Month: November 2020

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A Selection from the Shop

Because I’m still finding my way around WordPress and its various plugins, I haven’t fully implemented searches. At some point I will be adding the ability to search by price and probably also size and medium. Until then, here is a selection from the shop of what is currently available. There are lots more on the Printmaking pages in the shop, and I’m adding more all the time.

Once we have got past the COVID-19 crisis I would very much like to hold a physical show. Follow the blog or better still sign up for my mailing list to be notified.

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Latest in the shop

I’m continuing to add new items to the shop. My intention is to do that every day, but I don’t always make it! The shop structure is now much simpler, although I’m working on improving the search to allow for searches on price and size. For now, I’m concentrating on adding work made this year, the ‘Lockdown Series‘, with some older works.

Have a look. I’m quite pleased with it so far but I would appreciate your comments. The image below is ‘I Ching’

geometric abstract print resembling hexagrams of I CHing
I Ching – geometric abstract print

I’m still working away in the studio on some ideas for more ‘pared down’ images. There’s nothing to show yet though. I’ve learned a lot making these prints, especially about colour, and I want to transfer that experience to other print forms, especially collagraph, probably at first by revisiting some old plates. I also want to explore ways to take these monotype images into screen prints.

The best way to do this is probably by creating colour separations in software. These would then be used as the base image for the screens. Working in collagraph and screen print will also mean the images can be offered as genuine editions. I know of course that I could print directly from the scanned images, but that would then be just a reproduction, not an original print and I don’t do reproductions of my own work.

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Selling your art online – getting to grips with a new world.

From Westport to Ocean Park a collagraph print
From Westport to Ocean Park – collagraph

Selling your art online. Easy enough surely? Well, yes and no. I always wanted this site to be both shop and a blog. I enjoy writing so I want of course to write about my own work but also about art in general. That’s the easy bit. The shop though is, to say the least rather more complicated. I’ve sold online before, in a small way on EBay, but mainly on Etsy. That arcane art called SEO or Search Engine Optimisation, is however much more complex on your own site than on market places like Etsy or Folksy. That’s an issue but also an opportunity of course, but it still takes time.

I’m slowly adding new items to the shop, but it is much slower than I hoped. So please bear with me for now while I work my way through the listings I’ve brought over from Etsy. For that reason I’m retaining the links to my other online venues for the time being. Eventually I will move them to the About Me page because I want this site to be the centre of my online existence. One of the wider lessons I learnt from selling on Etsy is not to dilute your brand. It’s my art I’m selling, so my brand is me. When I talk about selling your art online, I mean my art of course, but if I have any lessons to share I will try to do so.

Lessons I’ve learned

I don’t feel comfortable writing a blog post that claims to offer the answer because I don’t have the level of expertise to do that. I will however post from time to time to talk about what I’ve done and why. So bear in mind this is not advice. I’m the one following the advice!

  1. This post title has links to other parts of this site and to external sites. As I understand it a good variety of internal and external links helps persuade search engines the site is reputable. Bearing in mind my comments about brand, those other sites also use variations on the same artist name.
  2. There’s a relevant and unique key phrase used in the title, in the text (including near the beginning which gets more weight in search engines), in the page meta description and in the SEO title. This last took me a while to grasp but it is what shows up in search engine results. It needs to be long enough to explain and short enough to show up in its entirety.
  3. A good chunk of the key phrase should also appear in the url.