Getty Images + Spoonflower + MOO

Yes I know, I have been a bad blogger lately. But, in my defense, real life caught up with me plus which, I have been quite ill, and am still well under par. Sadly, this has meant that I have not been particularly productive artwise. However, I do have some news.

Getty Images:
A few months ago, I joined the ‘Getty Call for Artists’ Flickr group on Flickr (naturally) and submittted some work. I didn’t think anything of it, and indeed forgot all about. Then  a couple of weeks ago, I received an email inviting me to be a contributor to Getty Images, and would I submit five images out of the batch (ten I think) I had submitted. I was chuffed to say the least. However, I didn’t rush to upload my images,  and had a good think about it first.  I read the contract thoroughly, and had a lawyer friend (thank you Kirsten) check over some of the small print. Luke made the point that the images would just sit on my hard drive and my website doing nothing, and why not try and make some money out of them, so..I submited four of the five images they asked for, and they can be licensed here.

Spoonflower:
I have had a Spoonflower account for a long time, ages in fact, and had never done anything with it. I decided this week to upload some of my artwork. I was quite excited by this, and the illustrations I chose worked really well. However, don’t be rushing over there to snap up my designs…cos here’s the rub. Firstly, before you can sell any fabric, one has to have ordered  a swatch first and then proofed it. This I can tell you had me pretty peeved as I have accounts at Cafepress, Imagekind, deviantART, Redbubble, and none of those require such a thing. Spoonflowers reasoning is that designs will look differently once printed on fabric as opposed to how they look on a monitor. However, that could be also said about paper and canvas, so as far as I am concerned..that doesn’t really wash!   However, a swatch is only $5 and the shipping to the UK $2, so it not prohibitive.  But, it does mean that only two or three of my designs will be available for a while, IF I then decide to sell them through Spoonflower. You see, if I sell my fabric though Spoonflower, I only get 10%. Jessica thinks this quite reasonble, but I don’t know…seems very low to me and I feel I am underselling myself. I am half inclined to offer the designs for sale through me, e.g. if someone wants some fabric with my designs on them, they buy through me and I order from Spoonflower. It would appear quite a few designers do this.  I get a 10% discount as  a designer, so my mark up would just take the price up to that which Spoonflower would charge anyone buying my fabric. These are the Spoonflower fabric prices.

Take a look at my Spoonflower Page, not only did I upload some of my illustrations, but I created some funky designs in Paintshop Pro (version 9, the best one) using some vector designs I created a long time ago and Photoshop.

MOO:
Last but not least, my recent mini MOO cards were featured on the MOO Blog. I suddenly noticed a lot of traffic to my Flickr page, website, etc, and when checking my stats, followed the links and discovered there I was, on the MOO blog with a very complimentary little write up, so thank you MOO. Very nice.

MOO Mini Cards