Zazzle Design Efforts Have Been in High Gear And I Want to Tell You About Them

So then I took The Whole Summer Off, Plus A Few Other Months For Good Measure. Today I'm resuming where I left off attempting to chronicle some of the journey with you here. I've been known to have some challenges with balance but I'm not going to belabor the point of how I should have been marketing all along, even while creating more designs. Instead, I'll tell you that I've learned so much this year, and am as excited as I ever was to have discovered Print on Demand (POD) as a creative outlet that also offers the potential for generating income. Before I move on, I'll show you some of the products I've designed that people have recently purchased. In no particular order:

I'll share even more at the bottom of the page. Since it's daunting to try and fill you in on All That Happened While I Wasn't Maintaining This Site, why don't I dip my toe back in the blogging waters with a few highlights instead?

  1. I streamlined my efforts and, through mountains of trial-and-error, plus countless hours of research, started learning how to create strategies for what I want to spend my time designing. I'm not locked into the strategies, but they're certainly helping.
  2. My last blog post tells you about one weekend in May when I designed nothing but postage stamps with the word "Love" on them. Somebody bought a bunch of one of those designs just yesterday, in fact! I'm still designing postage. It could be a little outrageous, the disproportionate amount of time I've poured into these designs. For some reason, that product has really captured my attention and I continue to be thrilled that I'm able to design my own postage stamps and also postage for other people's special occasions.
  3. Speaking of US Postage Stamps, this is the single product I've chosen to design that requires approval before the products are visible in my store. Months ago I also designed a few Zippo lighters which required approval as well. But I've since opted not to continue down that road. Postage, though? Oh yes. The ideas seem endless and I have much more to tell you, on that front, in upcoming posts here.
  4. Paper products, in general, have gotten much more of my recent design attention than the gift products I spent the first few months of the year designing. I love that I have the option to do either one, on any given day. This mood-driven creative loves Zazzle.
  5. It's been tricky to sort out my preferences where setting royalties is concerned. I'm feeling much more confident choosing the percentage for various products and these days I find myself going back to adjust royalties on pieces I designed in the first few months. Sometimes I go down; usually I go up.

If things go according to plan, I'll be blogging here even more in the coming days, so I'll wrap this up for now. I look forward to sharing some new designs with you as well as elaborating on some of the lessons I've learned while designing through Zazzle. They seem never to stop coming, and many of them, I suspect, are worth putting out there for interested others to find one day, too. For now, I hope you're enjoying some sort of creative endeavor for yourself!

Cheers!

Melody

Merchandise Printed with My Art Inspired by the Zentangle® Method of Pattern Drawing

A while back, one of my girlfriends was battling for her life in the hospital when other friends decided to put together a benefit event to raise money to help with her support. While it's nice to be able to make monetary donations, which so many of us did, I also wanted to try something different to show my support. This event was being planned during a phase when I was drawing little Zentangle® tiles nearly every day, and I was happy with the progress I was making in being able to successfully render some of the trickier patterns. I decided I would create a large piece of artwork based on these patterns, frame it, and donate it to the auction. And this is what I did! Boom. It turned out that this was the most complex piece I have ever attempted thus-far, and since it was gone from my sight so quickly, I wanted to have some products printed with the images I shot of it when it was finished. Now that I'm enjoying my print on demand work so much, I decided to create a few items that are printed with these and other "Zentangle® Inspired Art" designs I've created and have them available for others to purchase, too.

I drink out of a mug printed with part of this design almost every day. Last night I ordered a tote bag printed with the patterns, so I can enjoy carrying it this spring. There are also postage stamps and phone cases with this and other doodle art pieces I've created, too, just for fun. This page allows me to share them with you and I also want to make sure anyone reading this who is interested in learning more can access all the information they need to access resources for learning this fun way of drawing. I'll continue to explain more on this front below the images. Before you read on, check them out!

Balancing Originality and The Methodology of Others

It can be tricky to venture forward in a creative direction that blends diverse goals and designs when at least one of them involves a trademarked name. So I will tell you a bit about the artwork style in my banner and the images seen in my product links. If you're intrigued, perhaps you'll check them out and give it a try for yourself!

In spite of having been a lifelong "doodler" who added patterns to shoes and pants and all manner of paper products... for as long as I can remember, my efforts on that front changed considerably when I discovered the Zentangle® Method of Pattern Drawing. In spite of the fact that, when I was excited enough to show others - my family especially - and kept hearing, "You've always done this!" this style of drawing IS different from what I'd ever tried before. It combined my need for spontaneous, creative freedom with a methodology that made the organic flow much more forward-moving. Although I'd been passively aware that it existed for several years, a couple of summers ago I bought a book and started learning what I could from it. Fascinating. These folks, Maria Thomas and Rick Roberts combined her illustrative work with his meditative practices and came up with a structured way to combine pre-designed patterns (called "tangles") into freestyle lines (outlined in pencil and called "strings") to create truly unique works of art. As best I can explain it, they established some structure and form to what creative people have always done, and created something phenomenal out of it. They built the linear process that anyone can learn, they sell products, they even offer annual workshops to train people to become certified instructors. Should someone desire to become certified to teach others. Rick and Maria have anchored so many of the "zen doodle" activities of so many of us into something that has a framework. And for that I am appreciative. Here is Zentangle Dot Com for those of you who are looking. You'll find a lot of beautiful things there.

The hundreds of patterns both they and practitioners of the art form, both certified and not, have developed are incredible and great fun to work with. I go through phases in which I want to "tangle" every day. And at other times, I let those habits slide in lieu of choosing to journal for a half hour in the morning or spend that time on my yoga mat. One day perhaps I'll make time for all three! I know it's very doable. I just haven't carved out a morning routine that incorporates all three.

At any rate, using a trademarked name on Zazzle, who produces the items I'm showing you, is not permitted. "Zendoodle," then, seems to have become the accepted term for use. I also use "ZIA" as well, since it's short for "Zentangle® Inspired Art", which is what this is. Whatever you call it, just writing about this has triggered some huge impulses in me to create even more of this artwork. Maybe that will spur me on to launch this site so I can resume working that practice into my creative rhythms. And in the meantime, perhaps I've encouraged someone else to give Zentangle® a try!

Bonus Links

Photos of Sea Stars at Haystack Rock in Oregon: Now Available for Gifts

It's such great fun to learn new things. Maybe especially when you weren't even setting out for a lesson at that particular time. Such was my experience when I went back to refresh a couple of my memories from some of my travel days in nights in Cannon Beach, Oregon a few years ago. We camped. In the rain, even! But we also got to see some of the most magnificent creatures at the base of Haystack Rock.

I'd thought of them for as long as I've had these photos in my files - and the memories that accompany them - as "starfish" because that's what they were always called! But I now know that they're called "sea stars" for such a simple, good reason: they are not, and never have been, fish! So there you have it. Science wins again.

Whatever you care to call them, they're beautiful and I had great fun putting my original photos onto a few of the products Zazzle offers for customization and personalization for our gift-giving needs.

One of the many things I love about designing print-on-demand items - and perhaps especially what I enjoy about creating designs for printing through Zazzle - is the seemingly-endless numbers of things I can do in this arena. (I'm leading to a specific point with this, if you give me another minute of patience.) Some days I want to walk down memory lane and pull out travel photos from this or that nostalgia-generating trip, and when my eye settles on a favorite, I might choose to design merchandise with that specific photo. Sometimes it's a set. Other days I love creating invitations and thank you cards. Or stamps. Or writing blog posts about some of the aforementioned products in this new blog. At still other times I know it's time to pause and create a brand new piece of digital artwork. And then there are the days I neither design artwork nor merchandise but instead create collections from designs I created quite a while back. There seems, in fact, to be a never-ending array of things one Can And Should Do when one is heading down the path of creating merchandise designs featuring their own artwork or photography.

I mentioned the point, back there at the beginning of the paragraph above. Remember that? Okay. Here it is. Sometimes I'm all gung ho in the middle of covering digital template surfaces with my images when I need to do something else. Like work on a Squarespace-based website for one of my clients, or have a training meeting with one of my collaborators. And sometimes? Sometimes I just get a different idea In The Middle Of Said Product Creation Session... and I forget to come back.

This happened, most definitely, with these sea star photo gifts. I have four or five photos that I thought were good enough to have printed on merchandise. But you'll notice from the collection that one or two of the images are MUCH more liberally represented in the samples. That is because I moved on before I'd created everything I possibly could have. Repetition is the name of the game in this industry. Also? I've written a fair amount about my own ADHD leanings. Repetition gets boring. Let's face it. It just does. Fortunately I can usually accomplish a fair amount of work with a single image before that time arrives. Still, if you see a hip flask, for example, with one of my photos of starfish but notice a different photo you like better and you'd like to have it on a hip flask instead? Please oh please do not hesitate to reach out with your special request. I'll be more than happy to put that other photo on a flask for your gift-giving needs. I may get around to it anyway, one day. But it's also possible I'll have moved on to working with a color photo of a peacock or of some of the banana leaves waving in the breeze in my front yard. So I always encourage your emails. I love to customize and it would be my pleasure to create something specific for you, if you don't see it in my offerings.

Hm. That was a long way around the point. Thanks for your patience. And go check out my Sea Star Collection!

A fiend for designing with black and white patterns

Whether Zentangle and Zentangle Inspired Art, (which we'll be revisiting later in this blog,) or - now it seems - just creating AND using others' repeating patterns, I have another nominal, intermittent addiction.

I realized just how strong this affinity for black and white had been right about the time I was uncovering the incredible tools offered to Zazzle designers and shoppers wanting to customize their own gifts and cards. My earlier experience with Print on Demand (heretofore POD) designing had been fun too, and even addictive then, as well. However discovering the sheer volume of items to be printed, paired with the customizing potential available in this system took my near-obsession to the next level.

Having created a few thousand items to sell in the Zazzle marketplace since opening the Printed Muserie Zazzle store, all while keeping it mostly a secret online has been "all well and good" as my mom used to say on a fairly regular basis. But now it's time to pull this all together and start sharing the things I've designed!

The printedmuserie.com domain was purchased last year and I pointed it to a page where I wrote some things about the journey on my main website, melodywatson.com. Now it's time to dive in and make this thing real in the most tangible of web terms. As I get this new site started, I'll be writing little back stories (among my favorite things) about the kinds of things I design. Whether types of designs, such as the black and white merchandise I mentioned here, or brand new original art pieces, I want this site to be used to explore the creative process while also promoting the brand. As with all my endeavors, it is and will continue to be a learning process and an evolving journey I take in this online arena. I can't wait to see what happens!