How to Turn Your Art into a Greeting Card Business

1. Introduction: Hello dear students, my name is Jessica. And as long as I have been painting and doing illustrations, which is a lifetime now, I have been selling those paintings and illustrations as greeting cards as well as the originals. There was a scary time. Awhile back when online greeting cards hit the market and everybody said, Oh, no one is going to buy a greeting cards anymore. Well, the market has just continued to grow because people love real greeting cards and real mail coming in. And so it's something that if you're jumping it today, you're not really going to worry about too much competition because it's still such a popular delivery system for your art. Making occurred company, especially on a shoestring budget, is not necessarily simple when you're starting out and you don't know where all the potholes are in the road. Fortunately, I've been doing it for so long and through so many steps of sophistication in technology and printing and so on that I do know where the potholes are and I know where the access road is two and things that you can do to get around the problems. Most people who think I should turn my art into cards. And they do some research. They get very discouraged because you know, how many do I have blueprints it to begin with? And then how many do I order of each one? Because how do I know which ones are going to sell all yeah, I could test market. I'll get to local a little gift store on the corner to put some in and then we'll see what sells and then I'll know what it gets. Yeah. And what paper and what size and how do you package it? And the list goes on and pretty soon it is quit. So what this class is about is used starting a green card company from a shoe string from scratch and not getting discouraged because I'm going to tell you every single step of the way. And then by the end of the class, you're gonna be able to just create some greeting cards and get started right away. Our project for this class is obviously, and hopefully that you create a greeting card company because that's a big project. And so there's a small 12. We are going to create the beginning of your first line of greeting cards. You will create three cards on a theme using your own art that you already have, or are that you wanna make up during this class. But this class is not about teaching you how to do the illustrations for your cards. This class is about teaching you how to use the illustrations that you make to make a product that can bring you income. These cards, these three cards are going to be created on a theme. So they are the beginning of a line of cards. Greeting cards are usually not just helter Skelter all over the place. They usually are created in lines that have a relationship to each other. And that may be the theme or the style or the humor. But the three cards will obviously go together and harmonize. And so I really encourage everyone to upload your set of three cards into the project section at the end of class. And we will look at each other's sets and give feedback and comment. And I certainly will give feedback. And so with the big project and the little project in mind, let's get started. 2. 2 Supplies: There aren't a lot of supplies that you need in the beginning here, except what I want you to have as a notebook. And I want you to take notes, even though I will be, I'll show you things on the video, the sizes and measurements and tricks and all these things. It's a really good idea for you to end up the class with a little textbook and how to assert this kind of business because there are numbers and measurements in it and there are facts and figures in their manufacturers and their tips and hints and it'll all just fly out of your brain and you won't remember which video it was in and so on. So supplies for right now and I will introduce anything else you need as we go along or a notebook and something to write with is all you need. So let's start from the very, very beginning. In the next video, I'll see you there. 3. 3 Images for Greeting Cards: So what things are appropriate to put on a greeting card? Most classes that I've seen that talk about a greeting card business say that, let's sit down, let's study the market and let's see what's the best selling card? Birthday cards are always the best-selling cards, followed by every other occasion of the year. But there's a huge market for creativity and four cards that are inspiring, uplifting, or make you laugh. So as far as the artwork goes, it can be a lot of things. This is an older card of mine, sorry for the glare, but it's in the packaging. I'll be telling you about. This is a photograph. In the olden days. You got your photograph printed as a four by six print from the local photo lab and you mounted it on the front of a greeting card. Now, the papers that are made in the printers that are made for home use are good enough that the photograph can be printed right onto the card and have the same quality. Know if I do that, you won't see the Reflection, so that's good. So that's what happened here. This is a photograph as the art. This is a petroglyph illustrations, just a line drawing with a background and I did it in Procreate. But over the years I've sold nice same set of rock art, petroglyphs, artwork on all kinds of things and all kinds of style. So there are many, many renditions of this illustration. So this was created in Procreate. So it was already nice and clean and it was digital and could be put on, printed on occurred. Okay, sometimes I start with my original paintings. Sometimes with painting, sometimes I would call these illustrations more than paintings. But these are the originals and reproduced, scan and clean in Procreate, which will be a class that I will be publishing in February is the other part of making cards is getting the artwork here which looks gorgeous. But when you scan it, it doesn't look gorgeous. Getting it to look gorgeous when it prints. And so, but that is a big topic and that's another class. But anyway, here's what happened with these two. Is there a scan and cleaned up and they were printed on greeting cards. And now I've pretty much, once you figure out what you're doing, I would pretty much the same. Color shift will always happen, but not bad. Humor. This is a really simple illustration and childlike and all that. But the thought basically calmed down, makes it humorous. So it makes it very syllables. One of my best-selling in this wine of cards. Sometimes only type. And you have to, you have to either do lettering or you have to know how to use fonts in order to do type only cards because you have to do things like this, like use different fonts that have a contrast anyhow to have the right size and you have to line them up and you have to, yeah. So it isn't as easy as just type something in your word processor. But this is no art work. This is all graphic design. So you can do that if you know about fonts and Page Layout. Okay? This one is really interesting because wasn't really an illustration that started it. It was more like I paint in watercolor, I illustrate with watercolor, and so I wipe my brush off all the time on paper towels. And this particular, I forgot what it was. I think it was a line of botanical art. And the colors were just amazing. And I looked at those paper towels when I went to throw them away and I thought I can't. And so I scan them and I use them with some really brilliant quotes. And this line is called stroke of genius, because the genius is in the quote systems by Thomas Edison. Edison. And the brushstrokes are by me and they just make this really beautiful abstract illustration. So you never know where your card design is going to come from. And you always have your mind open to what can be a card and look good. So these are some of the ideas for the artwork that can go on cards. 5. 5 Card Stock Weight and Grain: So eight-and-a-half by 11 is the standard form of what they call a letter size sheet. In the United States, it's close to the size of an A4 and adjustments will need to be made with this class. If you're in Europe, because the A4 is, is a little bit different in size. So I'm, I can't do numbers and so I org translate that. So I'm going to leave that part up to you because you probably understand it better than I do. Card stock is not letter stock. With the business stationery paper that you would get for a letterhead is usually a 24 pounds, sometimes luxuriously a little more than that. But that is just way too light to make a greeting card out of. So there's a whole different family of papers called card stock, also called covers stock. So if you see that, that's exactly the same thing. And they come in several weights and they have the body that you need to make a greeting card hold up. Alright? The lowest weight that could be called a card stock is the cheapest as well. 65 pound. I don't find that it is significant for a car. Some people do. I think it is too light weight. And if you want to know what this pound thing is about, you don't even need to. But what it's about is that that's the weight of a regime or whatever packaging and I decide to do of a parent sheet coming off of the big paper presses. I'm a parent sheet of that kind of papers. So apparent sheet, big pile of them would weigh 65 pounds. And that's how you come up with this, but you just get to know this and you know it by feel and so on. So that's 65 pound and you see how bendy it is. The most common cover or card stock is 80 pound. This is an 80 pound and that is very sufficient for making greeting cards. And the next one, the heaviest one is 110 pound. And so that is kind of the top of what you can force through certain printers. And that's a different video in this same class is we're going to talk about printers and which ones there are that can run card stock through in the first place. And then we'll figure out what is the best weight for you, for what printer you have or how you're gonna do this. Okay, So besides the weight of card stock, we have to talk about the grain. When paper is made, it's made a little fuzzies, fibers. And they, as they're done, they align according to the movement of the thing that's shaking them and so on. And so when they're all, they're next to each other like little short, little as soldiers, it's easy to make a fold between them. And so conversely, if you're going to try to fold against that, you're folding all those little dude ads in half and they don't like it. That's what green is about in paper. Now, in manufacturing papers like these, it's almost always true that the grain runs lengthwise. And that means that they're easy to fall between those little grains going along. And they are not as easy to fullness. See that you can see it right here. Even in the 6051, you see, yeah, I can fold that pretty easily, pretty small, but watch this way. Lot more resistance, a lot more resistance. And so this visual will give you probably a pretty good idea to remember this. But what you probably should do in your notebook, sketch a rectangle, which is a piece of card stock. And you can make notes at the side, 65 pound, 80 pound, hundred and ten pound. And you can figure out which one we're going to choose later for your situation. And you can draw an arrow with two heads here to tell you that the grain runs vertically on these pieces of paper. And that wherever you draw that arrow, would that line with arrowheads, that's a fold. Fine. Okay. So it tells you two things at once. Because it runs vertically. Polls easiest vertically. Alright? Now when you get to 80.110 pound card stock, they're not going to fold easily anyway. Okay? So that brings us to the whole idea of scoring. 6. 6 About Folding Cardstock: What scoring is, is a method of printing a crease in the paper. And I don't know how you're gonna be able to see this, but I think if I hold it still, you can see this. So there is a score worn down the middle of this card. And if you look carefully, you see that this side of the paper is the mountain score. In the mountains score is on the inside. And that doesn't seem to make sense because I'll show you the valley score was on the other side. And when you score or something, it would increase in it, you would think, okay, that's crazy and I'm going to fold it that way. If you do that, it will never fold flat. Analyze how about kind of a proof to it. Okay, So after we get done talking about this scoring, it's good to remember that the scoring folds toward where you don t think it should. So now that we've talked about folding and scoring, what you should note is that when you are doing your two ups, which is what that's called, you put two cards up on a sheet and you're doing that for the A2 card, you're in business pretty much because when this sheet is printed, you're gonna do two things. You're going to make a score along the center at the foreign a quarter line. And then you're going to cut it in half on paper tremor at the halfway mark, which is five-and-a-half folder and you have your two cards. This is going along with the fire or the grain of the paper. So that's really cool, but it's 80 or 110 pound. If you even folded it like this and managed to get the corners together and everything fold is going to look kinda bad. It's going to crack on a lot of card stock, but it's still going to look bad anyway. So scoring is the thing that we always do. Now on a five by seven card printing on an eight now FY 11 page. You can see right away I think what the problem is, right? So this has to be scored. All things have to be scored. But this particular way, because what's happening here, the fold is gonna go across the grain instead of with it. And so on a five by seven card, that's another reason that the scores is more critical. And that's another reason why people find it easier to produce those smaller cards. So let's go learn how to score or something. 7. 7 Elementary Scoring: Here is where we're going to need her first supplies besides your note-taking notebook and your pen or pencil? This is called a bone folder. This one is actually bone. It's very old and it's very messed up. But they are made very inexpensively now, you can get them on Amazon. They're actually made from plastic. But what you want to look for is a nice round, smooth tip. The nice thing about the old bone folders, you can file them to smooth them out after you use them a lot. But people will say, Oh, you can do a score using a spoon and everything. Yeah, well, aside from the fact that it might make metal marks on your card, that's not a real good idea because this is made for the job, so it doesn't cost much. So if you're going to make cards, you want to get this stuff that it's going to make it easier in metal ruler. And it has to have a Corp or some kind of backing on it that it won't slide. That's really important because you're going to be running this along that ruler with some pressure. And so you're not going to want to be halfway down and then, oh dear, because then you're done. You're proud is over with. You score after you print in most cases. So you've just made this beautiful car and now you just wrecked it because this wouldn't hold still. And so I just saw that my injury got in here. I just got a new puppy. And you don't want to see what's under that bandage. So I thought I would spare you. The third thing is a grid. And you noticed that I've been doing this whole class on a grid. This is a very big one that I have on my desk. But you don't want a very big one for card making. You want one. This just bigger than the biggest sheet of paper you're going to have to score, which is just a letter shapes. So it's important that you want to see your measurements. Get one that has measurements on the side. They come in all sizes, all colors. They're called cutting mats. Usually there's some other words for them. But you want to have your rulers outside of the space where your paper is going to go so that you can see the ruler in order to do the scoring makes sense, right? So this is a really good size here, and I think it's an 11 by 14 If I'm no. Well, oh yeah. Look at the measurement on it. Hello. Nine by 12 is your middle area here, okay, and under that I have rotary mass are called sometimes this one is a bigger 11218, nothing. But if you don't have a lot of desktop working space and you really don't want a really big one. And I reason I'm not using the one that's in place here is because you can't see the eye, can't see either the ruler on the other side of it. And it's just too big. So this size right here is really great. And I want to get the other one out of the way. I'm going to put this one center chair. And we said that we were going to score this, we're going to cut it this way. And I'm working with A2 right now, okay, We're going to do it with A2. And so our score is gonna run vertical. And we are going to want to do that at 4.1 quarter inches. And so if we put her paper all the way to one side for a quarter is right here. So we're lined up on our paper, on our cutting mat. I'm not actually lined up very well, but there we go. And we have it at four and a quarter, which is halfway on the shoot. And you want to place your ruler just so that you can see the marking of four and a quarter. Because obviously this is not nothing. And so there's going to be, your score is going to be moved over a little bit from the foreigner quarter because of the thickness of this bone folder. So okay, starting up, they're applying pressure and running down along your ruler. Now you can't see this very well at all. But trust me, I just made a dent in here. So the mountain is on the backside, the valley is on the front side. I'm going to go cut this in half so it can fold it. Okay, So I cut this in half on a paper tremor and we're going to talk about paper tremors too. But right now we're going to finish with our scoring. This is the most rudimentary, the most inexpensive way to score. It's not the one I'm saying. It's going to have you smiling all the time. But we have to start somewhere. And if that's really have to start this where we'll start. So this side is my indent. I can feel it. It's a little ditch running along there. That means it's the outside of the card. The mountain movie in the middle and we fold against the mountain. When you, even, when you have scored something to make a good fold, it's really important that you align your corners as perfectly as you possibly can and hold that in place while you press down along your score. And say this did not, this particular sheet of paper did not even score and fold nicely enough, but all depends on the paper you have and how much of the grain. But anyway, then you smooth over it. There you have it. Hey, perfectly folded card. Okay. They make scoring machines. They used to make a great one. And I will tell you about it because if you can find it on eBay or anywhere, get one, they're not expensive in their last a lifetime and they're wonderful. And it was called score it, SCO are no e, hyphen it. And it was a concoction with a kind of a padded rubber surface and then a metal things standing up in the middle and you placed your card, it was a centering ruler. And you placed your card on there. And they had a little scoring tool that kinda fit over that piece of metal. And so it did a perfect score every time they stopped making it went out of business. But I recently still find one online and so just keep your eye open or if it ever comes up at a local garage sale or anything, grab it. They do make scoring tools now and they're different and they have a bunch of plastic and a bunch of grooves and I'm not I'm not sure how they work, but they would be worth looking at and seeing a video maybe of how they work. Because they are, those little tools make this so much easier. You have so much margin of error here because, or probability of error is what I should say. Because your ruler can slide, your pressure cannot be enough. And in paper can crack with this kind of score. Because it's not, if you score with a bone folder, it's not a very deep score. It is now because I folded it. But you see how it's, it's not clean when it folds because this doesn't really make the kind of valley that you would need. This was all there was though back in the day. So that's how you did it. But if you are wanting to build a successful card company and keep doing your own scores on your cards. You're not always gonna be smiling about it. Just saying. 8. 8 Upscaling Your Scoring Procedures: This lesson is going to be about upscaling your scoring procedures. So what we did last time with the bone folder and the ruler and the cutting mat. That's the bottom rung of upscaling. That's what you do when that's all you've got and you're just making your first few cards and checking out whether you even like the procedure. So it's all fine. You'll always be able to use your ruler and your bone folder and your mat. Okay? But the first little step upwards is a Teflon bone folder. It's not obviously may have bone, but it's got a great feeling to it. It's got a little thicker. I can I can I do that? Yeah. It makes a thicker score a little bit. And it's also more more uniform. The bone folders are great, but like I say, used to be able to send them. They can get rough spots and the tip is really, really pretty narrow. Okay, So sometimes a little thicker score is better. The other thing about the Teflon folders, the other end of it too. Is it like when you're doing this to your fold, you're burnishing your fault. It's very smooth, nothing gets caught on anything. So that would be your first step up is to not get a plastic bone folder, but to get a Teflon one. These are on Amazon and handmade book supply sites and so on. The next step up would be a scoring board tool like this. This is the older one. I told you that it's been discontinued. It's called the score. It SCO are no e hyphen IT board. It comes in two sizes. I'll show you the other one in a moment. This is a size you want to get if you can get your hands on it because this will do the larger A7 cards and the smaller A2. The way this works is that there is, this is a stand-up ridge of metal right here. And this this, these are rubber pads and they're placed just perfectly so that a scoring tool. Well, there's your brand name right there. So there's a slot in it that fits right over this metal. Okay? And then the other really cool thing is this is a centering ruler, so it's really easy to make sure that you're in the center of your paper, if you remember, we're doing it in the basic way that you had to have your bone folder offset a little bit. So this does that for you already. Okay. This is not available on the market. The company is out of business, but these do show up on eBay. The last time I looked, there were three or four of them. There are around with $35 price point. I have had mind for 20 years. They're just awesome. They never wear out. And if you keep them, don't put them in the sun and let the rubber dry out. And if you're careful with your scoring tool, they'll be with you forever. There was a model also that had a metal scoring tool and it was pink. And you might see that had the same brand name. So how this works is that you were going to pretend that you've printed out a letter sheet with two A2 cards on it. And so we're going to put this on this table. So it goes to the foreign, a quarter mark on each side. That's a wonderful way to center. And then you get the hang of this over time. But you basically hold this like you would a pencil. And you want to hold it right, straight up and down, and you press on it. There's some there's some pressure here too, just like with a bone folder. And then you slowly bring the scoring tool down. Reason you don't go fast, you can slip off of this. And then your pieces room because your score is going up Bus. So if this were to A2 card, all printed, all you'd have left to do is to cut across the center, then fold them. Now, look at the difference in this score. You can see it even on the camera. I mean, it is pretty substantial. Right? And you can tell that this is an indent. Okay, So this had been like this. And the mountain score is here because of the fact that this metal part popped up and made decreasing the paper and you pressed it down, you press the card stock down with this tool over that mental part. So it makes the same kind of a score as a scoring machine at a print shop mix. So it's just invaluable. There is another size and it's called the scoring mini. And there are many more minis on eBay and the resale market. But this is the Mini. Now, if only they had made it just a little bit wider and a little bit taller, we could have we would've been able to do an A7 card on it. Okay. But you can see here that that is not going to happen. However, if you decide that the way for you to go is gonna be an A2 card. This is a perfect fit. But only if you cut it in half first and then do your scoring. So it's two scoring times instead of I'm the big one. Do your whole sheet at once and then cut it in half. And this one, if this is all you can get a hold of, it's still worth it. You would go through and you would cut all your sheets and half across the middle like you're supposed to him and score them one by one. And it can be fun. I mean, you can just sit at your desk and it's like beatString, it's stress reducing, and so on. There is a current tool for scoring. A scoring board that is out there on the market right now has got a lot of five-star reviews. I can't speak to having used it because I have these and no reason to invest in one of those again, around in the 30, $35. Some of them I've seen ever been $25. And it's a plastic board with grooves that every eighth inch. And so the idea on that one is works. It comes with its own tool that is very similar to a bone folder. And you are, instead of making your mountain score, you are making your indent, your Valley score on those because you're pushing a paper into these grooves that are between hard plastic grooves that are at your ruler markings. And so there's a lot of, a lot of people that loved them. And if that sounds like a better idea to you, then take a look at that tool. But this is as far as at-home card making. The scoring board tool is the highest level you can go. That's the best score that you're going to get, the most accurate score and the most uniform score on your cards. 9. 9 All About Card Blanks: You notice that I said that that was the high end of the scale for you doing you're scoring at home. And the reason I said that is because there's a higher end of the scale and it's where I am now. I really, I make some miniature cards for little sets and stuff. I still score at home using the scoring board. But the A7 card, which is like 90% of my line. I just got tired of it, To be honest, I got tired of printing the card stock. I got tired of the two trams I had to make and then to score every one of them. And so what I do, and the best scores are coming from not doing it yourself. And so what I'm showing you here are pre-made A7 and they are pretty scored as well. So there's a whole level of types of card stock and pricing. But I will tell you that if you start, you get beyond your first ten cards and you go, You know what, I like this and I'm going to do it. Then. Think about this as an option as well. I still keep the score boards around because sometimes the A2s are just easier to do and I just do it that way. Sometimes I buy those also. But at places like envelopes.com, you can search for A7 card blanks and they come to you already. The right measurement. So you're not printing on a letter sheet and then having to do that term, they also come to you with a really beautiful machine score. Okay? Look for pricing differences. Amazon is not necessarily the least expensive and it's not necessarily the best quality. If I had to recommend a source, I would I would recommend envelopes.com. You can get your matching A7 envelopes to go with your paper. If you buy only 50 of these, they each cost is high. But when you're first starting out and you want to make your first 50 cards. It's not a bad caused at all, and it saves all this time. So it's like, are you into time or money? Most people are into both. But as you're purchasing goes up and these are blanks and so you can buy a bunch. And they're not all going to go for one style of cards. So you don't have to know ahead of time what's going to print on what. You can buy. More and more of these. And as the, as the amount goes up, the quantity goes up, price goes down quite drastically. Actually, until you get a card costs that's done around $0.50, maybe even less. It really depends on the numbers. But when you consider that you're going to sell that car for five or $6, It's totally worth it. The envelope is going to be a little bit and also the envelopes do the same thing. As you go up in quantity, go down and price at places like envelopes.com. And so your cost factor, your real cost factor that you went out and bought something is very, very small. Then depending on your printer, all you're doing is putting some ink on here. And then you have a product and the product is worth, like I said, five or $6. Okay? The only problem with this, can you set your printer up at different papers sizes, then letter, that's really important. And we're going to talk about printers. But this is not much good to you to print unless your printer will run a seven by ten sheet. Most those, it's more important about whether it runs card stock or not. And that's gonna be part of our printer discussion. Now, if it won't, Let's just say the printer you currently have and you don't want to afford another one. And let's just say that it won't adjust to do that. Okay, Your other option, and it's a really good one is to take this beautiful card blank and then take a letter sheet. Do a four up of your art. Okay, so you've got a sheet with four on it. You cut it into quarters. And then using a double stick tape, you mount that artwork on this beautiful card and it enhances the price of the cart. It's now a handmade card. And so it's really beautiful thing to do. And I, I think the only ones I have here are walking around them so they got credit up. But you can see the concept. Okay. These are from, I have a line of succulents that I love. I painted them in here. And they got warping. Dance and everything. But this is an A7 card and it is made on a blank that was machine scored. You can see that mountain really clearly there. And I printed this piece is the size of an A2 card, I think. Yes. So I printed for pieces of artwork on one sheet of letter card side, letter size card stock. And then I cut them on my paper trimmer is cut them this way, cut them that way, and then use double stick tape roller. I'll give you a recommendation on my favorite of those also, to mount this on the top. Now, when the person buys the card, they're not looking at just printed card. The perceived value goes up because the artist has touched this, you know, they've made it hands-on and probably signed it. I do because why not? You know, it's easy to do and everybody loves that idea. And when you take a card that's made like that. And I call those handmade cards when I do that, you take a car that's made like that and you put it in a map. It's kind of almost like it's double mounted. So that is really cool too. So to recap that, okay, we have our down and dirty ruler and bone folder. We have the option for a Teflon bone folder. It's going to work a little better. I'm going to help you with the after you fold your card, you burnish it, and that's good. It just slides so nicely. Okay. The next step up is your score at board. I'm not going to hold that back over here, but that's the next step. In the highest step, home scoring is to use a tool like that that's going to keep you accurate. Then the tops of the scale for scoring is don't do it at all and buy it already done. And if your printer can print this, it's also makes it easy to put something on the inside. That out of there. It also makes it easy to put something on the inside because you're not trying to place this somewhere on a letter size sheet and reverse it and figure out where it is. Okay, so that's another benefit to buying these and having a printer that will print them. You just have two little setups, one for the front, one for the back. And you're all set. If you don't have a printer that wants to cooperate with you about using pre-cut blanks, then you can use the pre-cut blank as your base card and print your artwork out four at a time on a letter size sheet and mount it with double stick tape. What about the information on the back? In that case, you could do that with a business card. You can make a special business card for your cards. And you can just mount that on the back. That's also handmade and seem special. You can have a rubber stamp made. There's a place called rubber stamps.com that for $4-6, you can have that size of a rubber stamp made out of any art. And it's really quick and it's easy. And you could just damp the back of your cards. You could just sign the back of your cards like with some real artistic signature. I mean, the sky's the limit. One more thing that I wanted to add to this video. You might have been able to see that there slight color difference and a not so slight color difference in the cards I was handling here. For all of my cards, I almost always choose what's called a natural white. Okay, that's a natural white. This is a bright white. These common 1 million things, milk colors, everything. But you're basically going to be getting white print on. The bright white is very bright and it's good for your illustrations that are really color pop illustrations. Okay? And this, what's mounted here is an unnatural, it's actually from, well, not really quiet. But anyway, this is a natural white different manufacturer and this is a warmer painting. I'm going to bring my wolf back again. This is on white. I wanted this, this is very graphic as colorful. It's ink lines. If I wanted this to really contrast with the paper, this, I wanted to have a warm, harmonious, kinda blended feeling. That for that, I use natural white instead of bright white. Okay, you can try both and see what you like. Now, this is actually a cream. So there's a big difference between cream and natural way. And cream, I think does a little too much of the warming blending harmony thing. I think you don't have enough contrast with cream. And so my recommendation to you is white or natural light, depending on the kind of artwork you're doing and how, how soft you want it to feel. That is just personal preference. You make your art, you know how it feels, you know how long you want it to feel. One more time since I have this in my hand, I'm going to reiterate that you can tell this is an indent. It would seem they want to fold it this way. Which you don't. This is a mountain, this is sticking up and you want to fold toward the mountain. Trust me on it. And you'll find out it's a really great thing. 10. 10 Using a Paper Trimmer : What I'm showing you here is the world's best, most wonderful paper tremor when I move it forward. And you see how beat up it is. You're going to understand that these things never die. Okay? We're at that one of those places where you have to have two, you have to have a good paper tremor if you're gonna make greeting cards, trying to do it with scissors and things, just never, ever going to be right. And so you want a paper tremor and they come in different kinds. The best kind is called the guillotine. And that's this off with your head, right? And you'll want the best one that you can afford. But you can start out with very inexpensive ones and you can get there to heavier duty one. Okay, so we're going backwards here. I'm showing you the Besser is, the brand name is premier. And it's made by the Martin Yale company, like as in, as in Yale. And they have been making these green paper cutters for, I don't know how many, hundreds of years. That's exaggerated a little bit. And now I have one that I am looking at across the studio here that's like a 25. 25. And I have had that one since the '70s, I think. And I use it those run six to $800. I use it to cut parents sheets of watercolor and Kelm paper for my, my glass and stuff like that where you have big things and you've got to cut them into small things. And so it's totally worth it and it is still around as well. So when you get these, ever have to get another one. Just saying, so this is the best. Okay. This cost $25, I think Office Depot and it's plastic and it's lightweight. Has a good blade. And it does the job. I bought this to cut aluminum flashing, believe it or not, It comes in rolls and it's silver. And there were some metal weird projects I was doing and I originally bought it for that. Cut it like a dream. I didn't want to use my grid paper cutter for that. Then I, when I got into glass about seven years ago, there's a thing called fiber paper and it's actually made a ceramic. I thought, well, I'm not going to try cutting that on my code one either. This has been my gosh, this is at least seven years old and it cuts eight years old. And it cuts right through that fiber paper which is full of ceramic fibers. So it's a good one. Okay? What neither of these have that you really gotta have is a guide shield thing here. Okay? If you don't have one, then you're going to fake it. When you make your cuts with your cork back ruler. What it does is if you have set this on your paper, I'm just grabbing anything here. So I grabbed this rule into card, which is not totally disposable, but oftentimes, especially on that really good paper cutters. The cut begins beautifully. When it gets here. It shifts the paper enough so that you get a crooked cut. Alright? And especially in making cards, you're going to come up sometimes with the fact that you have scored and folded your card, and it is not even I don't have that here, but I don't know why I didn't do. Not very much. But you might have the back more than the front, the front more than back. It might be a little skewed. And you want to, you don't want to cut away much of the card, but you do want to clean it up. So in that case, you would be trying to take like an eighth of an inch or a very small trim off of something. Now, doing it like this is almost impossible because when it gets down here you see how loose that is where you can't see it. But let me see if I can make you see it. When you get down here. This is loose, this is going to stay there. Were not come down with this good team cutter. This is going to shift so the cut will not be even or nice. However, if you can manage somehow to hold your piece of paper down evenly along the cutting edge is going to be cut out here where the blade is going to hit it obviously. But then when you put your two fingers down, you're holding the whole sheet down and then when you do a clot, it's going to cut evenly. Ok. Oh. Well, not quite. It's got a little little shift there, but I think that was in the card. And this is not a good paper cutter, but that is what you do with any paper cutter. That's a guillotine cut or when you want to make a nice even cut. And even if it's not small, even when you're making your cuts on your letter size paper. For your Etudes, you want to hold that paper's still. So the shorter the better, the more even it's going to be doing this. If you have to do this, if you're making an A7 that you printed on a letter sheet, ah, it's gonna be really important to do this because this is 11 " long. And by the time the cut gets here, it's no longer gonna be aligned like it's supposed to be. Unless you have held it down while you cut. It can be in about an eighth or yeah. A little more in from the edge, but it's going to hold that. And see on this bad paper cutter, you see what's still happens is that I didn't make it all the way. So this is why you want a good one. Okay, Now I'm going to talk about another kind of cutter that's not a guillotine. As soon as I get this out of the way. Okay. I'm going to put it this way because it doesn't say it the other way. So this is called a rotary tremor because what is in here is a round blade, like a razor blade circle thing. And your paper goes in. This goes up. And to cut the paper, you push down and bring it down. I don't know why it is, but I am not as good with these. I don't like them as much. A lot of people love them. So the best name in this type is filmmakers. And filmmakers makes a very good large rotary tremor. But they make a small desk size getting cutters and they're not that good. Because of what I was just showing you. They it's very hard to cut card stock on them and to get a nice cut. So this is called for desktop use, is called sunlit. And here's why I really like it for a desktop cutter. Okay, I don't have to use a ruler on here because it has already the plate. And this can be irritating sometimes, you know, when you're when you're putting your paper under there, that you gotta put your paper under there and then line it up and blah, blah, blah. But once it's under there and you are holding this, you're gonna get a nice straight cut even on card stock on a small. This is very inexpensive to Amazon. The other reason I got this, and it was the only one I found like this is the size because even though it's on your desk and you can use it on all your small things. It has a measurement that will take the eight-and-a-half side of a letter size sheet. So not the 11. I already cut this apart, but it will take the eight-and-a-half your letter size sheet. So in the case of you sitting at your desk to cut before you score, let's just say you have a mini score and you have this, you sit at your desk and you are able to put that whole letter sheet in here to the five-and-a-half where you have to cut it. You're able to hold it down all the way and make the cut down here is not gonna be as good ever. So my suggestion for that is that as you bring this blade down, put the slightest amount, and this is on any inexpensive cutter, put the slightest amount of pressure toward the paper as you cut and you're not going to run into as much trouble as you saw On that last one where that didn't get cut. Alright, so I'm gonna try that here. And it did it. That didn't sound so good by the time we got down here. But it did it, it didn't bend the paper, it cut the paper. So you can sit at your desk having printed out a bunch of your A2 cards with this. And you're a little scoreboard many. And you will be able to just sit and produce your cards with your pile of prints. You'll be able to cut them in half because this isn't going to fit. Your whole sheet. But this will, so I'm going to run through this with you pretending that you're, you're A2 cards are already printed on here. Alright, so we can't do anything with this until we have caught or A2 card sheet in half. This will do that, even though it won't do it this way, it will do it this way, and that's the way we need to have it done. Alright, so I'm under my paper guard. I'm going to five-and-a-half, which is halfway up this sheet. Okay. I'm going to hold this down. I'm going to put a little bit of pressure and cut. All right, so now let's pretend there's pictures on here. We have C, This is why this is a pain sometimes, but hey, that's life isn't perfect, right? Alright. So you wouldn't have to put it away. I'm just doing that because of the camera. So then here we are. And we're gonna make our score. And then this just fits. So here's your foreigner quarter, here's your foreigner quarter. If your paper is a little weird for some reason and it's not quite to four and a quarter on the other side, make it not quite to fourth-quarter on that side too. Centering. Alright, and here's our tool. We're going to mount it there, and we're going to go slow. Okay, that score is done. This is reminding me that I am totally out of little, little tiny cards at the local gallery and I better sit down and start doing a bunch of this. Anyway. Here we go. And another score. Okay, now our mountain is up on both of these, right? The next thing is we're going to fold against over the mountain. Okay? We're gonna do that by going corner to corner, as close as we can get it. And then bringing our fingers back to make our fold, take our Teflon bone folder and make that crease nice and sharp. And that C is perfect. And that's 100, 110 pound cover stock. Nice. Okay, one more time. Folding across the mountain corner to corner as perfectly as possible. Backup this way and see if this way, if, if the score is a little bit off, your corners aren't, and it's gonna be your score that's going to adjust rather than your coroners be cricket. And then your bone folder. And there are two cards, put them in your A2 envelopes to match. And you're all set. You can sit and do millions of these. 11. 11 Let's Go Printer Shopping: Let's go printer shopping. One of the, there are two pretty difficult things to overcome in making a greeting her company out of your art. And one of them is finding the printer that will do the job for you. The other one is finding the right page layout situation for you. Something that's easy and that has the essentials that we need. And we're going to talk about that. As soon as we talked about finding printers. I'm going to say right up front, I have absolutely no affiliation with any printers anywhere. I have used so many printers and brands over the years to try and fulfill what I think are the requirements. I used Kodak printers for a long time, but they're no longer made. I used absent in early times and then they went through some things where the printer would run out, break before your first ANC ran out. And it has been really the most difficult part of this whole thing. Unless you want to spend $1,000 or $1,200 and you can get these tank fed. Really great printers. But I didn't have the room for that or the budget for that ever. So. The reason that the search is a little difficult is that there are certain parameters that you have to have. The first is that I think that an inkjet printer is absolutely necessary. If you care about color matching, color laser printers are also excellent and some of them have rear feeds, and they will feed card stock and so on. But your color will never, never match. It'll never have the vibrancy when. So if you're doing graphics, if you're doing type that kind of card, you're not going to care about that. But if you are doing illustrations, photographs, things that it matters that the color looks like your original. You're going to care about that. Okay, So our first preference is that you find in ink jet printer. The next really important thing is, maybe the most important thing is to find a printer with a rear feed paper tray. It's rare as teeth on birds, but I don't know if birds have teeth are not. Anyway. It's rare to find. But it's really important because if the paper goes straight through the printer, it will come out the front without having to go through any rollers and bend around. And therefore, it can be thicker paper. That's really the whole game plan, right there, is that most printers have both the in and the out on the front of the printer, meaning that your blank paper goes in and it goes around a whole set of rollers and twists and turns and comes back out. And card stock almost always will get stuck in there and you'll be on doing paper jams until the cows come home. So that is one of the things that really limits our choices. And because of what I said, because it can feed card stock through. Another requirement for me is waterproof ink. Now, this is not totally necessary thing for you. If you're going to professionally saw cards, you're going to be packaging them with a protective sleeve. And so water is likely not going to spill on them and ruin the image. I just really prefer waterproof ink because I know that nothing is going to happen to it. It's going to look and feel and behave as if it's a card printed at a print shop. And so I feel that that's very important, but if push comes to shove, then you can skip that part and just be real careful in the handling of your cards. Separate ink cartridges is really important from an economic standpoint. Ink is probably your biggest printing expense you, by the printer and the printers surprisingly affordable. And you say UP until you see the ink cause is as high as it is. Now the AIM does last a long time, particularly if you buy the XL cartridges. But some printers have a black ink cartridge and then one cartridge that has the other three colors, the other three primary colors. And in that case, every time one of the colors runs out, Let's just say there's a lot of yellow in your artwork and so the yellow runs out, but you still got plenty of magenta and cyan cartridge is still no good. And you need to buy a new one. Now when they're separate cartridges, obviously you buy just a yellow cartridge. And it saves a lot of money, and it wastes a lot less ink. Your yellow and your magenta are gonna go faster than the blue and even done the black when you're printing cards. Okay? The other important thing entrepreneur, is that you are able to set size. You know, that might not be a letter sheet. Now, that's not a deal breaker totally because we, we are looking at how to lay out our cards on letter size sheets. But if your printer allows a seven by ten card stock to go through, you're all set, you can use card blanks and there isn't any problem about cutting or anything like that. Allowing that is about two things. It's about set, being able to set it up in the front dialogue when you say print. And it's also about having movable guides that you can squeeze in smaller to guide a piece of paper that's not eight-and-a-half. Why most printers have that capacity. So it's not a big worry, but those are what I consider the really important things about a printer that will do well by you making greeting cards. I'm not one of those people that fools around about what the answer to things is because when people do that drives me crazy. And I'm not under obligation, like I said to anyone to try to push any brand of printers, I'm going to jump right to what I use and what I love. And what I paid more than this for. This printer goes up and down in price and I got mine at Office Depot and I paid $300 for it. And now today when I looked it up on Amazon, is $249.99. So that's awesome. This printer has every thing and very, very few things to worry about. And I'm going to tell you those Everything's and I'm not saying this is the only printer to have, but I am saying this is the best. It's got everything that we need and this is how I print all of my greeting cards. And so the only drawback to this printer really, is that it's big. You can look it up on Amazon and look at the, you can't pick it up yourself if you're like me. And it's got a big footprint. What I did, I didn't have desk space for that. I bought a printer cart. It has a plug-in it and stuff and I can roll it around, get it out of my way. But it is not a regular sized desktop printer. The reason for that, the really great reason for that. It's, it's a wide format printer. Now, that means that it's not limited to two to 8.5 wide sheet of paper. This is 13 by 19 is is it's big limit. I got it. For that reason originally because I was making prints that were bigger than letter size sheets of my art. But it's also turned out to be a great card printer for me too. Okay, so it's big, but it's substantial and it's very affordable. So we don't care about it's big. Now it doesn't show that here, but a tray pulls up This house, by the way, a big scanner and it has a document feeder, as you can see, I don't actually ever use that, but I do use a scanner. It's a great Epson scanner. Behind that top where you see the the document feeder, a paper tray pulls up back there and it's 13 " wide and tall and it has those little adjusting side guideline. Please don't mind. My dog is snoring. I have a few minutes ago and I is that we're going to ignore that and maybe nobody will notice it. But anyway, there is a rear feed paper tray. Okay, And another great thing is that the ink for this printer is waterproof dura. Bright ink has been around for many years made by epsilon. Um, you don't want to use compatible inks in Epson printers. That is, they warn you on every one of their product descriptions, but they mean it not only are they not waterproof, but they also just really mark up your print heads. And that's, you know, death to a printer. So it's not something that you want to do. The other thing I'm going to point out is you don't let this printer sit for months without running a print because that also will dry up ink in your print heads and make trouble. So if you go on vacation, you need to have somebody run a copy or something every week or so to keep it alive. But in all fairness, I have, I have been bad at that a couple of times and the printer was still fine. And you run cleanings every once in a while to make sure. But anyway, this ink is great. It's pretty true in color and it is waterproof. So I'm gonna go back for 1 min and give you another look. This is the workforce 78, 40. It has a great big screen for doing all your do dads. And it has a keypad and it's just could not be a better printer. So there you go on that. And is there another brand? There are other Epson's but they don't have the rear feed. One does, but it's just as big as this and it's more expensive. So never mind about that, right? But the smaller workforce printers for the most part, do not have a rear feet if you find one that does and takes waterproof ink, Hallelujah, That's a great thing. But anyway, this is the end-all be-all. The other printer that I own is not this one as someone. I'll show you in a minute, but Canon pick SMA printers or the other printers, inkjet printers that will have a rear feed and that will feed a heavier paper through them. And this one is particularly inexpensive. Of course, there is a downside and the downside is that the ink is not waterproof on the Canon picks my printers. And so you're going to have to protect your cards from any moisture damage of that kind. The inks are pretty true to color. Like I say, I don't own this one, but I do own this one. This is a portable and I take it on all my road trips with me. It's just really easy to transport. And it doesn't show right here. But you can see in the small pictures on the left, the paper feed does pop up from the back. Well, actually it's the cover when you put the cover up. And so it will feed card stock. It makes a beautiful print. And the other thing I really like about this printer and My Apps, and both of them will connect to your WiFi signal. But that is a pain. If you're going motel, motel and having different signals and passwords and all of that. And so what both of these printers will do is called a direct connect. And that means they will put out their own Wi-Fi signal. And you, when you go to print from your iPad or your laptop, you go up to your network connection and you choose the signal coming off of this printer. And then you're all set and you print. The only thing is of course your eyes then tried to go online and you forget why you can't because she's still, you're still on the Wi-Fi signal coming from the printer. Anyway, that is a wonderful thing, especially on the traveling kind of printer. Or if your Wi-Fi network at home is located far from where your printer will be. Or just a lot of nicety about that fact. So I think I have covered what I have to cover about printers. And the other thing that we have to deal with that is one of the difficulties is setting up to print. And the reason I say it's difficult is because there are not a lot of apps out there that give us what we need. And what we need is a set of rulers top and side, and the ability to pull guides out of them. And that way we can set up our art and our type in the right place so that when it goes through these printers, it will be where it belongs. There are a lot of apps out there. Most of them are very expensive. Indesign, of course his top of the heap. Indesign is for any platform. But the affinity, there's an affinity set of programs, it's up against Adobe. And Affinity Publisher is a really good page layout program available for both iPads and Macs. Apple only though, and that costs 60 or $70. There are apps that are less expensive, but you really have to check whether you can pull guidelines out of the rulers top and bottom. Now, I have a Skillshare class for you, which I made for Procreate, so that you can make letter pages and layouts in procreate. And you can find that on Skillshare since that's where we are right now. And you can do this layout on your iPad. But as far as computer programs, there is a program called pages, also, Mackintosh only, but it's free. It comes with the Mac. It's been around forever. In the early days, it let you have a blank page so you could put pictures and text boxes and move them around. Then it went through a period of time or it only let you do a word processing thing, like when you make a blog post and the picture has to be part of the type. And now in the newest version it's back that we can have a blank layout page and so on. In our next lesson, I am going to teach you about page layout for greeting cards. And I'm going to be using the pages app on the Macintosh for that. 12. 12 Page Layout in Pages App: I'm going to be doing my sample layout for you in the pages app, the newest version on Mackintosh, it's an app that comes with all the max and the earlier versions were wonderful. They gave you a blank layout page and then there were a bunch of interim version that did not. Now the newest version allows it again. And so I'm going to ask for a new document and I'm going to get a template chooser and there's everything under the sun here. But what I'm looking for is a blank page for layout. There's a blank here that would give you a word processing kind of format, which means your pictures are stuck inside the type. That is not what we're looking for. A blank layout means just that it's a page that you can do anything with. When I get it open for your sake here, I am going to view it. The whole page here, fit page. There we go. We have an eight-and-a-half by 11 under view as well. I'm going to go to rulers. Was this thing jumps around. It's brand new. It's a brand new laptops. Show Rulers and now I have a horizontal ruler at the top, 8.5 " and I have a vertical ruler, the love for love in inches. Okay. And then I want to make sure that my guidelines are on and they are because I'm not hiding them there. To make a page layout, to make cards of whatever size you're making. You want. You have a page here that's the letter size. It's going to go through your printer and you want to put your things on it so that they land in the right place on the sheet. So when you cut it and you fold it, everything is all lined up. So to make a ruler guide, you go inside the ruler with your mouse or your finger, whatever your pointer. And you pull out a guide and there it is, and it will move anywhere across the page. And so the first layout we're going to do is for our A2 cards on a two up per sheet. I'm gonna divide this sheet in half both ways and there's four and a quarter there. And if you're not sure where you are, which I can't see for squat and this little screen. You can move and watch the numbers on this guy we want 4.25. So we know now that we're exactly in the middle. Now we're going to pull down a horizontal guideline and we want that to be at five and one-half. And again, I'm watching the numbers, which are little tricky here, but it's better than having to see, which is also very tricky. So what we have now is we have a layout page for two A2 cards. One is going to be here, and one is going to be here. I'm going to move my window out of the way a little bit. And we'll click on the background in order to get my Finder. And I'm going to open a new finder window. And I'm going to go where I know I just downloaded a couple of photos into downloads. And there they are, right at the top. And for this card, I'm going to start with how to be a princess as my artwork. And on the Mac you can just drag that into place. Other programs may have you go out, browse for it. But there's pages here. Let you just do this. So now that's my art. And it's not coming in at the same size. Now, even if you have this sized correctly, it for some reason pages doesn't bring it in at its actual size. And so what we need to do is resize it so that it fits nicely on the front of our card. And we do that in pages. You don't have to hold the Shift key down or anything. We do that by just pulling on a corner. So now that fits, but I kinda want it in the center of the front of my card. And then when I click away from it, there it is. Now I don't know what this is. A demo and I think that this gray line is on here because the picture I brought in was a screenshot to use in a shop. But you don't care because we're not really printing this. So you just pretend this is your artwork. Now, what we can do here is do the same card twice. Like say this is a popular one. And you want to print two of them at a time. In which case we could click on this already sized picture and Command D or go under the File menu to duplicate it and drag it to the front of the second card. And there's that. If you don't want to do that, you can make another current in the same sheets. So here's what I'm gonna do. Deleting that, moving back out so I can see my, my graphics here. And I'm going to bring in this other graphic. These are actual cards of mine, but they're, they're screenshots for the shops. So alright. I can just as well cited Sam right up here because it's all the same size, all four sections here. So I'm going to pull it in until it's going to fit. I'm going to drag it down here so it can be the front of this card. We go Now the back of the card. I don't know what you want it to be, but I know that it's going to be words. And so we're going to need a text box, and those are up here and pages. And you click the Text Box and you get a box with little tiny types that you can't see. So first of all, we're going to change the type. And when it still says typed enter text, you don't have to select it. If you have something typed already, I want to change your font. You do have to select it, but we're just going to say this card is illustrated by Suzy. Okay? It's very small and we're going to want it bigger, so we're gonna select that. And we're going to come over here to where it says text. In here is this size 11 point in by hitting this arrow, you can just make it size up as much as you want it to. Now also, we have our arrangement here. This is flushed left, centered is always a good idea. And then let's find a font that's a little more interesting than that. Helvetica. Heavens. Okay, I'm gonna make that Jennifer Sue. Whoops, that's a slow one. Small one again. So I need to go back but still highlighted and make this larger. Now perhaps I want to make the Susie artists larger and this smaller. So I'm going to take that part down some. In the Susie artist. Now I can with my mouse or your keypad, whatever you call that thing. I never use the touchpad. And I'm going to place that about there. Now suppose that you want your website down here too. You can save time by going and keeping the same font. Go up here, click on this Command D duplicate it, pull it down here, swipe over the whole thing and type www. You don't need that anymore. But anyway, Susie artist.com or whatever information you want, I think that's a little bit small since you want people to come and contact you if they liked his card when they get it. Just something like that. And now this is centered to make sure it's centered on the section that you want to be in to one corner, out to the other guideline here. And now we'll make sure that it isn't. We're gonna do this to take it over to the edge. And we're going to pull the box out to the guidelines. And then we know it's centered on the back. Now this card has got a different picture. However, you probably would have the same back unless you had titles that you changed. And so we're gonna go up here and we can either Shift-click this to get both of them or we can scrape over it. But anyway, duplicate it, command D and just bring the two together down here. And we are all set to print to A2 cards with your artwork on them. And when this piece of paper comes out of your printer and you cut it in half right across here, and you score it right in the middle. This should be centered on the front, and this will be centered on the back. And everything will look like you're professional and you knew how to do it the right way. Now I'm going to add a page here because we're going to try and A7 card. So, um, we don't have any guidelines carried over for this. Before I do that, I wanted to say that you could save this document with just this page as a file that you will open to make new cards. You can save it as a template that you can open on purpose. I get confused when I do that. So I just save that file and I might call it cards start or A2 or something like that. Because I can go in, I can open that file, I can delete these pictures, put in other ones. I might want to keep the type that I've been using. It's already there. And I might want to change anything else, but the setup is all set up to make text boxes anymore or do any of that. Okay, so now on our blank page, and this time we're gonna do use a letter size sheet for occurred that's an A7. I told you that I often would set this whole pages document up to be an A7. And therefore, I wouldn't be doing this. But if you're not using pre-made card blanks, that you would use a letter sheet. And so we want to have a card that's ten by seven by seven, so that we end up when we fold it with a five by seven. And this time I'm going to do a horizontal format, a landscape format. So it's gonna be this direction that it prints. And I'm going to pull a line out of here and go to 7, ". Close enough, it was heaven or wine. And from the top ruler I'm going to bring one down to ten. And then I'm gonna divide that in half so I can tell what I'm doing in my layout. So I'm gonna pull another horizontal down to half of ten, which is five. Again, I'm just letting go because I'm not going to fiddle with this in front of you. And now what we have is one A7 card, but we know where things are supposed to print. This is when you are going to have to take an inch and a half off of a cut, off of one side and an inch off the other. End. Score it, and have your card if you're not using the pre-made blanks. Okay. So I'm going to again, I'm going to go out and get from my finder window a piece of artwork that shaped correctly for this, this is a photograph and it is a horizontal photograph. It's a photo that I took in the countryside in Illinois and I put it on Instagram and they liked it so much that the state asked me if they could use it. I would leave more whitespace here. So I'm going to make my photograph just a little bit smaller. Okay. This time I'm going to want to put that same type from over here, but there's going to have to be a change. I'm going to come back to my first page. I'm going to click that and I'm going to Shift click that. And this time instead of duplicating it, I'm going to copy it. And you can do that under the Edit menu, but I'm doing a command C, and I now have a copy of it. And I'm going to move to this card. And I'm going to do a Command V, which is the key command for paste. So now I can make that centered on the back. I might, because it's a wide card, I might change this a little bit. I might make the discard is illustrated by all one line. So it doesn't look so funny. Okay, and then I'm going to have the website information down here too. I go like that. But what's wrong here? If you think about it, you're gonna know it's gonna be upside down on the card prints, right? This is the front of the card. You're going to fold the card in half and the type is going to be upside down. So in pages this is an easy fix. Because if you come over here to my range over here, there is a rotate. We're going to rotate one at a time because we don't want to rotate the entire block or we'll have it in the wrong place. And here I'm going to type 180 and hit the Enter key to make that happen, to see what happened. We got upside down there, but we are in the wrong place because that's the bottom of the card now. Okay, so we're going to do this, and we're gonna do this. So now this is going to print on the bottom back. And now this one, we also want to rotate. And so we're going to put 180. They're also turn it upside down. And then we're going to place this about a third of the way down and the back is a nice-looking thing. Alright, and this is a card that is set up now for an A7 print and everything will land in the right place. These lines won't show. So you will know that the first thing you do is you cut an inch and a half off of one side of the paper, off of that side of the paper. Then you're going to have something 7 " wide and you're going to cut an inch off the bottom of the paper. And then you're going to have something 10 " long. And that you'll be able to score right in the middle. And make your greeting card. If you want to make a, if you, if you want to make an A7 card and a portrait format like this, you need to start your whole your whole pages file with a horizontal blank page. And then you would have the room. You'd have this set up the same way. But everything would be right-side up because you'd be looking at a wide sheet. I hope that translates because this video is getting too long for me to do a sample of that. Anyway, all the layout programs are different. I do provide you with a class actually in Skillshare about doing this in Procreate, which is a wonderful thing, just everybody who's an artist almost and has an iPad has procreate. And it's just so much easier than finding the right program to make it on your computer unless you have a Macintosh and you get this for free. The other programs InDesign and affinity is not bad. There's an Affinity Publisher and that's not bad. That's a 60 or $70 program. Indesign you have to subscribe to and it's very expensive. It's made by Adobe. There are some, you can look for apps. There are some apps like, I don't know, called publisher to or publish it, or what kind of more clunky setups of this same thing. But as long as you get a pair of rulers and you can pull guides out of those rulers, you're all set. And as long as you can set the dimensions of your page so that you can have a letter size page. I hope this has been a little more clear than mine. I'm sorry. It's a pretty complicated subject. 13. 13 Selling Your Cards: Before we can talk about selling our cards, we have to have some cards to sell. So use your class project over the three cards that you made that all have a matching style and create a line of six cards in that style. And then it would be smart to create two or three more sets of cards of six each to put together a portfolio of your cards. And the style, the feeling of your cards when you show somebody, there'll be able to see kind of what your card shop, If we might say it that way, would be like, package the cards beautifully and then put them into some kind of a case or a box or something lovely that you could use to take them out, to show them or sell them somewhere. So that's, the first step, is to make the cards exist. When you're ready to show your cards to someone, you start at the source. This seems kind of obvious and maybe not too sophisticated either. But show your cards to your family and your friends and watch carefully for reactions and tell them that you would like some real feedback that you're thinking of selling your greeting cards and avoid anyone in your friends and family who already has been telling you to get a real job instead of being an artist and so on. You know what I mean? You don't need hurt feelings, but you are looking for actual feedback. Oh, I like that. I like the way that said or, or whatever. You are also listening for. Anyone's saying, you know, I don't get that. I don't understand the message. And the reason is because greeting cards or communication, you are helping someone to say something to someone else. And if the something is not very understandable, the greeting card is not going to be very successful and probably will not sell well either. After friends and family post your cards on your social media. I'm not sure how I feel about the validity of likes and so on and social media, but they're there. So if you were to put a picture of one of your cards on your Instagram and it got a lot of likes, then you'd say that's probably a pretty good card. It has a sense of you have a sense that it might sell. So that's pretty good feedback. Ask for feedback. If you have to, if everybody's just going to, oh, nice. Asked for feedback and then appreciate it. Tell people that. I really appreciate that you told me that I, you know, that you didn't understand the message there because now I can fix that and that opens up communication so that people would give you more meaningful feedback. Take notes on the feedback so that you can go back to your line of cards and make the corrections that might have come up. Use the feedback is the next step. Take those suggestions, dislikes and of your, of your first audience to heart. And go and make the changes to your line of cards that you feel makes them better, makes them a better product. The next thing is to test market. That's a different thing than asking for feedback because test marketing is about whether somebody is going to take money out of their pocket because they liked the card. There's a difference there. It's easy to like things when they're free, just like they do on social media. You know, nobody even wants to pay a comment, but they can hit a like button. And so you need to test market someplace. And the most obvious place is if your community has any small arts and crafts shows that are inexpensive or free to be a part of. Sometimes they're through schools or through a churches, or through little shopping centers. Little, little farmer's markets that you can get. Farmers markets are good if they have arts and crafts as well. You can get a table for not very much money. And when you get that table, you can lay out your cards beautifully and you can stand there and watch what happens. The best way to find out which designs are going to sell is to try to sell them to a live buying audience. And so you've got to put your arm or on if nobody buys any, nobody else knows and nobody bought any but you. And so you don't have to tell anybody either. But if they do buy your cards, then you're going to know which ones are more popular. And that is a great thing to start finding out even in the very beginning. And so look for, I'm not talking about your big art shows where you're going to pay hundreds of dollars for a booth That's for Wade later if it's something you choose to do. But just small things, small local things are gonna give you a whole lot of feedback about what is salable. And one isn't. The second possibility for test marketing or selling your cards is local shops. All kinds of stores sell cards from supermarkets to dog rumors, florist, or especially fond of selling cards because they go with the flowers that they sell. Gift shops of course, are given because Cards go with the gifts people are buying for other people. If you approach an actual card shop, It has the benefit of already having card racks and displays and other stores don't always. And that's something that you're going to have to make a plan. As we spoke about before, about how your cards will be displayed. But visit every kind of local shop in your neighborhood or in your town. And most of them will sell cards. So the next thing you want to do is figure out what kind of cards and what price range they're selling them at. So when you visit the shops, see the feeling of the lines of cars that they sell like a dog groomer. The card rack could be full of dog and cat cards or a pet food emporium. We'd be like that of Flores. There might be a lot of floral cards are still lifes or, or things of that ilk. Some stores sell funny, insulting humerus courage. There's a flavor. And you need to pick up that flavor. And then you have to figure out whether your cards would suit that flavor, which your cards fit in, in that shop. And if so, you might try to chat with someone, a clerk, or whoever is there about whether you could have an appointment. Just show them your cards. Be sure to mention that you make them yourself and that you are a local artist. Because a local store can appreciate local shopping and having goods that are made locally. Always make an appointment. Don't ever stop in to a store and think that the ulnar is going to stop what they're doing and sit down and pay proper attention to what you have to show them. A shop owners are very, very busy people and you have to respect their time. They appreciate that. And they might give you an appointment just simply because you are respecting them enough to ask for one and not just come in and shove your cards in their face while they're doing something else and saying, do you like this, I'm trying to sell them. You just don't wanna do it that way. It's just much nicer and more professional to make an appointment to show your goods. When someone else is going to sell your cards and you're not selling directly, add a little show locally or anywhere. You are going to be in a wholesale retail situation. When you saw your cards that someone's store, they will get 50% of the sale price. Now this can happen in an actual sale to the store in which they will buy a certain number of cards from you and they will pay you for them and they will pay you half of what the selling price is. But more often you're going to be dealing with something called consignment. It's easier for the shop owner and especially on a product they haven't tried before. And so what that entails is that you put your cards in the person shop at no cost to the shop. And you don't get paid for your cards until after they have sold and usually a month after they have sold. In most cases, store will sit down every month and they will add up all the things that are sold and make-up checks to the artists who have their work, they're on consignment. And there's probably a certain date for that and every store will be different. Now you want to understand all that very clearly in the beginning and then you want a written agreement doesn't have to be a big old contract or anything complicated. Just what you in the store owner shop owner have agreed to regarding your cards and both of you sign it. And then there aren't any like arguments later about what you said this or you said that verbal agreements are difficult in camp or can become difficult. And so you always want your business contract to be a contract. As part of your research, looking at the prices of the cards sold in the shop you are considering. We talked about pricing. The usual range is from $4 to about 06:50. With most common landing right around $5 for printed cards. But some places like supermarkets might have mass produced printed cards for as little as $1.99. That wouldn't be what you would want to compete with. Your five-dollar card. Handmade cards can be as high as $16. And a handmade card is one that looks like the artists made it totally by hand. In other words, they printed out the parts that they got the Ryan Stones or whatever. They put the car together by hand. They're usually three-dimensional. I'm not I'm not talking about hopped up cards here, although that would fall in that category, but usually there's a layering of stuff on the front of the card and so on. And then it looks like it's real art and then it can solve for more. But if you were looking in a shop where all the cards are $5 and none are handmade, you'd be in the wrong shop for selling your handmade cards. In other words, your cards need to fit the shops pricing profile, as well as the shop style profile. Selling online, My goodness, all brand new, all unknown really. But the best place to learn about it is to visit successful online greeting cards sites and see what is popular, and see what bestsellers are. See the sizes, see the pricing. There are very tiny mom and pop shops. You can start looking on Etsy. I'm on Instagram, search, hashtag, card shop, all one word, and plan to spend some serious time discovering how people sell cards online and what kind of cards they're selling. Some card shops online or just terrifically successful. And they're run by very energetic people who go out and learn a lot about marketing and who work their tails off on their business. And it can happen. It all depends on what you want to put into it, what you might get out of it. There are also successful entrepreneurs and the card business that offer classes free and paid. How they started it. I'll look on YouTube as well, how they started their card business and what they did to make it succeed. And you can learn lots from things like that. When you are ready to set up an online shop, there are a lot of choices there as well. Etsy is the obvious answer of where to start if you don't have your own following online. Because people can find you there by using the Etsy search for certain products. Now that is a really nice perk. However, the downside is that not that many people find you because of how many artists are on actually the competition is just really incredible. And another part to Etsy is that to set up a shop is free. But the downside to that is that Etsy charges hefty fees for listing an item and for selling and item and low priced items take a big hit because of these fees. So it has to be weighed, but it might be a great place for you to start if you're starting from nowhere. Because you won't have a chance of building a new audience. You won't have to bring your audience with you like you will. On other shops, there are several sites where you can pay a fee for a shop website. If you don't have a website of your own, these can be a good deal, but you have to do your own promotion to drive traffic to your shop. Some examples are shopify.com and Squarespace. Wix Weebly. The cost per month ranges from about $15 to 40, and there may be additional fees, transaction fees, credit card fees, et cetera. The concept here is that templates are offered for you to set up the look and feel that you would like for your shop. And then it's very easy to plug in descriptions and photographs and set your shop up. But you have to look at the cost first because they're greatly varied. If you do have a website or social media accounts like Facebook and Instagram, you may be able to use my favorite solution, which is, I don't know how they pronounce it, but it's E CW id.com. They offer a shop that you can park anywhere. The shop actually resides on the server, but to your customers it looks like it is on your site where your social media page. There's a free plan to try. It is as easy to set up as Etsy and the paid plans are affordable from $19 a month. You hook up your own PayPal or square accounts for direct payment and equity does not charge any additional fees. You can connect your shop to as many places as you want, even putting single items in blog post with a buy button. Everyone's perfect solution will be different according to individual circumstances. But with enough research, you will find the approach that works best for you and for your card line. 14. 14 Packaging and Display: Here's where we talk about the packaging and the presentation of your card line. Part of that is very easy. Part of that is very, very difficult. The packaging is great. And then I'm going to demonstrate this card of mine. And I'm going to go in reverse order. I'm going to reverse engineer so that you can see that the end result here is wider than 5 " by 7 ". And it's important to know that is because of the envelope and the outside envelope that when you are doing the hard part of this and looking for displays that you might offer to a store or use an art show is going to really matter that a lot of them are only 5 " wide on each pocket. Well, 5 " wide, It's how wide the current is, That's true. But when you have your cellophane envelope on and the envelope inside with your card, you are out at five-and-a-half inches. And so that is really pretend this is the vertical card. And that's another thing too, is that you're going to have to decide between vertical and horizontal racks. All of that part is really hard. But we're not going there quite yet. We're just talking about how we package the card. So it's good to know that the fully packaged card is five-and-a-half inches wide and about seven and three-eighths. And that is on an A7 card that is different on the A2 card. It is smaller, but it's still not. Your card measurement of four and a quarter by five-and-a-half. It still has to add a half an inch for an envelope Anna and outer sleeve. So anyway, this is a picture I took some years back of a CloudFormation. I did not Photoshopped this this is not played with. This is actually an angel and paid out of the cloud. So anyway, this is very professional looking because it is put inside of a clear cell envelope. And we'll talk about how to put it inside in a minute. But I'm going to take this apart to show you this. So this comes from clear bags.com. There are other sources. Amazon sells them as well. I liked the quality here and the range of size choices. These come with what you just saw, the fold-over sticky flap, and those are good there. It gives you a higher-end look. The car doesn't fall out the end. Yes, there's a little bit more plastic involved and adhesive. And so if environmental things are more important to you, you can consider that because these also come with just an open top. And a lot of people use them that way and the card slides out. If the person wants to slide it out to look at the interior, they never put it back in correctly. This is one of the reasons why cards with messages on the inside. A lot more trouble. But anyway, a card without a message on the inside, it can be put in a solo envelope and it will still look shiny like that, but the n will now look finished. Tip number two, I think it is your envelope. Okay. Many people would just put it at the back of the card, put it in their envelope. And then when a person turns a card over and store to see who made it or anything else about it or the price. They would do this and they would just be seeing an envelope back there. And so what you'd want to do is you want to put your envelope inside your card. Let us show this tells the person There's an envelope with it. But when it's in this cell asleep and you turn it over, There's all the information that you printed on the back of your card that you want people to know. Now, this card was printed some time ago and so that price was printed on it. That's a very old price. I can't use this card anymore because of that. So that's why I was telling you it's a really good idea not to print your price the back of your card, unless you plan to charge same thing for it your whole life. And the cost of materials does change. So anyway, this would be inside the envelope and I think I will put it back in there to give you an idea is it's more difficult for me to do this now because I have already opened it. And what that means is that there is an adhesive strip right here. When you buy these, this is lying flat. And there is a cover paper, relief paper on the, I love when I make an idiot of myself on video. There's a relief paper on the adhesive. So it isn't doing things like this to you. But for the sake of showing you something okay, resealed. So what I do when my cards are in a gallery or a store is I use a price sticker on here. It's good to remove that price sticker because people sometimes give the cards as gifts and don't want the price on there. But we stick a little price sticker removable one on the back of the card, on the plastic envelope. Nothing with price on it is on the actual card. When you start looking at card displays, you're going to find out that there are ones that are revolving racks and they have hooks coming out to hang cards on and you go, how would I do that? Well, the same people clear bags.com, make aversion of these envelopes with a hang tag on one end. And they make him for this type of card and disorientation, and they make them for this orientation. So you take your choice depending on whether you do mostly horizontal cards or vertical cards. And that, that hang tag is going to make that impossible to use it in a regular slot card display because it's going to add some width to it or height to it. And so these are all choices. This why I'm telling you that, how you're going to display your cards in a store or at an art show is a really big project to figure out. I am not gonna be able to tell you my solutions on that because my card racks and my systems are well, they're not made anymore. And I've been selling cards since the early '90s. And so I've just kept them all these years and put them in different configurations because, um, I could and they had to, but I can't tell you where to get them now because they basically don't exist. Now. I can tell you where to go to look for what does exist. So there's a popular thing going on right now. The environmentally speaking, a lot of card makers are saying all, all we have to do really is just put the envelope inside of it and put a washi tape is, it's a low tack decorative tape, but they're making and marketing Now a little card. Tabs, maybe your color, but basically it's low-tech tape. You just stick it on your card and it goes over the edge of the card and the edge of the envelope over here, over here. And then no Solow is used. Now. Yes, that's better than using plastic. But when you're talking about a retail marketplace, that card is vulnerable to handling and it will be handled. And there's nothing you're gonna be able to do to stop people. They pick up a card to look at it and say put that down because you're getting fingerprints on it. If you're using a printer that is not waterproof, That's going to obviously be a situation where a disaster can happen if anything wet gets spilled or a wet hand or even oily hands, which is a natural condition, will put fingerprints and so on. So I highly advise against that kind of a of a trick unless you are just handing someone a card as a gift. Because handling in the marketplace that will be erect before you know it, store owners prefer for obvious reasons, packaging so that they can know their inventory is not going to look like a bunch of wrinkled and bent stuff and not sell. In fact, they would call you in and have you replaced the inventory at your costs. So it's just not something you want to do. So we have these in a little bag with the flap or without the flap. The other thing is transporting your cards. If you don't really have a flap on this end, the Kurds likely to slide out of the envelope. And that's another thing for you to watch. So my best recommendation is that clear cell, the best grade recycled, whatever, if you can get it with an adhesive strip, fold over. Sometimes you want to sell cards in sets. This same clear bags.com cell boxes and they come flat. They're not inexpensive. I can't think what are the current prices because I'm not using them currently, but they come for all sizes of cards. They are great for holding about six cards with their envelopes. And then you, I have friends that saw their cards only this way, only in. So what's inside can be all of one. This happens to be a six of this one card, but it can also be a collection. It could be your whole six card line sold in a box. When you do that, however, it didn't happen here because it doesn't have to. You have to do something that inserts on the back. You have to print something with a miniature of all the images on it so that people know what's in this pack of cards. And then this package console, individually at $5, that was six cards would cost $30. At a price of $5 to six would cost $30. And so anything under that is a deal. And the buyer will respond to that and more readily by a set of cards. Maybe then to pick up six if all six were in the same pack, if they liked a variety of images than they would pick this up. This also makes it really good gift, a set of box two cards. There are also cardboard boxes sold from companies that sell jewelry boxes and they're big enough for cards. You can go that direction. That again, is more expensive than this. Anyway, these boxes come flat and they're all scored and ready. And so you put you fold them and they come for the A12Z, A7, A6 is any size card you want. These boxes are made for it. Okay, We're going to move along to the idea of displays. And I'm just going to go to some screenshots that I picked up of different kind of card displays. The idea about a display is that you walk into somebody's store, you've got a handful of cards. And unless they are a current store already, they're gonna say, what am I supposed to do with them? How am I supposed to display them? Now, the least expensive option is that you sell your cards in a basket, that you get from some nice basket craft store or something. And your cards all stack in that basket. And what the store owner has to deal with is just a basket footprint that she can put on a shelf and people can go through your cards, people like that. It's not great for great numbers of cards. It doesn't show the fronts of all your cards, but people like to fiddle with things. And so whether in an art show or at a current job or whatever, it is, one option and the most inexpensive option to have a container. And I've seen people use corrugated cardboard containers that they've decorated. I've seen, like I said, baskets, wire baskets, galvanized steel baskets, the whole country, modern farmhouse look thing. So a container in which your cards can stand up together and the person will only see the one that's in front and have to go finger and through to see the rest of it. But generally they will like a print rack where you buy prints from an artist at an art show, you gonna go, go through them. And then it's particularly important that these are protected because all of that handling is bound to give you bent corners and very corners and fingerprints and every other thing. Some people sell sets of cards rather than in a box like this, tied with ribbon or a raphe around the set. And that's interesting too, but obviously your tie is gonna get in the way of seeing your image. You still have to somehow show all the cards that are in that group. The back, just like you would do here, because otherwise people are going to untie that bundle to see. You can tell I've been in retail for a very long time. People will undo the whole package and leave the raphe in the string all over the place does so they can see the back or the rest of the current design. So all of these things have to be kept in mind. And then when you go to try to shop for a display to offer to the store along with your line of cards, or to display your art show that you're going to do. You're going to just see such variety and you're going to see such a variety and pricing. You're not gonna get much under $50 for any card display rack. And you can go up to $300 depending on the quality and the number of cards that it holds. And the types are really all over the place as well. So all I'm gonna be able to do here is to show you some screenshots that I did and send you in the right direction. In your choice of display is going to be all about your choice of shop. It's like what are you doing? How many cards do you have to display in that store? And you go from there. 15. 15 Choosing Card Displays: So we enter the huge world of reading card displays. What I did up top here is greeting card displays is my search in Google, and this is on regular search. So you get your images in a row across the top. And this is going to show you already how many types there are and how much price range there is. And we're not even now looking into what the size of the pockets, these are called pockets on racks. And so That's where we're going to have to be careful about the actual width of our package greeting card fitting in them. But let's just as an overview, look at this and look at it from the standpoint of a person who owns a store where every square inch really counts. That's a real good place to look at it. And it's really good thing to bring in a picture and discuss it with the store owner before investing the money to buy it. If you're going to do your own farmers markets or a booth, or you're your own art shows, then it's up to you how you're going to make a display, and how large of space it takes. And it also depends on how many cards you have and how many lines you have, and so you get the picture is pretty crazy. So this is a spinning rack here. And these common all kinds of sizes and shapes and they turned so people can see the cards. The height factor on these right here is just as important as the width factor. Some of these are made for CDS, and if you try to put an A7 card and one, it'll stick up too far. To go under the next pocket. These are all called pockets. Each display will tell you how many pockets there are. And then if you research it more carefully, you will find out what size those pockets are. This is a stack shelf display. This one has different size things on it here. Bigger footprint, as you can see, the spinning rack. So this is a more expensive, this would be an interesting display GPUs on your, on a table. Because it shows a lot of cards right up front. You have to be careful because sometimes the cards will fall forward in these because there isn't very much of a guide on the front of it. Here's another one holding many more cards. Here's a tiny one holding just nine cards. Here's a Walmart, a mounted version, more spinners here. Here's one with all the individual slides instead of just the cards sitting on a shelf. Okay, here's a floor standing card rack may come in all kinds of numbers and sizes. These these wooden ones that you put together with a mallet I hear tell are pretty difficult, so I would avoid those. There are leukocyte versions. There are. That's another loose sight version, but there are metal like black metal wire versions. Just gonna, I'm not gonna go too far here. On your Google search. If you to say images instead of all in the front, you're gonna get a whole page of these with a little bigger picture to figure it out a little more. But you're already getting the idea that the choices are just limited. All of this will totally depend on your personal card line. How many designs are in it, what size are the cards? How do you want to show them? And so on. Another place you will like to check is Amazon. And here's one of those wouldn't want to put together with the melon. You notice this guy like two-and-a-half star reviews and mostly that's because well, for one thing I read the reviews just to see and is because these pockets are too narrow for your five by seven or 5.1 " or something that doesn't do a thing for you. And the other thing is people said they were almost impossible to put together even with a mallet. I would avoid those press board versions, but lots and lots of variety. And if you're a prime member on Amazon, that shipping can make a big difference. I think this is it. Yeah, this is one that I saw on Amazon that holds 12 cards. So it would hold two of your six card lines in pockets that are wide enough and tall enough, okay? So you can see that your package card will fit across, but also it's important that it fits below the pocket, above it. And this is a small footprint, just a circle. This is a wire rack. It shows your cards off. There's nothing at the bottom or sides. It's really hiding your image. And that's another good thing. But the price is a little hefty at $94. But if I had to pick a display that I would go out and take an original order of cards to a store and offer to have my own display. This would be something be under serious consideration for me. Okay, so let's try Etsy. So quite a few racks here already you see a wide range of price. Here's a three-tier birch ply greeting card display with a five-star review. There must be something good about it. So this is an affordable looking nice display. Looks to be handmade. Pocket width. You don't have individual pockets and so you need to go down. You see what the width in inches is 19375, your card is 5.5 wide. And so you'd have 16.5 ". You'd be okay. In the height is 12 ". That's this whole height right here. But you would be okay with your A7 cards and this because at a 19 inch width across the front, you're gonna be able to get three of your packaged five-and-a-half inch cards there. So that's pretty good. Let's see. They saw solo sleeves there, there's the one without an E-flat. Other wooden cases. Here's a four tier and so on. I'm not going to spend your time doing this on here because you're going to spend your time going and getting all your information and making the best choices for you. When you first start out, try less expensive things. Make sure that you know what the dimensions and parameters are and you can always move up to something else. I might, if I were you, I might try this $38.01. If I was going to do a show, I had 27 cards and I was going to do a show in at a farmers market or something. I might get like three of these and that would make a really nice display on a table. The price would not kill you right out of the gate. So just lots of choices. And I wish you the best on choosing the best choice for you. 16. 16 Card Lines and Styles: I have left our lesson on style and creating lines of greeting cards to last, because you can't promote yourself on Skillshare. And except in your first or your introduction or your extra reduction, your last video. So I saved it for this. This is a close-up shot of the card section of my online store. It's in the process of being changed right now. I will provide a link in resources so that you can come back and look at this more carefully. So the idea of what we're talking about here is creating groups of cards that has something in common, and that's called a line of cards. There's something in common might be that maybe it's all of them have quotes on them or all of them have illustrations in the same style. The best way to tell you about this is to show you about this. And that's why I'm using my own card shop. For that reason, all my cards are not in this shop yet, but several are in. You'll be able to get the idea. So this first section over here, hummingbirds in the garden. Over the years, I take a lot of photographs in my garden. And so hummingbirds are very popular. And so I collected them in, I put them into a set of greeting cards. And this particular set has an extra as well just because there was an extra Very cool shot. Several of these are one hummingbird who decided to stay around one fall until she actually scared me. This one right here is her in the morning, choose very cold. She'd be puffy like a teddy bear, and this is the same hummingbird. Later in the day when she was warmer, she finally did fly away to safety. She buzzed my head to say goodbye, but it wasn't in November by the, wow. Anyway, several are her. One is I love this hummingbird, hummingbird thing. It was such a lucky photograph because I just happened to be standing there wanting to take a picture of how that marble I looked on this hummingbird Stan, and a hummingbird came and jumped right in there. Okay, Now I'm also going to take this opportunity to show you how a shopping cart works. This is an equid and it's actually on their site. But on my site it displays this way. So it looks like the shop is here as well. If a customer was interested in that image, they would click that image and ever come to the product page. And I have a photo. I usually just do one photo of the cards because having it in a in an envelope is like, you know, not really necessary. I sometimes put a gray outline, sometimes not this heavy, just to show where the perimeter of the card is, overhears the title of the card, the price of the card, the buy button, product details. You would fill out this again. Who did the art? What the sizes? And here we have five by seven, which is A7 size as we know, that it's blank inside. I put some information about where my photograph in this case was taken. With the quality of the card is all of my cards are printed on museum quality paper with archival inks because I also consider the imprints. So that is what your product page and description look like. And using. But using any shopping cart, you'd probably be the same. This is what a line of cards that are all related to each other might look like. So let's go back again and let's look at another. These are illustrations of Southwest doors. These were all paintings of mine. And so you see that they're all different. But they're all the same style, because they're all watercolors done by me in this particular illustration style. And so that is a six card line of cards. This one is interesting because it, I bought the art, I actually licensed the art from the artist and the right to make cards with them. And then I combine these beautiful watercolor paintings with quotes that I really loved. This again, this is a thinner border showing you the size of the card and how it actually looks. Okay? If you do put quotes on your cards and it's small like this, it is a very good idea. In your product details to put that entire quote, people won't always, if they're looking on a phone or an iPad, they won't be able to read just from what is on the card picture. And then you don't want titles that long. And so it's a real good idea here. I have to me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakable perfect miracle. And that's a Walt Whitman quote. That's just one more tip about descriptions. Descriptions are important. People read them. Actually. You, you wanna do it now this is two lines of six cards, or in other words, this line has 12 cards in it. This is the best-selling line in the gallery and online because it's just, you can use it for any occasion, any emotion. Some of them are similar looking, but it doesn't matter. It's more about the feeling. The mood is a very different mood than my Southwest doors were. But everything in this particular line matches that mood. So let's see what else we have here. Here's another illustrated line. These are, take it as a sign. They were all based on signs. And you'll see it's a very different style than I had on the Southwest stores, even though it's me and I'm doing I'm not painting as much as sketching here because I'm using ink with watercolor. And it's a, it's a style. It all hangs together. But it's not the same style as some of the other sets, but some artists don't have. I was an illustrator for a long time and I developed a bunch of styles from photo realism to cartoony. But they all are still meet. People can still tell that I did it, but they are different. And this plant line will show you that too. I did these in response to a class on Skillshare by a lovely artist whose name I can count does not come to mind at the moment. But for the assignments, I would do the plants very differently than she did. But in a much more realistic style is still not realistic. This is kinda half painting and half sketch. There are some ink lines, but a lot of them are obscured by the watercolor. But again, you would know as you looked at this line of cards, that they were all done by the same person. They have a style that absolutely matches. So I'll just, I'll let you look at these for a moment while I finish up saying that I am eager to see the three cards that you create for your project for this class. And I'm willing to answer any and all questions that you want to post in the discussion. And you can also contact me by e-mail, by contact information in my I'm in my profile and I will respond to email questions as well. I would really love for you to post your three cards that you make together in the project section. And that way we'll be able to all see what you consider matching style. And I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor. It is fun. No matter whether you become a big company, maybe that's not what you want, but maybe it is. Whether you do it big or you do it small. It's a wonderful way to get your art into the world, into people's hands. As we talked about earlier, the frame ability of A7 cards is a real boon because people can Matt and frame your art on their wall to that, of course, this is all a very inexpensive way to have art, but I think everybody should be able to have art. And sometimes they can't afford it and it is expensive. But anyway, I hope you have learned everything you were looking to learn. And I hope that you have the best of success in turning your art into a greeting card company.