Monday, 12 September 2011
Thursday, 8 September 2011
Why Buy Your Greeting Cards Online?
There are plenty of reasons NOT to, especially when you have numerous handy greeting card shops locally.
- If you are looking to buy just one card, the shipping costs are out of all proportion to the cost of the card.
- You will have to think in advance as your purchase will not be in your possession instantly.
- And what if the quality is poor – many people like to hold a greeting card in their hand before deciding to buy it.
But nevertheless, people do buy greeting cards online, more maybe in the US but other countries are catching up. Greeting card websites abound and some of them are well established and very successful.
So why would anyone who has plenty of local outlets for greeting cards choose to order them online?
The first thing that sprang to my mind was that they might be housebound. I knew a couple where the wife was practically housebound and her husband did the shopping. When it came to choosing a birthday card for their daughter, he struck lucky and came home with a card that his wife really liked. She looked up the name of the artist on the internet, found her website and it all continued from there ...
Another reason could simply be that you don’t like shopping and going into a card shop is something you would rather avoid. I think this probably applies to quite a lot of men – I know my son would fall into this category!
But it was one of my daughters who gave me the biggest clue. She normally buys her greeting cards when she’s shopping in town but she told me that if she were looking for something very specific, then she would turn to the internet to provide.
This seems to be borne out by my online card sales. A very high percentage are age-specific, person-specific – or both! The very detailed ‘categories’ offered through Greeting Card Universe baffled me at first because many of them seemed so obscure! Just look at them here! No ordinary greeting card shop in the High Street could carry all those categories and subcategories. But of course with print-on-demand, the online stores don’t need to!
Which leads to a further reason why customers would turn to the internet for their card-buying. Personalisation!
Personalisation – or Customisation! – seems to be the flavour of our times! Once it was the prerogative of the wealthy to have custom-made suits and dresses, while the rest of us made do with ‘off-the-peg’. Now, with the benefit of technological advances, the ‘luxury’ of a one-off greeting card, created to our own specification is available to us all!
So how does all this affect us as we design our greeting cards?
It seems to me that there are two ways we can go;
1. Establish your reputation offline, get your cards selling in shops across the country, or even further afield! And then hope to pick up some extra sales from your website. Here are three of my favourite UK designers who have done just that:
2. Make your designs ever more specific! Birthday cards that age-, name-, family relation-specific, Get Well cards for every conceivable illness or procedure, Thank You and Good Luck cards for a variety of occasions, greeting cards for less known religious festivals and so on...
3. Taking that one step further - finding a good ‘niche’ will undoubtedly increase your sales. Greeting cards (and other printed items like T-shirts) that seem to do very well are often based on pet photos, especially if the pet is a very specific breed!
Offline, in our local shops, my ‘blank inside’, ‘any occasion’ greeting cards, based on my pastel paintings do well. But online they tend to sit there, gathering virtual dust.
The nearest I’ve come to finding my online and offline ‘niche’ is to make cards suitable for men, as friends have told me how difficult it can be to find anything suitable that isn’t full of unwanted innuendo! And, narrowing it down further, the fact that my grandsons are beginning to reach the teenage years has catapulted me into tackling that difficult and not very well-served category, cards for teenage boys!
Now I’m wondering whether it would be worth concocting a Folk Art style card design for a Welsh Step-Uncle, who is crazy about Tibetan Terriers,with a 53rd Birthday on Valentine’s Day?
Monday, 5 September 2011
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Good Artists and Great Artists
A fellow artist and greeting card designer once told me, tongue in cheek, I believe, that she’d just decided that she was never going to make it to the Royal Academy and was going to settle for making some money from her art instead.
I wonder how many of us have secretly cherished dreams of fame and fortune that, at some point, we are forced to relinquish when it becomes apparent that our dreams were unrealistic. I suspect that at some point we have all hoped that, one day, we would be ‘discovered’ and a kind of ‘rags to riches’ scenario would ensue, though hopefully not quite like this one -
It does happen. We read stories and see movies about ordinary people who were ‘talent-spotted’ or who rose to the heights of fame, seemingly out of nowhere. J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series is a good example. She went from living on benefits to becoming a multi-millionaire within the space of five years. And the proliferation of ‘talent-spotting’ TV shows where someone like Susan Boyle can come from nowhere and shoot to international fame, with a song called, ‘I Dreamed a Dream’, shows us what can be achieved by ‘dreaming big’.
Perhaps this hope of a meteoric rise to fame, and all that goes with it, as a result of being ‘discovered,’ is linked to every little girl’s dream that ‘One day my Prince will come’, the story of Cinderella and so many other ‘and they all lived happily every after’ fairy tales?
Little boys on the other hand are perhaps more likely to understand that fame and fortune has to be sought proactively, like Dick Whittington setting off to London, where, he has heard, the streets are paved with gold.
So, yes, it does happen – there are fantastic talents, geniuses even, waiting to be discovered. And it’s good to have dreams. It’s good to set our sights high. But when our dreams don’t seem to be getting any closer to fulfilment than when we started out, what should we do then?
That is the time to recognise that we can’t all be the next ‘best thing since sliced bread’, that not all of us are going to make it into the ranks of the household names, however hard we try. And probably it's time also to recognise that it doesn’t really matter!
For every artist who has succeeded in becoming ‘great’, there are always thousands of ‘good’ artists - and the good news is that they all have their part to play. It’s important not to let those ‘big dreams’ stand in the way of recognising our lesser achievements, our day-to-day opportunities for job satisfaction.
Even with something as apparently ‘minor’ and insignificant as a greeting card design, I still feel thrilled that a complete stranger on the other side of the world chose my card to celebrate a special occasion, notwithstanding the meagre amount of money their choice has earned for me! Recently someone chose my sympathy cards for the loss of a son and a grandson. To me that was a huge honour that somebody had felt that my design was just right for such a poignant occasion.
Yes, art is more than a job, it’s a calling, a passion even, and it’s right that we all hope that our talents will be suitably recognised and remunerated. But it is a ‘job’ as well, sometimes requiring hard work, discipline and non-art activities that we may not enjoy.
And it’s most likely to be this ‘job’ aspect that will provide us with the little common-or-garden variety of satisfactions which will add up to contentment while we wait for our dreams to come true!
I wonder how many of us have secretly cherished dreams of fame and fortune that, at some point, we are forced to relinquish when it becomes apparent that our dreams were unrealistic. I suspect that at some point we have all hoped that, one day, we would be ‘discovered’ and a kind of ‘rags to riches’ scenario would ensue, though hopefully not quite like this one -
It does happen. We read stories and see movies about ordinary people who were ‘talent-spotted’ or who rose to the heights of fame, seemingly out of nowhere. J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series is a good example. She went from living on benefits to becoming a multi-millionaire within the space of five years. And the proliferation of ‘talent-spotting’ TV shows where someone like Susan Boyle can come from nowhere and shoot to international fame, with a song called, ‘I Dreamed a Dream’, shows us what can be achieved by ‘dreaming big’.
Perhaps this hope of a meteoric rise to fame, and all that goes with it, as a result of being ‘discovered,’ is linked to every little girl’s dream that ‘One day my Prince will come’, the story of Cinderella and so many other ‘and they all lived happily every after’ fairy tales?
Little boys on the other hand are perhaps more likely to understand that fame and fortune has to be sought proactively, like Dick Whittington setting off to London, where, he has heard, the streets are paved with gold.
So, yes, it does happen – there are fantastic talents, geniuses even, waiting to be discovered. And it’s good to have dreams. It’s good to set our sights high. But when our dreams don’t seem to be getting any closer to fulfilment than when we started out, what should we do then?
That is the time to recognise that we can’t all be the next ‘best thing since sliced bread’, that not all of us are going to make it into the ranks of the household names, however hard we try. And probably it's time also to recognise that it doesn’t really matter!
For every artist who has succeeded in becoming ‘great’, there are always thousands of ‘good’ artists - and the good news is that they all have their part to play. It’s important not to let those ‘big dreams’ stand in the way of recognising our lesser achievements, our day-to-day opportunities for job satisfaction.
Even with something as apparently ‘minor’ and insignificant as a greeting card design, I still feel thrilled that a complete stranger on the other side of the world chose my card to celebrate a special occasion, notwithstanding the meagre amount of money their choice has earned for me! Recently someone chose my sympathy cards for the loss of a son and a grandson. To me that was a huge honour that somebody had felt that my design was just right for such a poignant occasion.
Yes, art is more than a job, it’s a calling, a passion even, and it’s right that we all hope that our talents will be suitably recognised and remunerated. But it is a ‘job’ as well, sometimes requiring hard work, discipline and non-art activities that we may not enjoy.
And it’s most likely to be this ‘job’ aspect that will provide us with the little common-or-garden variety of satisfactions which will add up to contentment while we wait for our dreams to come true!
Monday, 29 August 2011
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Venturing into Digital Art!
I love to see them and I am very encouraged by the way Hafsah draws and paints with such confidence. Long may it continue!
But recently something new arrived by email – two of Hafsah’s digital paintings!
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| The Pink Panther on Television |
As you know, I have my reservations about digital art. But I think these are great fun and they seem to have succeeded in keeping that spontaneous, ‘hand-drawn’ look that is sometimes lacking in digital art.
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| Hafsah's friend, Sarah |
For someone who isn’t much interested in digital art, maybe it is strange that I do actually own a graphics tablet? It was a Christmas gift from my son and I use it almost daily to clean up my designs – ie to remove little marks and bits of fluff that have been picked up in the scanner or even little splashes of paint or glue that aren’t easy to see with the naked eye but which sometimes show up when the cards are printed.
To begin with, I had a very hard time coordinating what I was drawing on the tablet with what I intended to draw on the screen and I practised by writing my name until it became legible.
I was comforted to find that another artist friend found it even more challenging than I did; though, on the other hand, a non-artist friend took to it like a duck to water, when I allowed him to ‘play with’ my tablet! Maybe it’s something to do with the way the male brain is wired? Could there be a connection with the way men generally find parallel parking so much easier than women do?
But I’ve found that the more I use the pen and tablet, the easier it has become and I am at last able to draw recognisable people and objects with it. I still find it rather awkward and unpredictable, though, compared to using paper and pencil. I think this may be something to do with the way I normally draw – not in single clear lines but more as if I am feeling my way around a shape. People have suggested I should try sculpture but I call it my ‘Annigoni’ method. And I still find the difference in pressure required on the tablet somewhat disconcerting!
I seem to have a low boredom threshold when it comes to my artwork. So when I feel the first signs of waning enthusiasm, I try something new, just for the fun of it! I had been wondering whether it would work to draw my design in the normal ‘dead tree-ware’ way, scan it and then work on it with my tablet and pen. Recently, an afternoon of experimenting and ‘playing with my tablet’ was an excellent antidote to staleness and this is the result:
I don’t think it’s something I shall do all that often; maybe just when the subject seems especially suited to this style. Nor do I know whether any dentists would really want to send this to their patients as a check-up reminder. But as it cost me nothing but time to produce it, I thought I might as well post it on Zazzle, just in case!
And I would have found this Jewish New Year Card very tedious to paint neatly so doing it digitally worked well for me:
It certainly wasn't quicker than painting it traditionally would have been. But I learned a lot from creating this design digitally. So, while I was about it, I created a Diwali design, putting into practice the lessons I'd learned - such as blowing it up to at least 200% from the start saved me a lot of 'cleaning up' time later! The finished traditional Rangoli pattern found its way on to all sorts of Diwali gifts as well as greeting cards; so watch out for it in next Monday's post on my other blog . . .
It’s also nice to know that, if it ever comes to the point where this ‘starving artist’ can no longer afford expensive art supplies, my ‘naughty pencil’ will still have my graphics tablet for a playground!
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Tuesday, 23 August 2011
Another artist who doesn't know what she's doing!
A friend told me about a programme about an elderly artist I'd missed so I was delighted to find it was going to be repeated on the BBC News Channel. But when I switched over to watch it, the rebels in Libya had just entered Tripoli and that, of course, took precedence over the artist, Gillian Ayres!
Fortunately, I found it on BBC iPlayer and would like to share it with as many people as possible as I found it very inspiring:
I'm not sure how long this will be available or whether it is even availble outside of the UK, but if you can, do spare half an hour to watch it - and let me know in the comments, what you think!
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