It's that time of year

June is almost here, and our local Farmer's Market has been cooking along since April. But only now is the really good stuff starting to come in. Last week I bought a quart of strawberries so sublime that they lasted less than 24 hours. And yep, I ate every single one myself. Asparagus is fazing out. I haven't seen peas yet, but maybe I missed them with all the trialling I was doing in April.

I can't always afford to eat local and organic but when I can, I do. The food is better. It tastes better and it's better for you. Luckily our local farmer's market is large and diverse. There are products for palates from around the world, and to sell at our market the farmer must be local (within a certain mile radius of my town) and must have produced the product for sale. No importing, even from neighboring states. The Sustainable agriculture design won a Today's Best award at Zazzle!

Bags are back!

Woo hoo! Finally!

Bags have been out of stock for months and months. They're back now, which means I know have to get busy putting designs on bags, which is sort of a PITA. Anybody who says doing a POD is easy is wrong. It's a lot of constant work, but well worth it.

Robertson coat of arms

My newest design, for my family. I actually had to really put this together. There are many sites on the web that offer to sell you jpgs of coats of arms, but a) they're jpgs and b) none of the nicest quality ones in terms of graphic integrity actually depicted the Robertson coat of arms correctly. The fist holding the crown was missing, and that's an important part of the COA. One depicted the fist and crown, but the boars were tiny. So I thought to heck with it, and came up with my own.

Here's where having a clipart library with images which can be used for anything comes in handy. I had bought one oh, about 10 years ago. And quite a bit of the art in it is cheesy. But it happened to have a huge section on COAs. So I was able to meld together the main piece (the shield with helmet and cloth swirls) with a fist and crown, and a boar's head. I'm quite happy with the result and though it uses some ready-made graphic design elements, it's original too because I am the one who pulled the pieces together (redrawing several of them for good vector lines).

Does the Cafepress migration impact your sales?

One of my new flower designs. No sales yet, but I think there's hope!

Reading the Zazzle forums, it seems that some people are thinking the Great Cafepress Migration (wherein Cafepress pissed off an unholy crapload of artists with its new royalty system so they abandoned ship and came to Zazzle) is costing them sales. And indeed, Zazzle has loads and loads of new artists these days.

But let's be realistic. Those artists were already in the market, just at a different address. It's not a huge influx of new, but rather just a lateral move. And I still think overall it enhances Zazzle and helps us all. Zazzle is becoming THE place to be for designers. Vh1 and Hallmark have joined the Zazzle ranks meaning the Zazzle address is going to be attracting more and more hits overall.

But it's true that the more designers who use PODs, the harder it will be to get individual voices heard. I launched my new shop trying to appeal to a wider, non-dog audience and I love what I'm doing over there, but realize that though I'm appealing to a wider audience, I'm also now competing with many more shops doing similar things. I have yet to get a sale off of my new merchandise, but I feel like I will, sooner or later!

Launching a new store

I've finally decided to split my work into two galleries. My main gallery is of course dedicated to dog designs, but I also have a lot of plant/floral designs as well as other things that just don't fit well into a site devoted to dog things. So welcome DDGrafix! Yep, just almost exactly the same name I already have, in fact the logo is the same. But this gallery will have holiday items, plant/floral items, etc. Nothing dog related.

Hope you enjoy!

Featured artist and design

Today I found yet another outstanding artist, Creations Aimelle. She has gorgeous photos and photography. I was especially taken with this mousepad with it's stunning blues and greens accented by the hot orange of the koi.