed the orders on a Friday afternoon as that meant spending the weekend worrying about whether I'd wasted more money!

The card arrived on Monday morning - from the Isle of Wight, the island where I was born and grew up! Apart from the lightning speed with which it arrived, it was very well packaged and it's just what I needed. So for anyone else who may be printing their own greeting cards, I'd highly recommend that you have a look at the ConsumableMad website. I also got an immediate response to my query about satin finish card, which seems to bring out the depth of colour better than the matte in my original pastel and oil pastel paintings; a couple of sample sheets arrived in the post by return. So one very satisfied customer!

(On the subject of 'satisfied' customers, both of the recipients of the cards I spent last week making and sending have said the my cards look much better 'in the flesh' than on the website. Not much I can do about that but at least it's better than the other way around!)

 The envelopes took a little longer to arrive and when they did, I was surprised at the size and the weight of the box!

 The minimum order was 1,000 and the most I'd ever ordered previously was 300  - but even so!!!

When I'd removed the mountain of shredded paper, the box of envelopes was tiny by comparison -

The envelopes were the cheapest I've found so far and better quality than some of the more expensive ones I've used in the past. So, again, I would recommend Regent Envelopes   if you are in the UK and in need of large quantities of 5" x 7" envelopes  - but be prepared for the arrival of a very large box!

And just for fun, on the subject of boxes, Tom, one of the very helpful Greeting Card Universe artists, posted this YouTube clip on the forum -

Enjoy!

Twenty Minute Challenge

At the weekend, I had a lot to catch up with after all the printing and posting I'd done during the week; things like my Tax Return, people I needed to get in touch with, the ever-present ironing, the lawn needing mowing and the batteries in my doorbell urgently needing changing - the usual list of tedious tasks that seems to get longer rather than shorter. But I was determined to fit in some painting as well so I decided to see what I could achieve in a very short time in the way that artists on the 'Twenty Minute Challenge' website do.

My wallflowers are coming to an end so I, naturally, wanted to paint them before it's too late and I picked a bunch of assorted colours for my subject, set my timer and got stuck in! By the end of 20 mins I had easily finished the painting part of the exercise and my wet paper was decidely less wet. Unfortunately, I didn't think what I'd produced was worth photographing and it was still too wet to scan; so I can't post the result of the first stage. But after I'd had a quick lunch and done a few more 'odd jobs', I went back to look at what I'd done and decided that, now it was completely dry, there might be something worth salvaging if I defined the shapes of the flowers with a brown fineliner pen.

Not that it would ever be likely to become a greeting card design, but it might have some future on a white mug or even some more shoes! (These are obviously becoming my favourites when it comes to 'creating' products for my Zazzle store!)

Wallflowers Ringer Mug by helikettle
View more Wallflowers Mugs

I'm not sure that I learnt anything from limiting myself to 20 minutes as it is normal for me to work very fast and I never spend much time thinking about what I'm doing. In fact I'd probably have stopped painting sooner if I hadn't set the timer. But I did feel frustrated by the fact that I wasn't able to produce a really transparent but vibrant yellow. I tried several but they all seemed to turn murky and more like yellow ochre when they came up against the reds and merged with them.

My Keds shoes with a photographic image of wallflowers won a Today's Best Award but I actually prefer the slightly riotous look of my watercolour wallflowers -

Wallflowers Keds Shoes by helikettle
Make your own shoes online with zazzle

On the election front, I was beginning to feel a bit better about it when I read that Charles Kennedy had stood by his principles and felt unable to back the LibCon Coalition. But then I was disheartened again last night when it became clear that the women members of the BBC Newsnight's focus group had voted according to the 'fanciability' - they actually used the word! - of TweedleCam and TweedleClegg! And the men had almost all voted for them because they were more 'young and modern'! If this is what the election came down to, obviously Gordon didn't stand a chance!

Fortunately a spell of catching up with The Artistic Curmudgeon's blog, that I had neglected lately, went some way to restore my sense of proportion, as did happening upon these -

The Original Coalition Mug 2010 by Coalition_Mug
View other Coalition mug Mugs

And the jug of wallflowers, even though they are starting to droop, are still giving off a delicious fragrance - pity I have developed some sort of allergic reaction over the years that causes me to lose my voice around my favourite flowers!

Is this cheating?

Elizabeth White's book about Starting and Running a Greeting Card Business  cautions against selling at Craft Markets, advising the artist to seek out instead Craft Fairs, where the price of admission is quite high, as there will be more likehood of finding customers who are willing to pay a good price for a greeting card. So last weekend I visited our local monthly craft market to see if this was in fact true. I had explored the market when I first moved to Abergavenny some years ago and thought it seemed a very dreary affair, with nothing very interesting for sale and very few customers and had never been back since. This time was a little different. There were several stalls offering products I liked, such as this one, and there were a lot more people browsing. However, I didn't get the impression that much money was changing hands and wondered whether at least some people had come inside to get out of the cold wind and heavy, sleety showers! I didn't stay long.

Yesterday I was chatting about this with a friend from Norwich, who told me that she had just visited a craft fair in Norwich, where she had found stalls offering goods that she would have liked to buy if she had been able to afford them, but also a great many 'products' ranging from the repetitive to the downright awful. One stall that fell into the 'awful' bracket offered photographs on canvas blocks or framed behind glass and, although the stall-holder insisted they were photos, they looked more like really bad oil paintings! My friend does not use a computer and deduced that he had 'touched up' his photos with oil paints. That may be what he'd done but it's also possible that  he had used the 'artisitic' menu in Photoshop (or one of its free equivalents), something I had noticed but never really explored. But last night, when I'd finished editing some of my recent photos of the last of the wallflowers in my garden, I decided to have a little 'play on my computer' and was astonished by what could be achieved with the click of the mouse!

This is the original photograph on a mug - I like the fine detail of the veins in wallflowers' petals in close-up when you hover over them in the 'store' -

Wallflowers Mug by helikettle
cheap coffee mug with zazzle

- so I went on to make a mousepad and some slip-on Keds shoes.

But in some ways I prefer the 'oil painting' effect - it somehow bears more likeness to the way I see the world, even though my eyesight is near perfect - except sometimes, when it comes to reading the microwave instructions on the backs of frozen ready-meals! It seems to highlight the lights and darks (is this what people mean by 'tonal balance', a phrase I keep coming across recently?) and, in my view, there's a vibrancy that a sharply defined photograph often lacks.

So, with some misgivings about whether I was 'cheating', I went on to make a set of notecards and uploaded them to the online stores -

'Wallflowers' Get Well Soon Notecard by helikettle
cards from zazzle

I suppose it's the finished work that counts, not necessarily how it came about, and I like the way these turned out - but I still feel a bit as if I've cheated. It was an interesting experiment but I don't think I'll be doing it often!

Good News and Bad News...

 The little bit of good news is that at the beginning of the week, I achieved a minor milestone - my 100th sale on Greeting Card Universe. And it was followed shortly afterwards by my 101st....then nothing, but that seems to be the way it goes at the moment, like a switch being turned on and off.

The bad news is the outcome of last week's General Election and I've been surprised at how much Tuesday's announcement of a Coalition of the Tories and the LibDems got me down.

Leaving aside the policies and the personalities involved, it's the sense of well-justified betrayal and outrage in the country that I share. Many people were persuaded to vote Libdem who would otherwise have voted Labour, 'To keep the Tories out' and now the two parties have formed a Coalition, with the Libdems trying to deny that they have given  ground on some of their sacred core policies and that what they have done is  'in the national interest'!

To add insult to injury, some politicians are trying to claim that this is what we, the electorate voted for, which is, of course, rubbish. There have been various assaults on the electorate's 'trust' of their politicians, most recently the expenses scandal, and all the party leaders recognised this and promised a 'new politics' to rebuild trust. Instead, the word 'betrayal' is coming up again and again in the media, amongst Tories as well as Libdems and Labour voters who voted tactically for the Libdems. Apparently the Labour Party's website is groaning under the numbers of people defecting to Labour so maybe in the long run this will work in Labour's favour and the Libdems will have shot themselves in the foot. Only time will tell.

And for those who have no idea what I'm talking about, here are a couple of blogs that explain our situation better than I can. First, the BBC's Nick Robinson, - note the way he writes about the two men agreeing with one another. In some of the televised leaders' debates, Gordon Brown used the phrase 'I agree with Nick' so often that someone on Zazzle made T-shirts with those words as the slogan!

And here is Mehdi Hasan of the New Statesman's blog

And if you find all this too depressing, watch this -
.

It made me laugh in spite of everything!

Enough of politics - they say that a country gets the government it deserves! I've had an even busier week than I expected! Just as I was getting started on printing the catalogue and card order for my Norfolk friend, another call came from Norfolk (through another of my old friends there), a lady wanting to order 10 cards.

Both orders involved quite a lot of customisation, which in itself took up time, but also, the two orders between them included seven new collage name-specific cards. I've sometimes managed to make two of the male name cards in a day, but the female ones take longer...all those leaves to cut out and stick down! But this week I ended up making all seven in two days and both packets had been posted by yesterday lunchtime.

I had intended to make more of these cards gradually, whenever I ran out of ideas for new cards (as if!) so it was all to the good that I've now been able to post them on Greeting Card Universe and Zazzle as well, where I made some matching mugs. Here are just a few of the many combinations -

'Oliver' Birthday Card by helikettle
Browse more Birthday Cards

'James' Birthday Card by helikettle
Browse more Birthday Cards

'This Mug Belongs to Miriam' Ringer Mug by helikettle
More Miriam Mugs

'This mug belongs to Oliver' mug by helikettle
Create a customizable stein with zazzle.co.uk

So today I'm spending some time catching up with other things - like the ironing! But my Norfolk friend received her parcel of cards this morning and is so delighted that she rang up first thing to tell me that she's going to order 30 more before she goes to Germany on Monday! At least I can take my time with that order as she'll be away for at least couple of weeks but I do have to spend some time sourcing matte card to print on as my supplier can't get my usual card any longer. So if anyone reading this knows of a good source of coated matte inkjet paper, preferably 260gsm or heavier, PLEASE let me know!

It's felt more like March this week...

...but I haven't minded that too much as it's been a particularly busy week, beginning with my daughter in Sweden asking me to send a couple of dozen of my cards for her to try to sell at a kind of flea market her friends are having - so lots of printing, folding, trimming, packing etc. And then getting ready for a friend to 'drop in' with some of her friends for a glass of wine and a chance to see (and buy!) some of my cards on Election Night - and the very good news is that she has offered to arrange a 'cards' get-together with some more of her friends as soon as her kitchen refurbishment is finished!

And then, of course there was the election itself! I watched and waited - and waited and watched until the dawn chorus began and I realised it was getting light, having hoped to go to bed with some indication of who would form our next government - but here we are 48 hrs later, still not knowing what's going to happen, and I'm still feeling slightly muzzy-headed from lack of sleep. Which wasn't ideal for sorting out all the catalogue numbers on my website and coordinating them with my paper catalogue yesterday, some of which had got in a bit of a muddle to say the least! But I needed to do it sooner rather than later as I was expecting an old friend from Norfolk to place the first order for my 'party-plan starter pack' (which includes the catalogue!) and the first order of cards chosen from my website!

Luckily she didn't get around to doing it on Friday - probably because of the election! - but phoned her order through this afternoon, by which time the numbers were all present and correct! So another hectic week ahead as I now have another 20 or so cards to print (and some of the collage 'name' cards to make from scratch!) and get in the post to reach her before she goes away next week! She is hoping to sell them at her church for a charity she supports, which is a whole new selling angle I hadn't really thought much about.

So I've had a whole week with no new designs made. But I have managed to fit in making a few more 'Age-specific' and 'Relation-specific' greeting cards and uploaded them to Greeting Card Universe. I used a screenprinted design that I made more than 20 years ago! I had always liked the colour combination but it seemed to need something to 'lift' it - 

Pink Geranium Notecard by helikettle
Browse other Notecard Cards

- and I think the white lettering has done precisely that. It seemed almost as if I'd purposely left the space in the top right-hand quarter to fill with some text!

I'm very fond of those salmon pink geraniums and this design was based on one given to me by a friend when my son was born - in 1978. I've had a few in pots in my garden ever since, some of them from cuttings from the original and a few more I've bought over the years. Sadly, this year the very low temperatures in January killed the last of them in my front porch where they've previously over-wintered happily - the end of an era!

But they are preserved in my design! 

Recently I haven't been spending as much time on Zazzle as on GCU, where I seem to sell more, though my recent little flurry of sales ended as abruptly as it began! But I did 'create' a mug -
 

Pink Geranium Mug by helikettle
Browse other Mug Mugs

 - and some more floral slip-on Keds:
 

Pink Geranium Mini Slip-on Keds Shoe by helikettle
See more Slip on Keds Shoes

 
And now, after all that fun with 'creating', I'd better remove my Mother's Day cards from the front of my GCU store and replace them with Father's Day! It's certainly a busy life so if I don't write anything more this week, you'll know why!

The Traffic Wardens of Style

I've suddenly had a little cluster of sales through GCU in the week or so since my age-specific birthday cards were approved, not enough to make me rich, by a long way, but encouraging all the same. Some of the sales have been age-specific, including yet another one of those 'dancing man' cards.

But the one that has pleased me most is the 'New Baby Girl' card, which was one of the first greeting card designs I submitted to a publisher, along with a batch of somewhat 'quilt-like' designs I had painstakingly painted in gouache.

When I painted this one, it was some years since I had used a paintbrush as I normally work in soft pastels - and it took some getting used to! When I paint landscapes and so on, I work fast.  A pastel painting usually takes me about the length of time a CD takes to play; if it takes me longer, I can be pretty sure that I've ruined it. I can do this because there's no stopping to mix colours or rinse the paintbrush. Working so directly with pastels gives the painting a chance to flow without interruption.

Also I normally work quite large. One of my pastel life drawings took up most of a sheet of plasterboard, far too large and heavy for an easel and I ended up working on the floor! So restricting myself to a 5" x 7" space and having to mix the gouache was quite a trial for me to begin with.

But I gradually adjusted and sent a collection of Christmas card designs like this one to various publishers listed on the Greeting Card Association website.

Gradually the emails came back - 'We enjoyed looking at your work but unfortunately, it is not our style.'

By the time I'd spent nearly a year of submitting my designs to publishers, with just the one 'near miss' to show for it, I was beginning to think of publishers in very much the same way as I think of some gallery owners, as persons of immense POWER, power that, at times, I doubt is warranted.

As artists/designers we depend on them and I've met a few who seemed pleased to make sure that we are aware if it. Sometimes it can seem as if the balance of power is all wrong, when you think of the talent they reject, whilst possibly having no artistic talent themselves. Rather like the saying, 'If you can't DO it, teach it!', or, in this case, 'If you can't paint, run a gallery!' Or a publishing company...and yet maybe that's just the sting of rejection speaking. To be a successful gallery owner or publisher requires talent, just a different talent, the talent for business which many artists lack and have no interest in acquiring. Both publishers and gallery owners know exactly what they are - and are not! - looking for; and let's not forget that they have a living to make too!

Even so, I must confess to feeling a certain satisfaction when, through Greeting Card Universe, total strangers on the other side of the world began buying cards I had designed that had been rejected by publishers. As well as the 'not our style' emails, I'd received some with 'we already have cards in your style'. How confusing is that!

They say that there are two things you need to succeed in greeting card design; you need to be prolific and you need to be able to take a lot of rejection. But it can be frustrating when that rejection consists simply of  'not our style', with no constructive feedback. Probably most of us would like to know where we are going wrong so that we can perhaps do something about it. It took me a long time to realise that my 'style' wasn't actually the issue: it was just a polite way of saying, 'Thanks, but no thanks'. What I did, naively, before the penny dropped and I realised my 'style' had nothing to do with it, was I changed my style. With each batch of  'rejection' emails, I dug deeper and found a new 'style'.

First  I returned to the pen and wash style I'd used as a teenager -

- then oil pastels - until the summer heat in my attic studio melted them!

At which point I switched to exploring wet-in-wet watercolours -

Then I turned to collage, more as a solution to an illustration problem than as a greeting card design 'style'. Because by then I'd had enough of the 'rejection' emails and had begun to work on illustrating one of the decodable reading books I'd written for my struggling literacy pupils.

But my first attempt, 'Snowballing', was immediately so popular with Greeting Card Universe customers  that I began to wonder whether the publishers had really been as omniscient as they had seemed!

So how do I feel about all those 'not our style' emails now? Frustrated? Jaded? Embittered?

Well, actually, no, not at all! I'm thrilled that I spent the best part of last year going down roads that I'd never have thought of exploring if my first attempts had met with success! 2009 was a year of experimenting, learning, acquiring confidence in a broad range of styles, having fun! Yes, at times it was disappointing and yet it was also exciting, stimulating. I've found I can do things I had no idea I could do!

Or maybe it's my pencil that can do things - I certainly don't accept any responsibility for what it sometimes gets up to, particularly when it produces irreverent little doodles like this one!

Recently I was asked whether I have a recognisable style? On the face of it the answer has to be 'no, I have a lot of different styles'. But then I read on a blog, which I've unfortunately lost track of, that we all have our own unique 'style', whether we can see it or not. I certainly can't 'see' my style but maybe I'm confusing 'style' with 'medium'? I'd be really interested to know whether others can see a defining style in my work - and even more intersted in knowing what it is!

Cards for the Boys

Somewhere at the back of my dark and cavernous roofspace is a voluminous old suitcase full of things I don't want to throw away but don't know what to do with - other than pack them away in an old suitcase....! And somewhere in this suitcase are my school reports, aged three, with marks for 'literature' and 'poetry'. One of these now fragile documents contains the information that I 'showed promise in Art' but was 'not much interested in sport'. So nothing has changed really - apart from my late-onset enthusiasm for watching Wales play rugby.

But today I've begun to bring the two together, using my 'promise in Art' to make a series of birthday cards for young people who are 'interested in sport' -

 I had originally intended that these should be more collages, but as I seem to have sold mostly pen and wash designs through Greeting Card Universe, I decided to go back to that style. I even planned to venture into unknown territory, using a dip pen and went out and bought some Indian Ink. My practice pieces with the dip pen went well and I was pleasantly surprised at how much ink the pen could hold in its little reservoir (I was using a calligraphy pen), but when it came to the point, I chickened out and stuck with the 'safer' watercolour pencil and watercolours routine. After all, I haven't used ink for a while and one wrong stroke of the pen and all my work would be ruined!

You'll notice that, so far, these are all birthday cards suitable for young men! But I couldn't resist adding one for the girls -

I am trying to focus on cards for men and boys but 'three out of four ain't bad!'

The Greeting Card Universe reviewers seem to have speeded up just recently and cards are being approved in 5, rather than 7, days. So these, and all their related 'age specific' cards I've made, should be available quite soon.