I haven’t been painting recently, so there’s nothing visual to share, alas. I am, however, on page 58 of my novel, that’s about 32,630 words. Which, if you figure a book is about 200 pages, is about a quarter of the way there! Shame I’ve already written all the scenes I can think of to write… Hmmmm…

Etsy Banner

What I have been doing is attempting to set up shop over at Etsy. I’m hitting some practical snags. First of all, do most artists on Etsy have their prints done professionally? Or do they print them out themselves at home? I have a pretty decent deskjet printer with fairly good 6-ink cartridges and on glossy paper they come out looking fab, and it’s all on archival paper and according to HP, these inks on good quality HP paper should last up to 200 years. But I have these A6 cards that I bought so I could make greeting cards of my paintings and after lots of struggling with my printer (which was being grumpy because it had a case of the Mondays I guess), I finally got a set of ‘sky’ paintings printed out. They look…hmm… a little washed out. I kind of liked it after a while of considering them, they look sort of ‘vintage’y, although I don’t think that’s usually what people are going for when they want prints of paintings… I think it needs a glossy paper, but not sure how to do that, I think most card stock is matte. Or maybe I should give up on the homemade printing press idea and just bite the bullet and pay someone to do the printing for me.

So then I checked out Zazzle, which I’ve seen people referring to. They’re an online printing press kind of like my good old VistaPrint from days of yore. I figured I needed some business cards anyway, so I went and made myself some of those, and then I kind of got curious and uploaded some of my paintings. So… I’ll see what their quality is like when my shipment arrives in a few days, but I don’t like the huge ‘zazzle’ printed on the back… do all printers do that? Or just the online ones?

I will go check out real brick-and-mortar print shops too, because I want to get some proper giclee prints made of some of my paintings anyway, but for greeting cards, I’d just like to go with something a little easier and cheaper, if I can find something that’s decent quality. But is zazzle really decent quality? Anyone know?

I’m also unusually freaked out both by the ins and outs of PayPal and shipping. So I think I need to do some more studying up on those before I can feel confident enough to actually post items, just in case someone actually stumbles upon my stuff and feels inclined to buy… We’ll get there some day!