Funny, Artsy, Sometimes a Little Twisted!

This started out as a blatent promotion for my shop, but how boring is that?  So here is the link www.cafepress.com/artgiftsbylmr. 

Now that that is out of the way, let's get to the roadblocks I ran into and poor decisions I made opening my Cafe Press shop.  Don't get me wrong.  Cafe Press is a great place and it couldn't be easier to get some designs on many products.  I am learning the ins and outs of promotion and hoping to get my shop off the ground in a big way.   Hopefully, I can help someone else in the process. 

After reading all the info I could on the cafe press site (minus the forums), I decided to jump in.  I decided on a basic shop with the idea that I would see if I could make a few sales and then upgrade to premium (first mistake, but more on that later!)  I also chose the basic shop since I am HTML illiterate and it looked easier. 

MY FIRST ROADBLOCK - images.

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/images/

I got lost in all the templates and image sizes that fit best on each product.    I couldn't for the life of me see how the templates were that useful.  I was happy when I found that if you use a 10X10 200 dpi image, it would fit on most products.  Since my images are pieces of my artwork, they tend to be rectangles.  This worked for me for the most part.  I work in SFA (small format art) so the size is a bit large for my stuff, but it works out on most items.

I skipped the templates available on cafe press and used paint shop pro.  Here is the process in PSP. (See how I throw these letters around like I've always known their meaning)

select File -> New  -Set the size in inches to 10X10,  the resolution to 200 DPI, the image characteristics to Raster, color to RGB and background color to white in most cases.  Now you are ready to open the work of art you previously created. 

File -> Open  -find the file ;  Once opened use Selection - Select All (or used some of the selection tools I like to avoid to grab only part of the image) Now choose Edit -> Copy,  Click on the new background you created above and choose File -> Paste as new layer.  You now have your design in the 10X10 space.  use the pick tool to resize the image to better fit the space.

My scanned art is usually too small to fully fit the space so I then use the text tool to add some humorous text in the space to help fill it up.  Now I forgot to mention that it is very important to center your work.  Use the View menu selection to turn on the ruler.   For gosh sakes, don't just eyeball it.  Once they blow it up big on a shirt, a little off on the computer turns into a big discrepancy!   Save your work and you are ready to upload to Cafe Press.  Another note about format.  Cafe Press recommends using the png format.  It uses no compression so the image will be sharper when enlarged and printed.  Check out the info here.  http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/images/help_images#format

Now like I said, this format works for most things.  It does not work well for black shirts.  There is white space around my design that shows on the products displayed.  You really need to fill up the space.  You also don't need to do a full 10X10 either.  These square designs also don't work very well on round objects so I still need to learn more about that.  You can also set the background color to black instead of white for a black shirt.

With the images ready and the easy to follow process in Cafe Press, I had a basic shop up in no time.  I did spend some time on my image tags so they would hopefully be found, loved and bought.  I also found one of the big differences between basic and premium shops.  You can only use any particular product once in a basic shop.  This means that if you put a dog design on a women's long sleeve t-shirt you can never use that shirt again. 

That was my intro into my next Roadblock.  I realized that I needed to use a premium shop if I was ever going to get anywhere.  That is the next subject to come...

Roadblock #2 - Converting to a Premium shop!  See Lens#2 in the series!