My RedBubble Account

About two weeks ago I finally got around to opening a RedBubble account. It’s been on the ‘to do’ list for quite some time. One reason for wanting to open one is trying to promote my paintings more (the pots have taken over in the past few years). But another reason is to do something with my ‘back catalogue’ of ‘old and sold’ paintings by making them available for purchase as greeting cards, prints and so on.

Long ago (before digital photography!) I used to take 35mm slides of all my paintings. I have a stack of them covering paintings from 1995 onwards. So I thought it would be a simple matter of getting them scanned and loaded onto my new RedBubble account. Well, to cut a long story short (a story that involves two separate scanners, a PC, a Mac, some cables and quite a lot of tea-and-angst) I discovered that while my slides look fab on my old lightbox, most of them really weren’t up to scratch for display on a computer screen - let alone for print. Not even Photoshop could revive them! So unfortunately I haven’t been able to add everything from my back catalogue. A bit disappointing but never mind.

In the past few days though I’ve loaded 24 images – and there’s plenty more to come. I’ll be adding more in the next few weeks and also when I paint something new too. I’ve already had some positive responses from people on the site, which has been really encouraging, although I’ve yet to explore RedBubble properly...there's too much to see!

Anyway, here’s a link to my main profile page on my RedBubble account. And here’s a link to my first journal entry there too – which is why I feel like I’ve written a blog entry already this week!

Greetings Cards and Happy Birthday Tags

Today I listed these new greetings cards in my Folksy shop. They’re part of a series of small paintings I’ve designed that feature a little white bird: this one is called Little White Bird - Red Flower (previous post). This painting was made using acrylics on watercolour paper and finished using pastels to give it a soft feel. The white stem on the flower was made by actually scratching through the paint to reveal the white paper underneath.

Just as I was about to upload the image though I realized the photo background was looking decidedly yellow (it was sunny on the day of the shoot!) So I thought I’d have a go at making the background completely white around the object for this image (using Fireworks). I’ve never done this before so it was a bit fiddly to do: and I’m not entirely sure if it feels too white now! I certainly don’t have time to do this on all my photos – I take too many! And I suspect that a picture of a pot edited like this will make it seem like it’s hovering in space and a bit lifeless and flat – so I probably won’t be doing this too often. But it was an interesting exercise…

Anyway, the other thing I wanted to mention was these new Happy Birthday tags I listed in my Folksy shop yesterday. You might remember I talked about my letterpress in a previous post. Well finally I thought I’d show you the results of using my letters in a finished piece. These tags are perfect as little gift tokens or to add to gift-wrapping as a special feature. They measure about 35mm across and are strung on a pale blue ribbon with a drop of about 10cm. I thought they might be something a bit different for people to give – and I think they’re quite sweet really! (Click on pics to go to the listings.)

Greeting Cards from Original Designs

A couple of years ago I made a series of small mixed media paintings on watercolour paper using acrylic paint and soft pastels. They were designed to be simple, stylised illustrations suitable for greeting cards that I hoped one day to have printed. Well it’s only been a couple of years (where does all the time go?!) but at last I managed to find time to get a few of these designs printed into cards. I did the printing through moo to see how they would come out, and I’ve only printed a small print run so far – I hope to do more in the future.

This design I’ve called ‘Little White Bird (Heart Tree)’ for obvious reasons. Hopefully you can see the little pink hearts in the tree. It’s a simple design which I hope will appeal to many and can be used for lots of occasions. The cards are blank inside so people can add their own message and of course they come with envelopes.

Anyway, I’ve just listed this card on my Folksy shop today so at the moment only this one design is available. But I hope to add more soon.