Transcripts
1. Introduction and Class Project: Hi, I'm Nicky and
I'm bringing you this wonderful class
on how to turn your artwork into art prints. Now, when I first started, this was such a hurdle for me. It felt like magic. How did people get
their artwork onto the computer and then have
like hundreds of them printed. I have no idea how to do it. And it took me awhile to
figure out all the steps to find a good printer learning how to digitize your artwork. And that is, I am
bringing you this class because I know it can
be a game changer in terms of what
you can offer with your artwork and everybody. Not everybody, but a lot of people who are artists want
to sell their art work. I mean, it's, it lights
me up still when somebody purchases one of
my art prints from Etsy, It just makes me so
happy because part of my heart and soul and into
that piece of artwork. So I'm going to show you
how to do that today. We are going to start off by, I'm going to show
you how to gather inspiration and some other
things you need to think about when you are starting to paint or draw for
your art cranks. Then I'm going to show you
how to digitize your artwork. This is so key. I was so terrified of digitizing
my artwork for so long. I thought it was gonna
be so difficult, but spoiler alert, it's actually a lot easier than
you'd probably think it is. So don't worry about that. It's not like this gigantic
mountain you have to climb. I'm going to show you my top tips for
digitizing your artwork. Then I'm going to show
you how to get your prints or your artwork
ready for print. I'm going to show you my
recommended printing vendors. I absolutely loved the
vendor I work with noun and it was hard
to find a good one, and I finally did so I'm very happy to share
that with you guys. Then I'm going to
show you how to mock up your artwork so
it looks really good on platforms like Etsy or if you have your own
website like Shopify, I'm going to show you
how I do my mockups, which is also probably
easier than you think it is. I remember struggling so
bad thinking I had to take product photography and
you don't have to do that. Then I'm going to,
we're going to talk a little bit about SCO, something's words
to use and not to use and your titles and your image descriptions,
et cetera. I'm going to talk to
you about mailing and packaging so you can have a
good customer experience. And lastly, just a little
bit about marketing. The class project
is going to be you creating your own artwork
and sending it off to print. Of course, you don't have
to send it off to print, but I do want you to
at least digitize it and then put it in the class projects so you
can see what you create. I love seeing what
you guys create. Everybody is just so different. And that's the amazing
thing about art, is there's just
so much variation in variety and it's
a beautiful thing. But I'm really excited to
bring in this class to you. I can't wait to show you
how to turn your art into art prints so that you can start making money and
selling art prints. And just being stoked
that people are going to have the artwork in their house. So let's get started.
2. Supplies Needed: Before we get started, I want to talk about some of the software or tools that you're going to need
for this class. The first thing is
you're going to need either a scanner or a camera. Now when I say camera, you can totally use
your iPhone camera or your android Camera. Most phone cameras now are such high-quality that they'll
produce a great picture. If you, if you don't have a scanner or the way
you're gonna be bringing your artwork into your computer is by taking a photo of it. Just make sure you take a photo where there's really
good lighting. Natural light is best. You don't want
fluorescent lights or light's coming
over your head. You can also use something like a white board to reflect light
back onto your art work. Secondly, you are going
to need Adobe Photoshop. In my opinion,
adobe Photoshop is a gold standard for
digitizing your artwork. If you are wanting to do this
as a job or a side hustle, I highly recommend
having Photoshop to remove the background
of your artwork. I use it all the time. Then those are the only
two items that you need. And lastly, optional,
you can use Illustrator. I'm only going to be showing you a very short thing
in Illustrator. And I'm going to show you how to export your files out
of Photoshop as a PDF, but also an illustrator because that's how
I like to work. But you do not need Illustrator, but you will need Photoshop. Okay, now we can get started.
3. Getting Inspiration: Let's talk a little bit about getting inspiration
for your art work. Now, something that I've
discovered is you really, and this is going
to sound cliche, but you really need to
be true to yourself and that buzzword, authentic. The reason I say this is
because if you try to copy somebody else's style
or heaven forbid, copy other people's artwork, which I know that you
guys would never do that. But if you try to be something
other than yourself, it's going to show
through in your work. So part of being ready to
share your art prints with the world is really just
finding what you like to paint or draw or however
you create your art. It's really funny. My two most popular or three
most popular art prints in my Etsy shop were
all things that I just painted because I
wanted to paint them. So my California poppies, I wanted to paint bees because I actually first offered these as a way to raise money for the California
wildfires in 2020. And it came out of the
goodness of my heart. I wanted to paint
them and they are still one of my
most popular items, my Scottish, this'll same thing. I just painted it as part of the challenge
that I was doing. I did like a 31 day flower
challenge where I hosted it. And there was a bunch of
artists that painted with me that when cells like crazy, my Scotland prints
my California coil. I just, I remember sitting down lap a night after work and
I just started painting. And I'm like, Oh, I
want to paint a quail and that one's cells like crazy. So sometimes I think if you
think too hard about it, it works in the opposite way. So get into that flow state and paint things
that you love to paint because that definitely
will show through. There are some art
prints that I have been asked to do that
nobody has bought. So it's really funny
how that works. Or, you know, somebody
asked my DMs, Oh, why don't you do this flower and then it hasn't sold at all. So that's up to you if you want to paint things
that people suggest, sometimes getting
suggestions from people can be really helpful. So let's talk about some
practical ways to get inspiration or to know like, what do I want to
pay and what do or withdraw and put
it in my art shop. One way is if you have an
Instagram account or Facebook, you can do a poll and ask your followers what
kind of art they are, what kind of things
they would like to see you if you're a
watercolor artist, see you paint, or maybe
you sketch venues. And you could say, are there any venues that are really popular in your area? That's one way it's
kinda know it's popular. Another thing to do, and this kinda falls into SEO. That's why I've kinda
combined this section with gathering
inspiration and SEL, you want to see what's trending. And let me just say a
disclaimer to this. You want to see what's trending, but that is still in your style. So for example,
something that might be trending right now
is like tarot cards. And because I'm recording
this in September, so we're moving into
the Halloween season, tarot cards and spooky stuff. So I may see that. And that doesn't really
fit my style, right? Because my style is really
bright and whimsical. Maybe there's something I
could do to incorporate it, but don't feel like you
have to follow a trend. Make sure that you actually like it and that it
fits within your style. But trend reports from
Etsy can be very valuable, especially around
the holiday season, but they usually released
those quarterly. So if you're on Etsy
and you have a shot, makes sure when
you get that email that you read through
their trend reports that can be really
helpful in giving you inspiration of what
to paint or draw. Then Pinterest also
has trending reports. There's also a platform
called marmalade. They have I think
it's $19 a month, but you can get a
two-week free trial. And they show you what the
trends are for each day. And they use Pinterest
together, they're trending. So that's one way you can
kinda trend forecast. But in the end, the
most important thing here is that you are creating art that you love
because that will show through and you're
going to enjoy it more.
4. Digitizing Artwork For Print: In this lesson, I am
going to show you how to digitize your artwork. This is seriously
a game changer. You guys, I don't mean
to be dramatic about it, But I was so afraid for so long to learn how to
digitize my artwork. And it felt like this huge
mountain that I had to climb. And to be honest, it was way easier than
I thought it was. I just needed the right
tools and I googled a ton. But I finally figured
out a way that works for me to digitize my artwork. And it's made
thousands of dollars because it's the way that I make all my art prints, my
wedding stationary. Basically anything I do, That's watercolor artwork
and then has to be printed. Even my calligraphy
I digitized as well. But I say all this to
tell you that this is a super important aspect or knowledge-based to
have that can really change your life and
change your business. So with all that said,
let's get started. I am going to show you three different ways
to digitize today. I also want to make
a small side note. This is how I
digitize my artwork. And there are other
artists who do it differently and some
artists who do it the same. But this is my method. I'm going to show
you three examples in this video series. But this is my own method and
this is what I like to do. So if you for some
reason are like, Oh, I really would like to
explore a different way. You can totally do that, but this is quick and
easy and as I mean, pretty quick and easy and
has worked well for me. But I just wanted to say that there's always like
a different method for everything and that's
what I've really found out in just growing my business, that everybody does things
just a little bit differently. But I'm showing you
my method today and I hope you love
as much as I do. The first thing we
need to do is we need to scan in our artwork. And I'm going to start
with what I like to call the most difficult thing
to scan and earth, sorry, to digitize
and difficult. I just mean it's a little
more challenging than something that is
really high contrast. So as you can see,
these strawberries have little white flowers. Since the white flowers are so similar to the white paper, it's going to just take a little more effort
to get rid of the paper. But it's not impossible. And Photoshop has made
it really easy for us. We're in the scanning window and just a couple of things
I want to go over. Your scanning dialog box may
look different from mine. I'm using an Epson
Perfection V 600. I believe I got this in 2020, so there's probably a
new version by now, but I love this scanner. It's been incredible. If you don't have a scanner, you can also take a photo of your artwork to get it into
your computer to digitize. Most iPhones and Androids
have amazing cameras. Now, just make sure you have really good light when
you're taking a picture. Like I said, your dialog
box might be different, but a couple of things
that you'll have, something similar to what I have is you want to make
sure you're in photo mode. You're in photo mode. And then a couple of other things you want
to look out for. A really important thing
is your resolution. Now as you can see, I can go up to 1200 or
sorry, 12,800 in DPI. Dpi just means dots per inch. The more dots per inch, the higher quality
you're going to get. You never want to go
under 300 when you're doing artwork that
you're gonna be selling and sending to print. I like to go 600, but if I'm doing something
such as a repeating pattern, sometimes I get all the way
up here to 12 thousand just because I know that that could
be blown up super-large. And there's a point with watercolor artwork where
you can't cross that ledge. But for the most part, you can blow it up pretty large if you scan it in
at high enough quality, make sure your resolution
is at least at 300. Never go below that.
I'm doing 600. And then I have these
advanced settings where I can kinda play with the
contrast if I want. I can add the brightness. I don't really wanna do that. Listen to things I'm
going to do in Photoshop. So I just wanted to
make sure that it's pretty similar to what it
looks like in real life. That looks good. And one more thing to look
out for is your image format. There is debate and the artists community
about which is better. For me personally. I use a JPEG, I used to do tiffs, so tests do not
compress your artwork. That means you're going
to get a gigantic file, which that might
work out for you. For me, my computer
is so full of artwork that I don't
need a tiff file. I have found that
JPEG is just as good, in my opinion as a tiff file. So I use JPEG, but some other artists use tiff, figure out what's best for you. When I go ahead
and scan this in, like I was saying
in the beginning, there is just different artists find different methods
that work for them. So I'm showing you my method
and it works great for me. I'm going to grab my artwork and I'm just dragging it into Photoshop and it will populate. And I'm going to close this
out just because I don't want my computer to
have too many things running in the background. And now we have our beautiful
artwork or it's scanned in. And now we're in Photoshop. I am going to this is going to be a simple
thing in Photoshop, but if you guys have never
gotten into Photoshop before, I recommend taking
a beginner class. There's tons of them on
Skillshare, even YouTube. But I am going to walk you
through the tools that I use, but I won't be giving you a
whole tutorial on Photoshop. Now what we need to
do is we need to remove this white
paper background. If this was super high contrast, say all of that, we didn't have this
white, it was green. I would be able
to just come over here to my magic eraser. And I would be able, oops, sorry, make sure you
have your layer selected. Oh, one thing I like to
duplicate this layer, so I'm just holding
it down and hovering over this plus sign and label this original and turn it off just in case
for some reason, if something happens to my artwork and I can't get
it back to the original. I have the original down here. Or if I've done edits to this, I can look at the original
to see the comparison. I have my artwork
layer selected and I'm just going to come over here and remove the white background. Now, I know what's
going to happen, but I want you guys
to see because the contrast between
the white paper and the green is so high, it easily remove the
background really, really clean on
the edges against the screen because it's so
different from the white. But these flower petals are not very different
from the white paper. And so it picked
up those pixels as well and got rid of
my pretty petals. And I don't want that. So we're going to
Command Z and go back. What I need to do is
save these puddles. So there's a couple of
methods you can do for that. The first one that
you can explore is this magic eraser
has a tolerance. 65 is really high, but if I go down, say to 20, I can kind of play around to see if it still gets
rid of the white. Still got rid of that. Let's go down to ten. The ten actually gets rid of the paper and
keeps my petals. But if you add a
layer underneath, and I always like
to do this with all of my watercolor artwork. When I'm cleaning it up, I add a layer underneath and
I usually make it black, whatever is enough different
from the painting. And you can see that, yes, it kept our petals, but now we have all this, for lack of a better word, junk. It's still paper
around our artwork. And that's just going to be a ton of work for us
because we're going to have to come in here with an
eraser and lightly erase it. So what I like to do is I have
another method that I use, just trying to get
my paper back. I'm gonna go ahead and add that layer underneath
again that's black. And make sure you're
on your artwork. I, there's two things
you can do here. One, you can come up to your lasso tool and
click Magnetic Lasso. I zoom in, so I'm on a Mac, I'm pressing command
plus to zoom in. And magnetic tool will basically
magnetize to any pixels. It can see the are the same. So I click and all I did was just one-click and now
my finger off the mouse, but I'm just dragging my
mouse around this petal. I'm not clicking. If you do click, say it's kind of getting out of hand and you're
like No, go there. You can click to help
it along its way. If you click somewhere
and it's an accident, hit delete, and it'll
delete that anchor point. This is one way that you
can get rid of the paper. Essentially, what I'm doing
here is I'm going to create a border around the
petals to protect them. As you can see, I took
that all the way back. Hold on. I don't know
if that was clear. Let me redo it. I went all the way back
to my beginning point and I clicked on that
beginning anchor point. Then I get the marching ants. I'm going to hit delete, and it'll get rid
of that section. Like I was saying, I want to
create a border around this, all the white areas
so that when I use that magic eraser at
a higher tolerance, it will easily get
rid of the white, but it won't get rid of
these areas because they're essentially protected
because the paper is already been removed. Now the thing with the
Magnetic Lasso Tool is it can work well if
this works for you, but I don't like this. I don't like the
little jaggedy edges and I would rather
do it another way. The other way that
I'm going to do is come back over here and
grab just the eraser tool. If you come up here to
the top left-hand side, you can play with the
size of your eraser tool. Another shortcut
is the brackets, the open and close
brackets, oops, we'll make it larger
or smaller as well. Then the hardness,
I'm going to do full hardness because I want it to be a really clean edge. But if for some reason you're doing something where
you want a softer edge, you can change up your brushes. There's a ton of them in here. I rarely use this
unless I'm doing a landscape painting
and maybe I'm having to make the bottom of it fade out because
it's going to go on an invitation suite or a map. That's really the
only time I use that. It just depends on the
style of your artwork to the hard brush. And I'm going to
increase the size a bit. Then I'm going to zoom in here. And I'm just going to
make that little border. I'm holding down the mouse. I'm clicking and holding down. It can get cumbersome on
your finger and your joints. So this might not be the
method that you want to use, but I don't have
that much to do, so it's not going to
bother me that much. Sorry, you don't
need to do oops. You don't need to make
that whole line across. I was just coming off of
using the magnetic tool. So I was thinking that all
you need to do is make, I like to call it a moat
around the castle that kinda just protects it
from being invaded. I'm using quotation
finger quotation marks because it's going to protect, when you use that
magic eraser tool, it's going to
protect your petals. So like right here, this would still connect and
probably delete this petal. So make sure that you really are getting all of that
really light paper out. And I just go around
in all the spaces without the paper is connecting
to a really light area. And I do this. So I'm going to speed this up because why would you
want to watch me do this? I'll go back and show you
the magic eraser tool. Okay, so now we're coming back and I have the
Magic Eraser tool. And I am going to
move the tolerance up to 55 because I want
a really clean line. And I'm just going to click. And it's so easy. It's just getting rid of all that white paper and I don't have to worry
about it getting rid of my puddles
because we protected it by erasing the paper. And that looks amazing. Some things to look
out for is I'm going to go back and grab
my regular eraser tool. Does anything outside here
like these little tiny dots, make sure you get rid of those. I cannot tell you how many times I've sent
something off to print and then I get
it back and there's just a tiny little dot. And I have to send
it to get reprinted because I'm just such
a perfectionist. I can't have people buying my art prints
and that happening. So just make sure you keep a
close eye on those things. Another thing is you
might want to come in here and clean up
some of these areas. Depending on how
smooth you want this, you might want to switch to that softer brush if
that's more of your style, I like a clean line. And just a note. This is okay. This is watercolor artwork and you're working on
textured paper. So if you have areas like
this where it's kinda jagged, that's just really the nature
of watercolor artwork. So don't feel like you're
doing something wrong or this is ugly or something because it's not
it's just the nature of it. I like to clean it up a little
bit because sometimes I think the paper might have still been on
here a little bit, but don't feel like you have to make it
absolutely perfect. I do like to zoom in though, because here I can see that the paper texture or there were still some paper left in here. And I would probably
smooth this out. Just a tad. This guy over here. Yeah. So there's just
some paper texture in here because it might have been a little similar
looking to the leaves. I'm not going to do too much. I want to show you
guys a couple of methods for printing this. So now that I have my artwork. I, let's say I want to
print on an eight by ten, or let's do an eight by eight. So click new inches. Okay, So this is
something I haven't gone over printing my printing
vendors with you guys yet, but we need to set up our
file for the printer. So what I'm going to
share with you guys, they require a
quarter of an inch bleed and I just include
it in the artwork file. I don't do like an add
bleed or whatever. I need to check with your printer what they require because every
printer is different. This is what my recommended
vendor recommends. And I do an 8.25 by 8.25 that gives a quarter of
an inch all the way around. And all I'm going to
do is click Command C. I'm not sure if you're
on a PC what that is, but you're copying this
and you're pasting it. Then you need to this is
your little moving box. Make sure you have
Shifts selected so that your artwork isn't warping. Like if I don't have
Shifts selected, this is what happens. And then just fit it
inside of this box because this is how you're
going to print it. Okay? You can leave it just like this. It looks beautiful. Or since we digitize this
and there's no background, we can change the color
of the background. I think maybe a really
pretty light blue, kinda like a cornflower blue. And then maybe one thing
I like to do is I add another layer underneath and
I make that layer white. And you'll see why
in just a second. Because then I come up here
and I reduce the opacity. So I can just get
a really light. This helps me get the, the color the way I want it. For some reason I
can't always get it right in this little
color box here. So that's what I like to
do a reduce the opacity. So I think this is adorable and I want to send it
to get printed. Just so you guys know. If you don't know
what a bleed is, a bleed is just this, oops, this space around your artwork that
can get cut off. It's not going to
affect your artwork. For something like this, it doesn't really matter because the artwork isn't
close to the edge. But if we were doing something, we call it full bleed, where it did go
right to the edge. It would end up cutting
off some of my artwork. So that's why you
need to use a bleed, but you have to use it
for everything even if your artwork looks like this because that's what
the printers require. It kinda just cover
it's the printers. Now we want to save this as a PDF because we're going
to send it to our printer. And most printers require you
to save artwork as a PDF. I'm going to save a copy. And let's call this strawberry. I highly recommend having a really good naming convention and file naming convention. It will save you so much time. I have over 60 art prints and I cannot tell you enough
to stay organized. It'll save you so much time, especially when you
start saving a lot. So I'm just going to
save this to my desktop. And I wanted to save
this as a Photoshop PDF. So you need a PDF and I'm going to uncheck Preserve
Photoshop Editing abilities. Our printer does not need that, plus it just makes
your file size even bigger and we
don't need that either. And we just save as a PDF. Now I do use one other
method that is Illustrator. This is actually how I
do all of my art prints. I like to do them
in Illustrator. You could totally do Photoshop, just like you did it. There. I always
digitized in Photoshop and then I make my art
prints in Illustrator. I'm not a 100% sure
why I do this, but I just have always done it. It's the way I do all
my wedding invitations and send them out to print. Illustrator is kinda just
something that is my favorite. I'm going to show you
this method as well. Same thing here we're
doing to five by 8.25. We don't have to worry
about adding a bleed because it's already
in our art board. Some advanced options,
RGI go RGB color. This is another one of
those things that's kinda controversial in the art world. When you go to art school
or marketing or business, or even when I worked in
an advertising agency, we sent everything
to print as CMYK. Cmyk is the color
mode for a printer. However, my printers
have told me that everything gets transferred from RGB to CMYK anyways. So it doesn't really matter. Personally I found that I
liked the way my art prints look better when it's RGB
color that I send to print. So that's what I choose. But if you are going to
order like a big order baby, just test one out first to see if you're happy
with how the color is. I'm super picky about color and to me it always looks great. Now that I have this art board
open in Adobe Illustrator, these programs work
really well together. I am going to click
and hold down. And then you can see
my little plus sign. And I just drop it
into Illustrator. And there it is. I'm just going to move it into, and I'm going to print this
one with a white background. I'm just going to show
you how I save this. I save a copy. We'll just put copy. I come down here to Adobe PDF. I actually like to name my
print files, print ready. It saves me a lot of
time because when I go into my files, I know that that's
ready to go to print. Now up here are some options. I keep it at custom. I used to do high-quality
print or Press Quality. And several of the printer
printing vendors I use for invitations and art
prints said, just do custom. Then remove, preserve
illustrator editing abilities. You do not need that. And then come to compression and uncheck compressed
texts and line art. You do not want it to do that. It will mess up your
artwork and Save PDF. The next form of digitizing that I wanted
to show you is what to do. If you have a painting
or a piece of artwork that goes
edge to edge, edge. So we would call this full bleed because it's going all
the way to the edge. What I did was I
scanned this venue painting in and I just
dropped it into Photoshop. So now I want to rotate
this so it's the right way. And it's pretty simple.
What I'm going to do. As I mentioned before, it's really important
that you paint and the dimensions that you
want something printed in. You don't have to paint. Like if you're going to
print it out 11 by 14, you don't have to
paint at 11 up 14, you could paint at whatever
would be comparable. So you could paint
at 1013 or whatever, but has to be the dimensions
have to be the same. That way when you
go to drop this into a document
that is 11 by 14, because you're going to send
it to your printer that way. You don't have to cut off
parts of your painting. I'm going to rotate this just slightly because I scanned
it a little crooked. If you want to save
yourself time, make sure you place
your artwork on the scanner without
it being crooked. Oh, there it goes again. I can see that I'm getting this spinning
rainbow wheel here. And I'm guessing it's because
this is a gigantic file. I'm gonna come up here to Image. Oops, I need to
press Enter to set that image, image size. So I can see that the image
size is 45 megabytes. I don't need it to be that big
for something that's being printed at a size eight by ten. So what I'm gonna do is
reduce the size here. And when you have this
little guy clicked, it is going to adjust the height based on
what the width is. You want this on when you're resizing your
artwork like this. Otherwise, I'll show
you what happens. This is what happened. So it's not going to resize
it for you appropriately. I'm going to drop this
down to 1504 megabytes is fine for what I'm
doing and I'm going to drop it down to 300 resolution. This isn't being blown up big. Remember it's only eight by ten, so it's totally fine
to megabytes is fine. It's just going to make my
computer run a lot faster because we don't need
our file to be that big. I'm all for big files, but for something like this, you don't need that big if
you're making a pattern or you're going to blow
this up to 24 by 36. You would want it to
be larger like that, but we're not gonna do that, so we don't have to
worry about that. Okay, we have our artwork and there's a couple
of things here. If you feel like when
you scanned in or took a photo of your artwork and
needs some adjustments, you can come over here to
your panel adjustments panel. If you don't see your adjustments
panel come up here to Window and just click on adjustments and
it'll bring it up. I don't use a ton of these. The ones I use
most are exposure, brightness, hue and saturation
and selective color. So if you come in
here and click, you can see if I toggle
this little triangle here, it's going to be
brighter or less bright. It's scanned in
basically perfect. So I'm okay with how it looks. So I'm not going to add that. There's also hue and saturation. So if you're Hughes off
a little bit or you want to make it
like a funky hue, you can do that here. You can also increase the saturation or
decrease the saturation. That's a cool look, maybe a little more like Bobo. And you can also play
with the lightness of it. Selective color. I encourage you
guys to just play with these because honestly, nobody's ever given
me a straight answer with how exactly these work. I've just always
played with them until I get the color
the way you want. But, okay, let's say
that we selected white. If I reduce the black, the white is going to
come out a lot more. If I increase the black, the white is going to get really muddied and turned into
almost like a beige. But all these other
ones like yellow, the yellow is working
a little bit magenta. Like cayenne is not
working at all. So just play with those and
see how they work for you. I'm going to delete them
because I don't need them. I'm happy with the
way this looks. Now, as you can see, there's some paper here and some pencil lines that
I want to get rid of. When I come up here
to my Marquee Tool, rectangular marquee tool. I'm clicking and holding
down my mouse and just making a rectangle
around my art work. You wanna get it in just
a tiny bit inside because you want it to get rid of the paper on the
outside that I'm releasing my mouse
right-clicking. Oops, make sure you have
your layer selected. If you don't have
your layer selected, you're not going to see
these options here. Right-click layer via cut. So now what it's done is it's
cut out that background. And now I can just trash that
because I don't need it. Now I have a perfect
eight by ten and it's ready to be moved into a document where it
would be printed. A couple of things. If you notice up here, I can see that this artwork looks like I have a couple of
watercolor splatters on it. And I want to fix that. So I'm going to grab
my spot healing brush. And all I'm gonna do is just click and it literally
just gets rid of them. But be careful if you click
too close to something. Sometimes it makes the funky. It's actually not
doing it right now, but all you have to do
is click because what this tool does is it matches the pixels that are
around that spot. It's amazing. I love it so much. Okay, so this looks good. And what I would do, I'm not going to
do this because I just showed you guys
how to do this, but I would open up a new
file that is eight by or with our printing vendor
recommendations 8.25 by 10.25. I would copy and paste
this in there and then fall what I told you guys before about
sending it off to print. So that's how you do
something that is full bleed. The last thing I
want to show you is if you have something
that's too large for your scanner bed and you need to maybe like scan it in twice
different sections of it. I want to show you
how to do that. There's a really simple
fix in Photoshop. Let's say that this painting was bigger than my scanner bed, so I only could get part
of it for each scan. I scan those and so you can
see what I'm talking about. You can see that I had to
do this, this section. In this section, It's very
important when you're scanning that to make sure that it's in the same position on
your scanner bed. So basically what I did was I scanned this one and
then I just pulled it through straight across and scan this one because you
need them to line up. Now what I'm going to
do them in Photoshop, I'm going to file automate, Photo Merge and browse. And I'm going to select
those two files. I'm going to hit Shift
or hold down Shift. So it selects both of
them and then open. And then you can watch
Photoshop do its magic. You can see it's created basically a clipping
mask of both. And it is totally together. It just seemed
together perfectly. I just merge those layers down. And then from there, you can just move forward like I taught you
in the previous lessons. And easy peasy, super easy way to get your
artwork back together. I don't recommend
doing three or four. Like if you have to
cut your ears down to three or four times
and scanning those, it doesn't really
merged more than two. Well, I recommend if you have something like that
going to staples, usually they have a
large format scanner that they can scan
your artwork in at. But I've never had to use that. This is enough for me. And I hope that these lessons
were helpful for you guys.
5. Printing Your Art: The next thing I'm
going to show you is where to print
your art prints. Now you have a couple
of different options. I am going to show you
my favorite printer, which is print swell. But if you don't want to have a bunch of artwork in stock, you might want to do a
service like print on-demand. I do not use these services. So I'm not going to walk you through the
steps to do this, but I am going to tell you
that these are available. So if you want to be able
to send your prints out, but you're not going
to send them out. You're going to use this
site that prints on-demand, like print full or Gooten. I actually did use
guten when I first started and I didn't
make any sales. But I sent one to myself and it wasn't
the quality is good, but it wasn't what
I was looking for. I wanted to have a paper that felt more like watercolor paper. And the options
that Gooten had at the time was kind of a glossy, almost poster like paper. And it was not what
I was looking for. But if you something
that interests you to use a service
that prints on-demand, check prideful, or Gooten out. Print on-demand means that you upload your designs
to this site. You can integrate it with
something like Etsy. So when you get an order, it sends a message
to print out the, the order, so the art print and then send it
to your customer. There are a couple
of things that I don't like about that
I already mentioned about the quality or it's
not necessarily bad quality. They are good quality but not what I was
specifically looking for. Also, you're not able
to brand your items. I know there is. I can't remember which one of these two companies does it, but one of them will
brand your item. But I I think one of them well, but I just didn't like that. I wanted to have full control. I want it to be able to
write a little note to my customers and it
didn't fit well for me. The other option is to keep inventory and have a
stock of art prints. Now, don't worry, you're
not going to have to print like a thousand of them. The quantities on prints well, fulfillment or as low as
I think for and it's, it's very inexpensive so you don't have to worry about having a ton of art prints. However, I do have a
pretty good amount. I think I have about 50 of each art print and I
have over 50 in my shop. But I have this
space to keep them. And you don't have to have
that many art prints. You can start off with a small
collection of five or ten. It's up to you, but I'm
going to show you how I print my own because I like
having them in my hand. I like the paper that
they use at prints. Well, and I also like to send like little notes and
branded the way that I want to principal fulfillment
when they have a customer-facing site and
it's just prints well.com. You do not want
to use that site. You want to use prints. Well, fulfillment.com, this
is their wholesale site. Since it's a wholesale site, you do have to apply to
get a wholesale license. But when I started,
oops, I'm sorry. We need to use their incognito
I'm in in cognitive, so it doesn't log
into my account. They are a wholesale site, which means that they need to know that you're a business. Don't worry if you're
just starting out. You have an Etsy store. They're usually fine with that. When I started, I wasn't
even offering art prints. I was doing weddings
stationary because this is where I print some of my
wedding stationary as well. And they totally accepted me. I just gave them my website URL. So you just select Order here. It's kind of a weird
way that you get to the to apply for their
wholesale account. And then say that you need help and just write
it here application. There's also a ton of
other resources on here. If you want to
know what you need a template or die cut templates, envelope liner is
just about everything I know that's kind of
getting into well, I'm overriding
wedding stationary and we're talking about
art prints today, so you don't have to
worry about that. But if you ever want to offer
more things in your shop, like notepads or stickers
or gift tags, coasters. There's tons of options here, Folded Cards, this is where I get my Folded Cards as well. But for right now, you need to apply so that they'll
give you the cow. They're a family run business and they're, they're so great. I love working with Prince
while they've always been so great when I have questions or if I need something
as a rush order, you just go ahead
and fill this out. They are going to ask
for your website. If you don't have a website yet, maybe just tell them that you're just starting your business. I'm guessing that they're gonna be pretty open with taking just about anybody who's wanting to start their own
art print store. They're not going to
take you if you're not interested in being a business, like if you just want to
print stuff for your house, they're going to direct you
to the regular customer site. But once you fill this out, you'll hear back
within a few days and see if you are accepted, which most likely you
totally will be accepted. Once you're accepted,
then you will be able to get into the fulfillment site. So I've placed a ridiculous
amount of orders with them. And what you're going to do once you have your account
is start your order. You get inside of their site. I'm just keeping the
short rate here because this has like my
personal information underneath this line, as well as my
credit card number. So I won't be sharing
that on here, but I'm going to show
you how you go ahead and get your art prints ordered. You're going to come up to here, what type of product
do you want? We are going to select black card and choose
the size that we want. We ended up going with
an eight by eight. I'm going to come down here
and select eight by eight. Then what paper would you like? They have a ton of
different papers here. For my art prints, I use a £110. That's what this
number is on the side. It's how heavy the paper is. Felt. Bright white. I like to use bright
white because I do a lot of watercolor artwork and
a lot of colorful art. I want it to be
true to the color. If you choose something
like warm white, you're going to get
a little bit of that yellow and it's not going to
look as bright and crisp. I highly recommend or not, it's going to look Chris, but it's not going to be the color that you're
seeing on your screen. I go with 110,
felt bright white. I do not recommend going
any lower than 110. These are texts, white papers, papers that are in books or
computer paper really low. You don't want this. You could go to, this is another
paper I recommend. The felt finished has an actual felt finish if
feels like watercolor paper, That's why I like to use it. That's also another
reason I don't use print on-demand sites
because I don't get to choose the paper like I do here. You could also are one of the other ones I
really like is 120. It's a little bit heavier,
eggshell, ultra white. That's a great one
to print artwork. It's what I use for all
my invitations weights. So that's a good one. And then you don't
really want to use these cotton papers because
sometimes with cotton paper, your colors can get
a little faded. So I don't recommend
choosing that. And then of course there's
double thick if you wanted to. So it's the same type of paper. The felt bright white
but it's double thick. The only time we do this
is around the holidays. If I have a premier
print that I am selling, I'll do the double thick, but for all my other art prints, I do the 110, felt bright white. So you select that and then do you want
printed on the back? I don't print on the back, but some people like to put
information on the back. Just make sure if you do print
on the back that it's not super dark because
it'll show through your artwork if there's any light coming
in from behind it. And you definitely
don't want that. So printing on the front only. And then we go ahead and
we select our price, or sorry, we select
our quantity. This is wholesale pricing. So if I ordered 20 of them, it's only $0.91 for
each art print. And then you sell
them at 20, $25. You have to take into account Etsy fees and all that stuff. But it's a pretty sweet deal. I usually go. It just depends. If I am reordering something
that's selling a lot, I'll order a lot, but maybe it's something I'm testing
out for the first time. I might just order ten. Then you select this product. And will this be a
variable print job? No. Variable printing is
when you're printing. Maybe it's the same design, but you're changing one
thing about it every time. Would you're doing art prints, you're never gonna be using
variable, variable printing. I use this for envelopes
because if I'm doing a wedding, the addresses are
gonna be different, but you don't need
this no quantity. Perfect. Bag, the
bag it for you. And then you come
in here and you're going to upload your PDF. Now remember, we made
sure that we had that extra quarter of an inch because that's
what they require. So it's going to load up here. There's an extra quarter
of an inch here. If you're ever wondering
what the blade needs to be. For principle, it's always
a quarter of an inch, so just add 0.25 to whatever
your dimensions are. So if it's eight by ten, it's going to be 8.25 by 10.25. That looks good. Sometimes if you know your
your file is high-quality. Don't worry if it's a
little blurry here, sometimes it is
just a little bit. We don't need this to
be a die cut shape. You don't need holes
drilled or angled corners, so we just hit Next. And then you just add to cart. Follow the instructions below. It's going to ask you
how you want to ship it and asks you for your
credit card information. Obviously, we're not
going to scroll down because it has all
mine down there. Super simple. I really recommend
if you do have multiple prints ordering
multiples at a time, because sometimes shipping can
be a little bit expensive. I also, you are going
to need packaging, which we will talk
about in a little bit. But that's how I
order my art prints. It's really simple,
straightforward. You just upload a
high-quality PDF and there'll be sent to you and then you can ship them
out to your customers.
6. Mocking Up Your Art: Now that we have our art
print sent off to print, what we need to do is create these pictures
of our artwork. So it might be
surprising to you, but these are actually
not photos that I took. These are called Mockups. It's really funny because
sometimes people ask me, where did you get
that frame and I can't find that frame anywhere. And the truth is that
this is a mock-up. So a mock-up, somebody takes
a photo and then they make, sometimes it's only a JPEG, but I like to use ones
with smart objects, which I will explain
in one minute. But basically they just take
a photo and then they make this a smart objects
so you can easily put your image inside of this. So what I'm gonna do is I
like to find these on Etsy, but you can also find
these on Creative Market. That's another place. I'm not sure if there's other
places that sell mock-ups. I'm sure there are, but these are the two
sites that I use. I find that Etsy is a little
bit more or a little less expensive because at C doesn't take as much as
Creative Market does. I sell my artwork on Creative
Market and they take 50%. So that is one of the reasons why things
are a little more expensive is because people are wanting to make the same amount of money,
which I don't blame them. What I'm going to do is
I'm just going to search. Because remember our image
is eight by Earth's, our artwork is eight by eight. So we want to search
that kind of mock-up. I'm going to put in eight
by eight frame mockup. Now, do this whatever
size you have. So if you're doing
an eight by ten, do an eight by ten, make
sure it's a mock-up. One thing to definitely keep your eye on is
some of these are not. Okay, perfect
example right here. They're not Photoshop files. This is, it's telling you right now what you're
gonna get a right here, one jpeg and one PDF. So you can use those
and I will show you how to make your own smart file. But honestly, just spend
a little extra money and get the ones with
the smart file, it's so much easier. So I'm just going to
write in Smart Object. And you're looking
for a PSD file. None of these are square, okay, this one is square. So I bet you this is only 198. It's probably not PSD file. Nope, it's a PDF file. So you really have to
pay attention to this. It's going to save
you work in the end. No. Actually. Yes. Okay. So this one is saying it's a
PSD Photoshop smart object. And usually if they
have a zip file, you know that it's
the smart object file because it's a Photoshop file in Photoshop files are really big. So that's how you
are going to find your mock-ups to
find one that fits your aesthetic,
fits your branding. I definitely recommend
keeping it simple. You don't want to get
one that is really busy because I think that just takes away
from your artwork. For example,
something like this. I probably wouldn't
go for just because, well, first of all, it's
dark and that's not my vibe. But also there's a lot going on. It doesn't really
match my artwork, but say you do lettering art and it's just
really simple and minimalistic and it
kinda has a bow whole vibe that might be something
that you really like. Let's just take a little look. And just so you guys know, there's literally
mock-ups for everything. Here's a mug right here. I do. So I also have a template shop
online and I order or yes, I order all my mockups
from Etsy and I am mockups for invitations, for bar menus, for
welcome signs, this kind of thing where
it's a seating chart. So they're everywhere. It's awesome. I love it. Also. If you're doing something
around the holidays, getting one that's
more holiday themed. You can also make your own too, but I like to buy them
because it's just easier. I already have my mock-up here, and it's a PSD file
with a Smart Object. I just opened it up. And as you can see, you need to come over
here to your panel. And a lot of times
there will be, oops, this is the wrong file. Hold on 1 second. Alright, We're back in business. This is the file that I needed. And as you can see over here, I have all these
different layers so you can remove the shadow, you can remove the
mount if you want. But I'm happy with it just as it is over here on this panel with all
your different layers, you'll notice one
that says artwork. Sometimes it'll say artwork, sometimes it will
say place artwork here or double-click or
something like that. This little Sign right here means
that it's a smart object. I'm going to double-click and it's going to lead
me into a new layer. And I'm going to
grab my art work, my PDF, and I'm just
going to drag it in here. And we want the trim box. And it's going to
place our artwork. Another thing you
can do is when you export as for your
just hit Enter. So it sets when you export this, when you're getting ready
to send it to print, what you can also do is
export it as a JPEG. I usually use jpegs in here, but you can do a
PDF to, it's fine. Now that this is set, essentially what it's done is it's put my artwork
on this layer. So I'm going to save this. So File Save. Once it's done saving
on this layer, because it's a smart object, it automatically saves here. Now, if you just saw what I did, I couldn't see my artwork. That's because it was
under this mounting layer. So I just moved it above that. I think that this is something faulty in the mockup
that I purchased. Typically, you don't
have to do that, but if that ever happens, just play around with
where your layers out. There. I have it so easy. There's my artwork and it looks beautiful
and it's simple. Now, if you are working in Etsy, etsy likes their images to
be 2 thousand by 2 thousand. And so open up a separate art
board that's 2 thousand by 2 thousand pixels and you
don't have to do this. But sometimes I just want to follow all the
rules of z because I want my stuff to show up
in their searches and I know that good photos are
going to show it better. So I just listened
to what they say. I'm back over here in my
mock-up and I'm hitting Shift and selecting
all of these layers. I'm going to hit,
I'm copying them. So again, I'm on a Mac, so Command C or Control C, if you're on a PC, coming
over to my 2 thousand by 2 thousand pixel document
and Command V pasting. And then make sure you
hold down shift so you're, your artwork doesn't get warped. And then I just move it, size it to that 2 thousand by
2 thousand pixel document. And then I export this and I can load it into my
listing for Etsy. If you don't use Etsy, make sure you name your files. Sorry, that's one more thing. And make sure you name
your files really well. Because sometimes file
are actually a lot of times filenames get
picked up by Google. So do like watercolors, strawberry artwork, wall decor. You want to name it well, because Google might pick up
those words on the image. That's how you use the mockups, super easy and
you're going to get high-quality photos
for your Etsy. Or if you have
like Shopify shop, it's awesome and it's so easy. Yes, you're going to have to
spend a little bit of money, but to me it's totally worth it. I don't think I've
ever spent more than for a simple
mock-up like this, I've never spent more than $10, so I can use this mockup as
many times as I need to. If you look at my Etsy, I have a lot of eight by ten. I use that mockup over
and over and over again. I think I paid $6 for it. So definitely
recommend splurging and buying a good
quality Mockup. Now, I'm going to show you
how to make your own mockup. And i'm, I'm going to be using an example that is
not an actual frame, but you could do the same thing. It's just that I don't have any really good photos over frame. But if you have a, you need to take a high-quality photo of a frame and then you can make a smart object,
object out of it. As I've brought in this artwork, that this was actually
something that was a giveaway another
station or took these. They're just photos. So it's only a JPEG, not a PSD file or
a smart object. Yet. She took these for people
to use those mockups. And you can just kinda
drop in your artwork here. But it doesn't look quite
as good as a Smart Object. And the smart, smart object
just makes it really easy. I'm going to show you how
to do that right now. So say you took a
really amazing photo of a frame that you
love at your home. Now you want to bring it into Photoshop and make
your own mockup. What you're going to
do is add a layer. And then you are going to
grab the rectangle tool. And you probably
want to zoom in for this one I'm going to do is I'm going
to make a rectangle. Don't worry about
it being perfect. So I'm just holding
down my mouse click right now and
dragging it out till, I mean, that's pretty perfect. Sometimes it's not this perfect. I'm going to make
it not perfect. So I can show you
guys how I tweak it. Then I'm going to release it. I do not want it to be green. So switch it to white. There we go. Okay, wants me to
raster size that. I've switched it to white and
I need to transform this. So again, I'm on a Mac, I'm sorry if you
guys are on a PC, but you're going to have, I don't know what the
commands are for a PC, but for the Mac it's Command T. I'm transforming this. And then I'm going to hold
down Command and move. Can you see how it's moving
however I want it to? I'm just snapping it to these corners because I want
it to be perfectly lined up. Again. I'm holding down command. And I'm just making sure
that it comes all the way out to these edges
and then hit Enter. Perfect. Now, make sure your rectangle layer is
selected and rename it. Place artwork here. Come up here to layer, scroll down to Smart Objects, and then hit Convert to Smart. Now, if I double-click
on that layer, it leads me here where
I can place my artwork. So I'm just going to grab a
design that I did recently. Let's see. Here's one to two digits. Okay. I'm just going to place it. Hit Enter. Remember to save.
I hit Command S, but you can also
save up here and there it is on our mockup found one other thing that can make it look slightly more realistic is select your
artwork here layer and go to Blending Options. And you want to make your
Blend Mode multiply. So you see how it kind of
switched it a little bit. Let's see. I'll go back to normal. So normal is just really opaque and multiply grabs the
texture from the background. If you don't like that,
don't worry about it. You don't have to do that, but that's how you
make a mock-up. It's so easy. So you would follow
the same rule for a frame if you wanted to
do it in a frame as well. Like I said, I highly, highly recommend
having mock-ups. It's going to make things
look really clean. Also, it's going to make things look consistent in your shop. I can't tell you how bad. I wish I could show
you an old photo of my shot because it
was just a hot mess. I had like gold frames
and then I had pictures. I took myself and
was not selling things at all because
honestly it looks so bad. You want somebody to
come to your shop and feel relieved if you
guys are in the US. I don't know if you've ever
shopped at Forever 21. But when I go into that store, I feel so stressed out
because everything is so cluttered and it's just a
mess and it's unorganized. And there's like different
styles everywhere. And you don't want
people to feel like that when they
come to your Etsy shop, you want them to feel like happy that they're
there and like everything is clearly organized
and you don't want mockups with a ton
of stuff going on because your artwork is the focal point and you want them to focus on your artwork. So that's my $0.02 about how you do your
mockups and your frames. Next, we're going to
discuss packaging. One last thing I forgot
to mention before we move on is that you need to
save this as a smart object. So what you're going to do
is just go ahead and delete this layer and delete the
layer and then hit Save. So now this is
blank and you still have that artwork layer. And you're going to Save, As I'm just going to
save it to my desktop. You're going to
save this as your, this is a single card mock-up, but if you add a frame mark
mock-up, just name it, whatever it is, and make sure
that it's a Photoshop file, then you'll be able to use this just like any other mockup. One side note, if this
is not your photo, you cannot use it. So you can't like, take a screenshot of a frame
that you see and do this. That is illegal because
it's not your property. Make sure that you're
either taking the photo or purchase the photo or you're using a site such as Unsplash, where they have royalty-free
images that you can take. But if you're just
on the Internet and you see a photo and
you screenshot it, that that's not okay. So make sure not to do that. I don't want you
to get in trouble. Alright, now we're gonna
move on to packaging.
7. Packaging Your Prints: Let's talk about packaging. Now, when I first
started my Etsy shop, I didn't give a lot of
thought into packaging. But it's really,
really important. You do want to have a brand
voice and your packaging. And you want, when somebody
receives your items, you want them to be really
excited about them. You don't want to send something that looks like you don't care. Now you don't have
to spend a ton of money to have nice packaging. If you want to, of course you can, but I know when you're
first starting out, you're not really looking
to spend tons and tons money because you're
not really sure how you are, how successful
your shop will be. I wanted to show you a
couple of things that I use. When I first started, I really, one of the things
that stopped me from offering Art Prints was I didn't know how to package them and I didn't want them
to get bent in the mail. Then I figured out that you need something called
a rigid mailer. This is an envelope. It's size nine
inches by 12 inches. I'm going to show you
guys after I show you my items where I get them online so you can get
them to if you want to. But it's it's pretty thick and the post office will
usually not bend knees. I have had them shoved
into a mailbox before. So that is why I now have this sticker that
says do not bend. Make sure you put something on your packaging that says do not bend if you're
sending art prints. This is a rigid mailer. It's a large envelope, has a sticky right here. All the packaging that I use is biodegradable and that's why I like to use the
company that I use. I tried to reduce waste
as much as possible. The second thing I'll use is
this plastic sleeve. Again. This is, I think
nine by 12 inches. And that is just to
protect my artwork. You could send it just in this. This is just adding a
little nicer to it. This is also
biodegradable plastic. I don't know if you
call it plastic, if it's biodegradable, but I know that it's not your typical plastic that stays in landfills
for 400 years. Something else I
also really like to put with my items is
a thank you note. When I first started, I
just hand wrote these, but now I have just a general one and I'll usually write a
note on the back, especially if somebody is ordering one of my favorite
art prints that I've created, this little corky cottage. I just love it so much. So I usually write a
little note or any of my Scotland prints because I'm just obsessed with Scotland. I always put a little
note that that I just loved to see the printer to know that these prints are
going in your home. And it means so much to me. But this also says
the same thing, like thank you so much
for your business. You want to be really grateful to the people who
are buying from you. I am kind of a
woo-woo person or I truly believed that
the energy that you put out comes back to you. So just having that good energy, that grateful energy to people who are buying for
you goes a long way. And it's just so cool to know that your art
prints are gonna be in somebody's home or maybe
they're like office building. It's really neat. I always include some
type of thank you. This is also branded
with my branding. So colorful watercolors,
bright colors. And this, I go ahead and
I put it inside here. And then this is also
stickies all pull this off and stick it
in there and then put it inside this rigid Mealer. Then the rigid mailer
gets the do not bend. I also these I just
got off of Amazon. I used to write all of
the postage or sorry, I used to write all the
addresses directly on here, which you can totally do. And then I would go
to the post office and get postage for it. I'm so thankful that I
figured out that you can just print postage
directly off of ETC. It's so easy and streamlined. I highly recommend doing that
if you have an Etsy shop, they also give you
discounts as well, which is really awesome. One other thing I like to add is a sticker and this is also
goes along with my branding. This is Benny. It says quality checked by her. My hand, I painted this. And then the same company that I print my art prints from. Prints. Well, I can print these in multiple quantities and
it's pretty inexpensive. I think I have 20 sheets of
these and it cost maybe $40. So it's really great. And then I just stick
that on the back of here. Also, if you guys are familiar, I'll put the link for them. But Sticker Mule runs really good deals if you sign
up for their newsletter. And I think that these
were they're usually $75 and I think I paid for them. They're not cost-effective if I'm going to pay full price, but they are when they have
a sale and I just love these so much they
turned out so cute. So I use these as well. So that's how I packaged
up my art prints. You really wanna make sure you have something firm like this. I'm gonna go ahead and show
you what vendor I use. But of course you can
use any vendor you want. I choose to use those
vendor because a lot of their stuff is more on
the clear bags website. This is a company I
use for packaging. They had tons of
different packaging. If you decide one day
that you want to offer. Like cards or I mean, they have packaging for
just about anything. These are just cards
and envelopes, but they have the
little boxes for them. But obviously for us, we want to do packaging for art prints because that's
what this class is all about. What I do is I come up here to the search bar and
search rigid mailer. And here they are. There's a few different
sizes something and also offer in my shop
is custom paintings. And I do offer those
at a size of 11 by 14. So just make sure that whatever the size of your artwork is, that you have a
corresponding size that works with your stuff. For eight by ten, I use
there 12 or I'm sorry, I use there 11.5 by nine inch. Now, keep in mind if your pieces eight by ten Do not buy a rigid mailer that
is eight by ten. I know it might seem like it'll fit in there,
but it won't. You need to have the
extra space for it. You can buy these in bulk. And these are
biodegradable as well. And they have the easy terrorist
strip and our adhesive. I just think that
they're really great. So that's where I get
my rigid mailers. For the bags. I just searched eco-friendly
flap tape, a bag. And I'm going to link
these for you guys so that you're able to
access them easier. And then you just come in
here and find the size. But make sure you search
eco-friendly because they do have the regular bags that
are not eco-friendly. These are the ones I use there, definitely crispier than
the other regular ones, but I find that they work great. So just make sure you
select your correct size. Again, I'll link these so you guys can easily access them. So these are the items that I use from clear bags
for my packaging.
8. SEO: Let's chat real quick
about SEO and marketing. We covered this a little bit, so I'm not going to go
way into depth also. I am by no means an SEO expert. I just this has helped
me in my business, so I thought I'd share
it with you guys. The first thing that I did
mention earlier and make sure you label your images instead of just leaving it untitled or labeling it mushroom picture. Do something that people
would search for it because Image Titles get
searched in Google. So you wanna make
sure that you're really utilizing those things that people might be searching. So if you have a
mushroom art print on your mushroom image, you might write mushroom dash, clip art prints dash, watercolor, dash wall decor or something
along those lines. So you're fitting in
those long tail keywords. As I mentioned before as well. Sites like marmalade
are fantastic. Marmalade is I think
it's $19 a month, but you can get a
two-week free trial. I just did the two-week
free trial and that was enough for me to gather
a lot of information. Eventually, I will get the membership because
it's totally worth it. But they'll tell you all
of your Etsy listings, What it's only if you use Etsy. So it'll tell you all your
grades for your Etsy listings. And it goes in and looks at your long-tail keywords
or short tail keywords. It also tells you
what's trending. It's really, really helpful. One thing about
your Etsy listings is you want to
make sure that you use all of the tags
that Etsy lets you use, which is currently 13. You can only use 20 characters, but I recommend just stuffing
those with keywords. So here's an example
of my peony art print. And I have Paeony
wall decor art print. All of these keywords that help people to
find my artwork. Another thing you want to look
at is your listing titles. Your listing titles
are really important. Here is my California
poppy watercolor painting. Instead of making some cutesy
name like maybe Puppy, cutesy puppy or I don't
know, some silly title. You really need to focus
on what is actually, what you actually are selling. For this, it's the California
poppy watercolor painting. Then I have California poppies print, California's
State flower. That's another keyword
here, California wall art. So think of all the things that people might be looking for. If I wanted to update
this listing title, I would definitely
put eight by ten. The size is also important because people
searched that as well. I use as many words
as I can here. I can't remember what the
exact character count is, but just use them all. This is what comes
up in searches. I was just naming things like California poppy print and they weren't getting found. So add all this as
much as you can. Obviously don't add
things that aren't there. But try to describe
your artwork as best as possible and it will show up
better in search results. Of course, there are lots
and lots of people on Etsy. So if you are selling something
that's really popular, you might be further
down in search results. That's why another good
thing to do before you start painting
is consider what's trending or is there a hole in the market that you see people
wanting more of something? Of course, always be authentic
to yourself because you want to create artwork
that you love. But these are a couple of small
tips that might help you. You can also use Etsy ads, but I don't recommend using
Etsy ads unless you have a shop that is pretty
well established. For example, if you're just starting out and
you have 0 sales as aren't going to help
you because Etsy want, is going to showcase
to you when you have reviews and you have, you don't have to have
a ton of reviews, but when you have a
couple of good reviews and some sales under your belt, I don't think it's good
to do ads before then. Also, if you only have one
or two items in your shop, I don't recommend ads, however, if you have 2025 and
over items in your shop, you can try out ads, just give a little money
and a little bit of a timeframe for ads and
see how they work for you. But I will say
typically it takes about 30 days to see
ads start working. I hope these tips are
helpful for you guys. Like he said, I'm
not an SEO expert. There are a lot of people that swear that they have
the best tips for Etsy. You can search those
people out there on Pinterest or an Instagram. But these are just a couple of little tips that I wanted to share with you that
have helped me.
9. Final words: You did it. You've
completed this class, give yourself a
round of applause. I think that it's
amazing that you completed this
because now you have the knowledge and the tools
to be able to go ahead and start your own shop
with your own art prints. I do want to offer a word of encouragement as I know
when you first start out, it can be really frustrating. I remember when I had
nine Etsy sales for, gosh, I want to
say almost a year. Granted, I did set my
shop on vacation mode for like three months and then
I just didn't do anything. So that was part of the
reason it took me so long. But what I'm trying to say is don't be too hard on yourself. Things take time. There are people
out there who are going to love your artwork. They just have to find you, or you have to find
them vice-versa. And I hope that you are inspired to get your
artwork out there. And I just want to say thank you so much for
taking this class. If you enjoyed this class, please, please, please
leave me a review. It helps me to know that I'm
doing a good job and that you guys actually are enjoying the content I'm putting out. It also helps other people
find my class as well. Lastly, if you are on Instagram, you can follow me
at lavender and see I always post photos
of my dog too. So if you like Portuguese, that's definitely where
you'll find Benny. I, I also have a YouTube channel and if you ever want
to reach out to me, you can reach out to me at
Nicaea lavender and c.com. I hope you enjoyed
this class and I can't wait to see what
you guys create it. Have a wonderful day.
Nikki Hess, Artist & Corgi Mama
