Transcripts
1. Society6 for iPad Artists and Designers: Sizes, Orientations, and Sharable Mockups: Hi everyone, I'm [inaudible]. I'm an artist designer and teacher. Today I want to show you how to create and fill your society6 shop using your iPad. Society6 is a print on demand side that allows artists around the world to upload their art work and put it up for sale on a wide range of high-quality products. What I love about society6 is that artists and designers don't have to pay any fees to make their work for sale and once you get the process down pat, It's easy to add new items to your shop. I create the work for my society6 shop on my iPad and I upload it directly to my shop without using a computer at all. Today I want to show you my process for creating and uploading artwork for society6, so that you can maximize the number of products you have for sale and minimize the amount of time you spend uploading and resizing. My goal for this class is to show you how easy it can be to upload new items to your shop so that you can focus on making beautiful work and not have to worry so much about the technical details like sizes and orientations. First, we will go through the basics of getting set up, making your shop look beautiful and uploading your artwork. I'll show you a few different methods for creating high resolution images so that your work looks crisp and clean on the products. Next, we'll look at several orientations that you can use for your artwork. I'll share with you my cheat sheet for society6, so you can quickly choose a size and orientation before starting a new product. Next, I'll show you how I turn a repeat pattern into an image that fits on almost all society6 products. We'll look at how I create and size my repeat block and affinity designer and go through the whole process from exploiting the image to applying it to products. Last, we'll look at ways to turn your product images and a beautiful mock-ups for your website or social media accounts. I'll show you how I use procreate to create shadows and realistic backgrounds that will make your product stand out online. I'll share with you 12 customizable wallpaper patterns that I created and show you how to find and create patterns that match your personal style. In this class will be using both procreate and affinity designer but you don't have to have affinity to take this class. I'll show you how you can upload images directly from procreate to society6. The only limitation with procreate is that you can't use larger image sizes. If you have affinity, you can make designs for any of the society6 products. Whereas if you're just using procreate, you will be limited to some of the smaller products. The amazing thing about this process is you can start immediately offering your work for sale and have a resource for beautiful project images to display your work. Showing your work on products, rather than just showing the images can help make your social media presence as an artist or designer more professional. I'll share with you my template for social media images so you can easily tailor your mockups to fit the image ratios for whatever social platform you're using. If you're looking for a way to start offering your work for sale or just want to display product mockups online using only your iPad, this class will show you everything you need to get started. All you need to take this class is your iPad and procreate and we'll be using affinity designer as well but that is optional. Lets get started.
2. Background and Reasons: The first thing I want to do is tell you a little bit about my background and experience with print on demand sites. I first started dabbling and print on demand in 2011. I found this site called Spoonflower that prints designs on the fabric and I realized I could turn some of my art into seamless patterns to upload to the site. It took me a couple of years to really take the time to get a shop started and start posting regularly. Honestly, I didn't see a turn of sales in the beginning, but I loved the process of creating designs and getting messages about them. I love the idea of Spoonflowers business model so much that I decided to apply for a job there and I actually got it. While I worked there, I got to really explore the site and see so many incredible patterns and learned so much about making repeat patterns and finally started to understand tags and descriptions and all the little important details of the successful print on demand shop. In 2013, I started uploading a lot more designs to print on demand sites and specifically I started making work based on tags. I was uploading to Society6 and searching for tags that didn't have a lot of designs and making designs specifically for those tags. That was really the first time I started making regular income on my print on demand work. One thing I want to talk about today is how to focus on tags and how to make designs highly searchable, so that they're easy to find and market to a specific audience. Overtime, I've had several different shops because as I learned more about design and improve my work, I really wanted to increase the quality of my shop. I used to focus on a ton of designs to really fill my shop. But the shop I have now really represents my best work and it doesn't get cluttered with a lot of old work that I'm not as proud of anymore. That is one thing that I really want to stress in this class, is that you don't have to fill your shop with a ton of images. The goal is not to have a full shop, the goal is to have only beautiful work that you're proud of and you think other people would love looking at. The same goes if you already have a shop and you're just watching this class to get some tips, this may be a good time to go through your shop and remove anything that you're not particularly proud of. Let's talk about a few of the reasons you may want to have a Society6 shop. Obviously, the most common reason people get into print on demand work is to make some extra money, but of course, there's no guarantee that you will make any specific amount of money. The amount that artists make on sites like this, very greatly and it depends a lot on your work and how often you post, how relevant your tags and descriptions are,so while passive income is a great reason to give this a try, it's important to remember that it can take a long time to build up a regular income from your designs. It's also important to remember that if you never build it, they will never come. If you never have a way for people to buy your work, then they will definitely not buy your work, but if you at least put it out there as an option and start getting used to the process of creating and sharing. You've already taken the first step towards selling your work. There are also a lot of other great benefits to having a front on demand shop, then one of the biggest benefits is that anyone interested in you as an artist gets to see your work on finished products. Let's say you're trying to start doing client work and your client goes to your website or Instagram page and sees your work on finished products in a really professional layout. This makes your work look professional and marketable, so it helps you build your credibility as an artist or a designer to spice showing people that your work looks beautiful on finished products. Seeing your work on products is also a great opportunity for self-critique. Sometimes I'll upload something to Society6, and I suddenly realize there's a problem with the image that I need to fix. There's something you're seeing an image on a finished product that makes it so much more clear what the issues are and what's making the piece work or not work. The images you generate on Society6 are great for posting on social media, which brings more attention to your work. It's nice to post images of your work or posts some time lapse posts from procreate. If someone can see your work on a finished product, that could encourage them to check out your shop and eventually purchase something. In this class, I want to show you how to create product mockups and procreate using the images you make on Society6, but we'll add some interesting backgrounds and shadows to make the products look a little more eye-catching and unique. Lastly you can use Society6 for gifts. Maybe you don't want to sell your work at all. Maybe you just want to see your work as a pillow or a mug for yourself or someone else, so the class will still help you figure out how to format your artwork onto any of the products on Society6, so you can purchase your artwork on physical products. Let's go ahead and get started with setting up the shop.
3. Downloads and Setting Up Shop: The first thing I want do is show you how to get all of the downloads and resources that you'll need for this class. You can find a link to get to this page and the project section of the class on the Skill Share website rather than the app. You'll find that once you click on that link, you need a password to get in. I'll show the password on screen right now. Once you get into that page, you'll see that there's a list of resources right below the video. The first one is create a Society6 account. If you haven't already created an account, you can go ahead and do that now. It's free to create an account. After you sign up, you just have to check your email and verify your email address. Once you do that, we can start updating the shop profile. The first thing we're going to do is set up the shop in a professional way so that when people visit your shop, they know that you're an individual artist rather than a company, and they know how to connect with you outside of Society6. In this section we're going to add a profile image, add a header image, add a description, and set the view options for your shop. If you've already filled out all the sections of your profile and you feel comfortable with that process, you can go ahead and skip this video and move on to the next one. Once you're ready to start adding in these features of your shop, you can click Edit shop and then Appearance. There's three sections here, a cover image, an avatar, and a bio. The avatar is just this little circular image here. You just need a square image to upload there, it could be a picture of yourself, you could create a logo and procreate you could just draw something that's relating to your art work. Whatever you want to upload there and just keep in mind that it'll get cropped to a circle, so you will lose the corners of that image. The next part is the cover image, and the tricky part about that is it has a very specific image ratio that they don't describe on this page. I've played around with a lot of different ratios and I went ahead and made a template for procreate that will show you exactly what size you need to make this image. To get that template, you can go back to the Downloads and Resources page and click Download the Header Image Template. I'm going to click and hold on that and click Open in a new tab and once that new tab opens, you can click Open and Procreate and it should open the file over here on the left. I'll click on that one time. If you don't see the file, it might be that you're in a stack and you just need to go out of the stack and go back to your main gallery. You'll see with this template there's just one layer and it's the pencil layer here. This is showing exactly what you need to fill for your banner. The space on the outer edge here will show up on some devices and then interspace will show up on iPad and most regular size laptops. I tried to keep everything essential inside the inner box and then keep things that aren't quite as important in the outer part, then I just made this a large image so you have plenty of space to work with. Something that I might do to create one of these is insert an image so that I've already created and place it up here and then just start grabbing parts of this image and throwing it onto my banner. I might grab this bird and I'm just using the Freehand Selection Tool. I click Selection and then Freehand. I'm just going to circle around this bird, drag down three fingers, cut and paste, which cuts it off that layer and paste it onto a new layer, then my move Tools automatically selected and I can place it down here into this section. I would repeat that same process with all of the elements that I want to include in the border. Here's the finished version of that banner. I just repeated that same process and put all these little elements across my banner. You could also add a colored background here, a texture, whatever you want to have on your profile. You can see I kept all of my essential elements within the smaller box. I'm just going to crop this image so that just my banner showing and I can export it. If you go to the Layers panel, you'll see that the bottom layer contains the sketching. I'm going to keep that active right now and go ahead and crop this image to remove every thing except what's within this pencil area. I'll click the Tool symbol, Canvas, Crop and Resize. I'm just going to use these to crop right to that outer pencil line. If I zoom in here, you can see exactly where I'm cropping, the very outside of the outer pencil edge. This doesn't have to be perfect because Society6 does crop a little bit around this, but just get pretty close there, and then click Done, and you can just make that sketch layer invisible, then we have just a banner. You can just share, PNG, save image to your camera roll. Back to Society6, you can click Edit shop appearance, Upload file, and then Upload your new file from your camera roll. The last section to update is your bio. You can click edit to edit your bio there. I'll just show you what my bio says here. I kept it really simple. I just said who I am, my website and then connect with me on Instagram and Facebook. You could put a little more. I've seen that some artists, we'll put a little story or a little background. This just depends on your personal style. In the next section we're going to look at a lot of other people's profiles to get ideas. That's a good time to read other people's bios and get some ideas about what you might want to include in your own. The last thing I want to do is edit the shop view. You can see if you scroll through my shop, it just gives you some random products and random designs, so that If a new person comes to my shop, they really get to see an overview of my work rather than just a single image. If you click Edit shop here, by default, the shop will be I think knew or most popular. I didn't like how that was showing up in my shop, so I changed it to random. You can edit that here, Y=you may want to have that on popular or maybe you just want to have your newest design showing up at the top. This is really just personal choice on this page.
4. Product and Orientation Research: The first thing we're going to do is some research on Society6. We're going to take a look at some of the products that they offer and also some of the orientations that artists and designers use. So what I like to do is click on Society6 at the very top left corner. And then just scroll around and see what kind of work they're featuring. So sometimes you can get some great ideas just by looking at what kind of work they're showing on the homepage. Like if you look at this image, you can see that bright colorful layered work is popular. We could also go to phone cases and see that repeat patterns work really well on phone cases, but so do single images. So if you're thinking you're not sure what work to put on Society6. I would say put all of your high quality work on Society6. And it may not fit on all products, but it will probably fit on at least a few. If you find an artist that you really like, you can click on that person. And then, you can click on their profile name and see their profile. So this person created a really nice banner with a bunch of art prints right beside each other. So that's something you could do. You could create some products in your shop and then turn that into your cover. Another nice thing you can do on this homepage is explore products. So if you're wondering, what does Society6 even offer? What do the products even look like? You can start playing around with these different sections. So I clicked on apparel and bags. And then over on the left side here, I can choose a product. And then we can see T-shirts. So you could see a repeat pattern would not work well on these t-shirts. But single images work beautifully. I love the simple greenhouse image. So you can create something pretty small and turn that into the front of a t-shirt. So I'm going to click on that artist's name so we can see her shop. So she turned some of her illustrations into a sort of repeat pattern for her cover. And then actually painted a portrait for her avatar image, for her bio, she just says a simple sentence about who she is and then her Instagram. So this is a great time to get ideas and then click follow on people you really like. If you have a Society6 shop and you're concerned about not having many followers. I wouldn't worry about that too much. A lot of times the followers are other artists, not necessarily buyers. So if you're not getting a lot of followers, I wouldn't worry about that and I wouldn't try to push people to follow you on Society6, I don't necessarily think that's helpful for making sales. Another thing I like to do on the site is go to Wall Art and then look at prints. So prints are, I think one of the best selling things on Society6. So it's a good time to get ideas for layouts. So you'll see some horizontal layouts, you'll see square layouts. You'll see some beautiful landscape images. So there's really no limit to the orientation that you can do with these. But sometimes you may just need some help getting started. And you can go here and say, you know, I could create a single image with a simple background and something right in the center, and that would be a perfect out-print. You don't have to fill the whole canvas. You can just do something really small in the center. And then, we saw the same LAMA on a cellphone case. So this artist created this image and then they're able to offer it on a lot of different products. So we can see here, this looks great on a mug, on an art print as a sticker. So you can really turn a single image into a lot of different products and just give people the option to try it and a lot of different ways. What I have found at Society6 is there's no one product that sells a lot more than the other. So I think it's important to try to diversify the products that you use. There are some products that don't sell very well, but there's not a clear winner in terms of what's number one in terms of my shop. So I would definitely encourage you to start thinking about making images that will fit on a lot of different products.
5. Tag Research: Next we're going to talk about tag research, understanding how tags work on Society6 is essential if you want to get found in search. If you already have a following from YouTube or Instagram, that he may not be as worried about finding new customers through Society6. But if your goal is to get found and search on this side, then doing your tag research as essential. So doing tag research is a really simple process, all you do is go to the homepage and just type in something that's relating to your artwork. Let's say you'd like to draw cats,so I'm going to type cat. One thing you'll notice here, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, is that there is a 100 pages and Society6 will never show more than a 100 here. There's probably a lot more than a 100 pages of cat images. It's going to be very difficult for someone to find your work if you use the tag cat, so personally, I don't think that's a great tag. That's not a tag that I would waste one of my tag slots on. Better term, let's say you're drawing a picture of the famous grumpy cat. I'm going to type Grumpy Cat, and scroll down, and there's only 10 pages of this. That's a lot better. A customer is likely to scan through 10 pages of information, but not so likely to scan through a 100 pages of information. If you're drawing an image of grumpy cat and it's a really popular in pop culture right now, you have a chance of someone finding that image. Another example might be, let's say you are a mapmaker and you made a map of Chicago. I'm going to type Chicago. Again, we've got a 100 plus pages relating to Chicago, a lot of these, I can't really look at these and see why they say Chicago, like a basketball, not sure how that's related to Chicago, so you're getting a lot of irrelevant information and customers are not going to be searching through all this to try to find your map of Chicago. But if we type Chicago map, we get eight pages, that's a little better. Somebody who really wants a beautiful map of Chicago might be willing to scan through here and find a map on one of these 10 pages. If someone's buying artwork for their home, they're probably more than happy to scan through 10 pages.That would be a great map for someone who created a map of Chicago. Another example might be if you're a mapmaker and you're making a lot of maps of different cities. What if he does some smaller cities? So I'm going to do Richmond. There's 30 pages, so that's not bad. But again, we're getting a lot of irrelevant information that from just looking at these images, I can't see how they relate to Richmond, some of them do, of course, but a lot of them don't. Whereas if I type Richmond map, I get one page. Anyone out there who's looking for a map of Richmond is going to look at every single design on this page. That gives you a lot better chance of having your work found. This is something I always think about when I create work for Society6, I don't want to be one in a million, I want to be one and maybe 30 or 40. For example, I recently created a lot of folk art work and a lot of them contain birds. If I type bird, that is a 100 pages, so I would not tag any of my folk art bird pieces with the word bird, that's just way too general. That's not to say you shouldn't do that, but for me personally, I don't like to waste mine tag slots on potentially irrelevant tags. But if I type folk art, you can see my design is on page one and it's the third design on the first page. That's pretty good. You want to be inserting yourself onto these pages. If you can't find yourself, nobody else can find you either. This is the goal to have your work show up towards the top on one of the early pages, and you can see there are 78 pages here, and so some of them have a lot more favorites than mine. Why is mine showing up at the very top? Well, it's new. There's a recency factor and search. If your work is new, it's going to get pushed to the top. If it's getting a lot of favorites and sales, it's going to get pushed to the top. Creating new work periodically is a great way to keep yourself high-end surge and also, encouraging people to go look at your Society6 shop through your social channels so that your work because more favorites and gets a little more interest. You can see these pieces I'm creating have a lot of Folk Art birds on them. Folk Art bird is a great term for me. If someone sitting in their house and they're thinking, I really like birds and I like a kind of a Folk Art style. They might go to Society6 and type Folk Art bird. I'm going to search for that. I don't show up on page one here, but there's only three pages. If I go to page two, here's one of my designs, here's another one here's two more, here's a newer one that I just did, here is one, so this is the goal. I want to be showing up on these pages often where my work is really relevant. I'm showing up on both page two and three, and most customers would be happy to look through three pages. If you're showing up anywhere in a three-page term, then I think that's great. Now, there's also a limit to this, you don't necessarily want to show up on a search term that's really obscure. If I type Folk Art birds with cats and houses, nobody's going to type that. If you're the one person showing up on this page, that's not necessarily a good thing. You want to be one design within maybe two to five or ten pages. If there's not a few pages of that design, that's probably a sign that that's not a great tag. I wouldn't say your goal is to be the one person on a search page that might tell you that your tags a little bit too obscure for anyone to actually find your design that way. The goal is to find a happy medium between a tag phrase with limited search results and a topic that's popular if you just use really obscure tags to be the only person on that search page, you won't necessarily get found because people have to actually type in that term to find you. The next step I would do here is create a big list of tags that you would consider making work to go along with, or something that already goes with work that you've created. I'm not saying that you have to create work that always fits into a unique tag category. You can make birds and flowers and things that just fit into a general category, but if you want to get found in search, I do think it's important to create work that brings some people and using tags. If that's your main goal to get found in search, then you really have to keep this tag search process in mind because that's the only way customers will find you. But of course not all of your work has to be tag focused. One last thing I want to mention here is that it can take time for your work to show up in search. It takes 30 minutes for an item to show up in your shop, and then it takes even longer for it to show up in search. I wouldn't upload something and then immediately expect it to be in search. I usually wait a day or two just to see how it pans out. If it's not showing up well on search, I might adjust the tags or the title or description, and we'll look at how to do that later.
6. Orientations and Sizes: Next I want to talk about orientations and sizes. When you first start using Society6, you'll realize that there are a ton of products and it can be a little bit overwhelming to think about what kind of images you should create for these products. So I created a cheat sheet that shows all of the products and sizes that you'll need. Also I want to share with you a few of the orientations that I like to use and talk about how you can start discovering your own orientations too. So if you scan through my shop, you'll see that I use a few different orientations often. One is a portrait orientation that's tall and thin, another is square, another is circular. That's basically the few orientations that I use over and over. I also do some repeat patterns. So you'll probably find a few orientations that you like. Then you can certainly expand on those over time. But I would recommend just starting with some simple orientations like circle or a rectangle and just playing around with how those fit on different products. So one thing I wanted to share with you is my Society6 cheat sheets. So you can see all of the products, all of the orientations that I like to use in a single place. So when you're ready to download that, you can click and hold on this link, on the class resources page, open in a new tab. Once that downloads, you can click open and procreate. If you already had a document open, it'll just stay there. So you'll have to go back to your gallery and then get out of a stack. If you're inside of a stack, and then you can click on the cheat sheet in your gallery. So what you'll notice with this document is that it has layers. So if you click on the layers panel, you can see all of the pages. With the new procreate feature, you can click and hold on the visibility symbol of that layer to just reveal that layer. So that's an easy way to navigate around this document. So the first page here is products that have a square orientation. So when you download this, you'll see that there are certain products that are by default square. Mini prints, art prints, wood wall art, metal prints, throw pillows, floor pillows, a wall mural, shower curtains, duvets and comforters, those are two different products, coasters, boxes, stickers and a tote bag. So if you made a square composition, it would fit very nicely on all of these products. As long as you make it large enough. So what you'll notice here is with each of these products, I've put a pixel dimension. So the wall mural is 6,000 by 6,000 pixels. That's the largest square product. So if I made a square, 6,000 by 6,000, it would fit on all of this stuff. It would also fit on some of the other products that we'll look at in a minute. But it would be ideal for these square products. Same thing on circular products. So there's not a lot of circular products, but we've got the coffee table, clock, bar stool, counter stool, cutting board. If you make something circular, it also fits nicely on something like a throw pillow. So here's an example of a few Society6 products that I created that have a circular image on them but the product itself is not circular. So that's why I like using the circular format because it tends to fit on a lot of different products, especially art prints and a few of my favorite products. It doesn't do so well on cell phone cases or anything really tall and thin so that's just a compromise that you have to make sometimes. If you want to make a certain orientation, it's just not going to fit on all the products and that's fine. You'll see in the later sections here, I'll use the same design elements to create different orientations so that things do fit on multiple products. The next section here is the portrait orientation. So there are a lot of products that are portrait orientation, mini prints and you saw mini prints on the square version. So they have two types of mini prints and the same goes for art prints. We have the square version and we have the portrait version. Same thing with canvas prints and then other portrait products wall hanging, cutting board wrapping paper, phone cases, shirts, notebooks, cards, sunshade, and also curtains. They have both transparent and blackout curtains. So I think repeat patterns work really well on these. But you also may be able to create some portrait orientation images that work well on the curtains as well. The next section is landscape orientation. So these are horizontal images. I actually had to split this into two pages because there's so many. So that tells you there are a lot of products on Society6 that are in the landscape orientation. Wall tapestries and hangings, a pillow, a credenza, the art prints are also in the landscape orientation. Rugs and towels. We've got laptop sleeves, beach towel, welcome mat, yoga mat. Then if we go to the second page with landscape orientation, I've put here some products that are landscape orientation, but it's hard to see in the product image. So I've also put the space that you would need to cover with that image. So as you can see, if you think about a square image or a circular image. Something like a circular image, a small circle is not going to fit well on this bench because this bench is long and thin. So for that we would need a portrait image turned sideways or we will need to create a landscape image. So there are some products that are harder to fit than others. You can feel free to ignore some products. Personally, I never do the yoga mat. I did a lot of them in the beginning and I never sold a single one. So it ended up being a lot more work than it was worth, but you can just decide what works best for your personal style. The next section is seamless repeat patterns. So if you create seamless repeats, they will all work pretty well on these products. Cushions, legging, shirts that are all over shirts, fanny packs, backpacks, duffle bag. Then if you do wallpaper, it needs to be exactly 3600 by 3600. We'll do that in a later section. The last section here is products by size. So what I've done is sorted these by their largest dimension so that you can see how large would you need to make an image for it to fit on everything? So we start in the 3,000 pixel section. You can see all the products there that are under 3,000 pixels. So let's say you've already created something in procreate and it's 3,000 by 3,000 pixels. You could upload that and you could put it on a lot of these products depending on the orientation. So you may already have some work that you can use for this. You don't necessarily have to create all new work for Society6. So I've got these sectioned out into thousands. So under 4,000 pixels, under 5,000 pixels. So if you create something that is 7,000 pixels, it's going to fit everything on this column and on this column, but not the larger stuff. So this is just a quick reference sheet that you can use when you're deciding how large to make your compositions. If you know, you're going for a certain product or a certain set of products, you can just look down here and see what size do I need to make this for it to fit on all of those products? The largest product, the absolute biggest dimension right now for Society6 is 14,579 for duffle bags. So if you created, for example, a repeat pattern that was 15,000 by 15,000, it would fit on everything. It wouldn't look great on everything, of course, there would be some things that it wasn't quite right for maybe art prints. But it would give you a big swath of products just by doing that one 15,000 dimension product. The next section here is my orientations. So these are just orientations that I personally like to use. So I just wanted to write down all of these pixel dimensions for you because I'll be referencing these throughout the class and I didn't want you to feel like you needed to write all of this down. So these are some dimensions that some of them work in procreate, and some of them are too big for procreate. So I use Affinity Designer and I'll show you the process for both of those. So if I reference any pixel dimensions today, just know that you can go back to this document and you can find all of those in both pixels and inches and what program I use them in. So that's the whole cheat sheet. You can easily refer back to this when you're making a new composition and just scan through and figure out what shape, you want to use. One thing that I do when I'm deciding on a new composition is create a new layer above all of these layers. Get the brush set. The brush set is called Society6 mock ups. If you go back to our class resources and downloads page, you can click, download the procreate brush set, click and hold open in a new tab. Once that opens, you can click open and procreate. Then that'll show up at the very top of your brush list. So that contains all of the brushes that I'll be mentioning today. So I put a brush at the very bottom of this set called square. If you choose a color, I'll choose pink as my color. So you can really see and just tap your square one time. You can adjust the size if you need to. Let's say for example, I want to make a landscape orientation composition and I don't know what dimension to make it or I don't know how tall it should be or how wide it should be. So I'm going to bring that pink square above that landscape orientation layer. Click on the pink square and just kind of play around with what orientation might look good. So I might try something on the pillow. If I think this design would look really good on a pillow. I might also try it on something like the credenza. So once you set your ratio here, you can just move it around a different Products and as long as magnetic is selected, it won't change the proportions. So you could start with the art print. That might look good on an art print. Then it would also look around the credenza. That's one way to just start by thinking about ratios. Then I can just figure out why that is. So it's about one unit tall and one unit wide. So in Affinity Designer, I might do 10,000 pixels by 5,000 pixels, for example. So that's just one way to start thinking about new orientations. You can feel free to just copy my orientations, but you probably eventually will want to start developing your own as well. So this cheat sheet will make it really easy for you to do that.
7. Best Practices and Tips: Before we start talking about posting a project on Society six, I want to cover some of the best practices and tips that I really wish I had known when I started Society six. The first is to always check for stray marks or errors in your design before uploading. You want to zoom in as close as possible and just scan around the image. Take your time, look for any stray marks, because if you do have an issue, Society six can remove your image. They can return the product to the customer and so that affects your shop, it takes away a lot of the work you've done because they might just go ahead and delete it. It's definitely worth your time to just take your time and check for stray marks or errors before you upload. The next best practice is to never use copyrighted images or tags. Obviously, you don't want to use images that are someone else work. You want to be sure you have the rights to use that image or you created it yourself. This also goes for tags and that means no company name, celebrity names, book titles, character names, brands, anything like that is off limits. If you create a mouse, you cannot tag that mouse with the word Mickey. If you create a van, you cannot tie that van with the word Volkswagen. You cannot create a dancer and call it Beyonce. So what happens if you do this is Society six will just delete your design. So it doesn't matter if you've gotten a ton of favorites and sales and you love that design and you put a lot of work into it. Even if it doesn't contain copyrighted images. If you use copyright tags, then it will be removed and so I really just want to emphasize only use tags that are general words and phrases, never anything copyrighted. The next best practice is to never up size. If you created a design at 3,000 by 3,000 pixels, that is as absolutely bulge as it can ever be unless you vectorize it, which we are going to look at in this class. So for example in procreate, you can't make an image larger. That's just going to create blurriness and society six can refuse to print that image and they may even remove it from your shop. So never up-size an image or a design element. If you stamp or draw something at two-by-two inches, you can never make it bigger than that. Always work large and then size down. Never work small and size up. The next best practice is play around with your color versions. You may have a certain color palette that you like but keep in mind that this needs to be marketable to a wide audience. For example I found that black and white images do really well and the more color you add, the less chance something has as being popular in my experience. But certainly to hire own colors, I do recommend [inaudible] colors. The more colors you add the less people will be interested in the product. Try out some limited color palettes, but also go with what fits your personal style of course. The next best practice is to be aware of white. White in a design will be transparent. So you wouldn't want to put a white design on a black t-shirt because that will just be transparent and it'll just be a black t-shirt. You also have to keep that in mind with products like the wood wall art. Anything that you don't have a color on will just be transparent. Society six does not print with any white inks. So let's go ahead and move on to creating our first post.
8. Saving and Uploading: Next, I'm going to post a new product on Society6 and talk about my thought process as I apply it to each product. I'm going to show you a few different options for color and orientation. You can choose something that works for your personal style or something that matches an image you've already created. This is a design format that I use often, sometimes I'll make them a little bit wider but I like this narrow format. It works well for cell phone cases, art prints and you'll see as we upload a lot of other products. This image is 4,500 wide by 10,000 tall and that's in pixels. It'll fit on a lot of the larger products but of course it's not going to great on everything. I like to do these unusual layouts. I think it really makes the work stand out among the crowd of standard orientations. But you can certainly do any orientation here. I tried to just do the maximum size that I could do in Procreate, which for my version of Procreate was 4,500 by 10,000. That's going to depend on what kind of iPad you have. I did put a list of those dimensions on the cheat sheet so you can see what iPad version you have and what the maximum sizes in Procreate. I created this piece using the process in my Folk Art class. If you want to see exactly how I made this, you can go check that class out. But all I'm going do here is remove the background no matter what color it is. I just want to have that black ink drawing for this particular post. Backgrounds are optional but having no background will give you a lot more flexibility, especially for products like t-shirts. If I did a paper background on this piece, the image wouldn't fit on square products. But on the other hand, it does get old to have a white background on all the products in your shop so sometimes I do create a background. Typically when I do that, I use Affinity Designer and I'll show you that process later on. Also, when I do work for Society6, I almost always do a few color versions. I always do a black and white version, and then I'll add some color and maybe a background. This allows you to get a lot more mileage out of a single design. You can also reuse your tags, titles and descriptions. I also created a circular version of this same image using the same design elements. I show how to do that in the Folk Art class as well. That way, you're creating a single drawing but you're using it in a few different orientations. You're not losing all of that work that you did to create a single beautiful drawing. That's one thing to start thinking about, saving your design elements as stamps or images or vectors so that you can create multiple color versions and layouts for each concept you have. I'm going to be uploading this colored version of this design. I'm going to go ahead and remove that background. You should just see the gray background in Procreate. I'm going to be saving all of these images that I want to put on Society6 to Google Drive. You could use Dropbox or some other cloud storage. It doesn't seem to work well between the iPad camera roll and Society6. It hasn't worked for me at all in the past. I always just upload to cloud storage. What I do first off, is go to the cloud storage. I'll be using Drive and then click "Plus" and create a new folder and then name that folder. I've already created a folder called Society6 images. That's where I put all of the images that I upload to society6. I'm also really careful with file names. For example, this piece I called bike green 16,000. This is my bicycle illustration with a green background, 16,000 pixels. That's going to help you stay organized if you keep a lot of information in your filenames. Another thing I like to do is just drag old designs into a new folder I created called used. Because once I use a design, I don't really need it in my way anymore. I want to be able to have my new designs front and center. I'll periodically go in and just drag designs that I've already uploaded to Society6 into this folder that I call used, that just kind of cleans up your desktop and makes things easier to find. Now I can go ahead and save this image to my drive folder. Click the tool symbol, share PNG because that's the only file type that's going to save this without a background. I click "PNG" and then I'll choose Drive or if you're using Dropbox, obviously you'd choose that. Then the Drive app will ask me where I want to save this. I'm going click "Drive", Society6 images, "Save here." Then I'm going title this bikes portrait pink and green 10,000. I've got the illustration, the color and the dimensions. Then I'm just going to check that I did my filename right and I did my folder correctly and then I'll click "Upload." This may take a little bit of time depending on your Internet connection and the size of the file. Once that's saved to your cloud storage, you can go back to your Society6 profile and click "Sell." Then you can click "Browse" from your computer, I'm going to choose browse here because I didn't save this to my photo library. Click "Browse." Then you may need to click "Browse" down here if you don't see this menu on the left. Then you'll find whatever cloud storage you're using. Open up your folder and then click on the image. It's at the top here, bikes portrait pink and green 10,000. I'm going to click on that. Then you have to answer a couple of questions. First, I own the rights to this image or have rights to use it, I'm going to check that. Then this post contains mature content. If there's anything in here, like language or nudity, that's for over 18 adults then you have to click that box and click "Go to the next step." Then we can start putting in our information about this design. This step is crucial, you don't want to just scan over this. This is the only way that people find your work. It's not just the tags, it's a combination of the title, the tags and the description. You want to think about all those keywords that you brainstormed in their tag research process and try to fit those in here. I'll start with my title. You can see my title here, bike lovers illustration. I wanted to get in that keyword bike. Hand-drawn bikes, that's a phrase. Bike gears, that's part of my illustration. Someone might go to Society6 and think, "I just want something related to bikes that has like gears or bike mechanics or bike parts." Then I put folk art birds in there because there's some birds in the illustration. I'm trying to put some things that I think are a real person might go in and type on Society6. Next I have to choose a category, is this a painting, a drawing, a collage, photography or graphic design? I'm going to call this a drawing and then I can start adding my tags. Again, these are the phrases that you think people might type. Interesting one here might be bike mechanics or bike gears bike parts. These are phrases that I went and searched that didn't have a ton of designs already created and repeat the word bike, which is important for search. You can do 20 tags total. I'm going to take some time here and put down 20 tag phrases. I've got all my tags here. I just type the tag and then click "Enter." Then I just go through and check the spelling for all of these. You just want be sure you didn't make any mistakes with their spelling, of course. Then I also tag my name because if someone is searching for me personally, they're probably going to just type my name. If you don't put your name as a tag, then you will not show up once someone goes to Society6 and searches your name. I always add that in. Then I'm just going to do a short description. The keywords are important here too because if you're repeating these important keyword phrases in your title, tags and description, that's really going to help you show up in search. I'll take just a minute to type a description here. My description says this folk art bicycle lovers illustration features a vintage bicycle and bike gears surrounded by folk art style birds in botanicals. You want to find a happy medium here between using keywords and making it readable. You don't want to do what's called keyword stuffing, which is just basically listing your tags out in your description because Society6 will penalize you in search for that. You want something that a real person could actually read but that also contains these descriptive phrases. You wouldn't want to just say, "This bicycle illustration will look beautiful in your home over your couch." Those phrases aren't going to help you in search at all. You want to describe the image and use these important terms that people may be actually typing in search like vintage bicycle, that would be a phrase that someone might look for or bike gears, someone might look for that. Folk art birds, someone may be searching for that and then just discover the bicycle. You want to keep all of that in mind, think about real people when you type these and when you type your tags. What are people out there typing? It can't be too obscure or strange if you want to get found in search. We can always edit this later, you don't have to put all of these in right now. Let's say you have a laptop and you'd prefer to do some of this typing on your laptop, you can just put a period here or say draft and just click "Continue to create products." You don't have to fill in all of this right now and we can always edit it and I almost always do that. Tomorrow I'm going to check and see how this shows up in search. Then I'll come back through and maybe if some of these tags aren't working so well, I'll alter them a little bit.
9. Adjusting Products: So I'm going to click "Continue to create products". And I just take a minute here to let the page load because it's creating a ton of products. That's taking the site a lot of work and it's taking your internet speed into account. So at this point I usually just go get a cup of tea or a snack and then come back and start adjusting the products. So I'm going to go through these products one at a time so you can see exactly how I adjust each one. And the nice thing about this page is it saves as you work, you don't have to click anything to save. And you can always get out of this page if you need to do something else and then come back. So all of this is saved, everything we've done so far. And I can click back to all posts and see all of my designs and my gallery, so then when I'm ready to adjust those products, I can work on that item and you can see it says draft because that isn't published yet. But you can see past designs that I have published. You can also see I only did 19 tags and you can do 20. So I might want to add another tag, so I'm going to click on that. And then I'll add one more tag. And then I can click "Update tags". And now I have 20. So I tried to keep that saying 20 on all of these. And then you can use this "Menu" here to just click and go back to that design we were working on. So you can see if you scroll through this page that the design doesn't really fit on a lot of these products, and we're going to have to do a lot of adjusting to get them to look right on each product. So I'm just going to start at the top here with the Framed Mini Art Print. And you can see there's a scale option over here, so I'm just going to adjust that scale until this looks nice on the mini print. So I always try to keep in mind the size of the object. So these Framed Mini Art Prints are pretty small, they're just a few inches wide. And so I don't want to go too small with this because I don't want it to be so small that someone can't even see the image. So that looks good to me. You can also click "Refresh preview". And that'll take just a couple seconds to load, and then you'll see your product, if you click on that, how it will look on Society6. So maybe it's too big or too small. You can adjust that here. You can see how it will look on the different frames. And also if you like the way it looks, you can just take a screenshot. And I'm doing that by pressing the "Home button" and the "Power button" at the same time. So if everything looks good here, you can click "Save and Enable". So what that's doing is making up for sale and saving the layout that you just set. So then if we zoom in here, you can see that's exactly how it looks, what you just saw in the preview. So I'll repeat that same process with the next print. This is another mini print, but it's not framed. And I don't need to click 'Refresh preview" here because it's going to look exactly like it does right there. So I'll just click "Save and Enable". The third item here is the art print. And what you'll notice is that the art prints have a money sign beside them. And that means you can set the pricing individually for those products. So if I click on the art print, you'll see on the right side over here, there is the option to change your pricing. So there's a column that says markup. And markup is how much you're going to make on that product. So if I sell an extra small 6 by 10 inch art print of this design, I get $1. And if I sell a 20 by 40 inch I get $4. So that's something to keep in mind here, you have to decide what this is worth to you. What I like to do is leave everything at its default until it sells. Once it sells, I'll bump it up a little bit more. If it sells a lot, then I'll bump it up even more. So I don't like to go through the work here of changing all the pricing, if I don't know whether or not it's going to sell. So for now I'm going to leave that as it is. When it comes to the art prints, you don't have the option to change the sizing. So if you wanted to change how this was laid out, you would have to actually change it and procreate and upload it to drive and then put a new image right here. So we'll do that later on with some of the other images, but I think this looks great as an art print just as it is, so I'm not going to change anything. I'll click "Save and Close". And the same goes for the Framed Art Print and the Canvas print. I like how those look. They look great in the preview, so I'm just not going to touch them. When it comes to the metal print, this image isn't going to work on the metal print because it's a square. So I don't want to have this really tall, thin image on a square. It's just gonna look forced. So I'm just going to leave that off. And you can see that applies to a few of these images here. If it's just not going to look right, I'm just going to leave it off. I'm not going to worry about trying to fit it on every single product, because I'm going to do a circular version of this design and that'll be great on the square products. So let's move on to the poster. I went ahead and switched back to Safari here. Sometimes I use Chrome for this and sometimes I use Safari. But I find that if one isn't working with Society6 the other will, so sometimes I'll have both of them open and just see if it's working better in one rather than another. So I just wanted to tell you why I switched browsers here. So I'm looking at the poster and I'm just reducing the scale. And I think that looks nice. This is an 18 by 24 inch poster. So I'm keeping that in mind. "Save and Enable". And then you'll see the Wood Wall Art. So the Wood Wall Art is always square. And I don't think square is a good orientation for this image, so I'm just going to leave that off. I am going to go to the wall hanging and resize that. Down on this next section, I don't think this is going to look great as a curtain so I'm going to leave this off. It's not large enough for a wall tapestry so you can see that's grayed out and if I click on it, it says to enable this product upload an image that's this certain dimensions. My image isn't wide enough for this, so I would have to use Affinity Designer if I wanted to get an image that was large enough to fit on this product, and we're going to do that later. I'm going to go back to the remaining products. You can think about," will this look good on a square throw pillow?" I don't think so, so I'm not going to use that. It also won't look great on a floor pillow, a square mural, a circular clock, a rag, so I'm fine with skipping all these products that it just doesn't work well for. Same goes for the shower curtain. It could work on the vast mat, but it would be sideways so I'm not going to use that. One thing that it will look nice on is a travel mug. If you wanted to have just a single strip. With the new catalog there's white-space on the back so I'm going to skip those as well. Now when it comes to a serving tray, that's a rectangular product so it's going to look good on there. So I'm going to click Serving Tray. As you can see, I just repeat the same process with all of the products that I think this design will look right on. I'm looking at the Notebook here. The Notebook has a front and a back, so I'm going to resize my image and then I'm going to put it on the front of the Notebook. I want to be sure that it's perfectly spaced from left to right, so I'm going to click Refresh Preview. These previews can sometimes take a little time to generate depending on your internet speed. I can see from this preview that this is way too far to the right, so I'm going to shift it little to the left. Refresh Preview again. I'm going to repeat that process until this looks right on the front of the notebook. That looks nice. There's an even amount of space on the left and right here. I'll click Save and Enable. This will look great on a card as well so I'm going to open that. This isn't going to look great on laptop sleeves or skin, so I'm just going to leave that off. I do think it's a nice orientation for a cell phone case, so I'm going to open those and adjust each one. You have to decide here if you're okay with your design getting clipped by this little hole. I am because this is symmetrical and it's clear what's on the other side so I'm going to leave that as it is. The next section is apparel. Now this design is not going to look good on a fanny pack, backpack and all over Tee, which means they print the entire front and back of the image, the daffle-bag. It's not going to look good on any of those, but the tote bag, I can center it in the middle and that'll look nice. You can see I'm having to do a lot of scrolling at this point because I'm working down at the bottom of the page. One thing that you can do is click and hold on a Product, open in a New Tab. I'm going to do that with all of the T-shirts here. I'm not going to do leggings and I'm not going to do the pouch because this design isn't going to look good on those. I can Close that tab and then each T-shirt is in its own tab so I can work on those one at a time and then close the window. This is a black design so it's not going to look good on black. It's got pink in it so I don't think it's going to look good on red or orange. I'm just turning off colors that I don't want people to be able to buy this product on. I'll resize that. This white box is showing where your design is going to be. It's not going to print a white box on the T-shirt. Save and Enable. Once that goes back to this page, I can close that tab and now I've got my next T-shirt open in the tab. That tab feature is just a little way to save some time on this process. I've got this on the lighter colored shirts. Now if we scroll down, you can see that all of those shirts have been updated and our leggings and the pouch are not on so we are going to skip those. We could do a beach towel, we could do the sling chair, but pretty much everything else in this section is not going to work with this portrait orientation. Click and hold the sling chair, open in a New Tab. Click and hold the Beach Towel, New Tab, and that's the end of my page, so once I orient these two, we're done. This is a sling chair, Save and Enable, Close that tab, and this is the Beach Towel. Just make that smaller so the whole image fits. Save and Enable. The very last thing I do is scroll through and make sure everything works right. Sometimes I make a mistake and I need to go back and fix that. Sometimes there'll be something a little strange where I think it didn't save the right layout. This is a time to go through and make sure you made all the right choices. Like that tote bag looks too closely cropped to me, so I'm going to make that smaller. Little things like that, you just want to be sure when a customer goes to your shop that it looks professional and nothing looks a little bit off a little bit strange. Once you're happy with everything, you've done your tags, titles, descriptions, layouts. You can click publish and you'll see it says, please note it can take up to 30 minutes for a post to appear in your shop, so it's not going to immediately be in your shop, you have to come back later and you'll see it. I'll click Publish. Let's say you realize now you made a mistake, you need to update that, it doesn't look right. It's no problem just click on the Post, make those same changes and it saves automatically. You never have to click publish again. You can click Unpublish if you want to remove something. At this point you can adjust layouts if you need to or upload a different image. Let's go ahead and upload our next orientation.
10. Vectorizing and Backgrounds: Next I want to show you how I take an image that I've made in Procreate and turn it into a vector so it can be upsized to any size for Society6. I'm going to do this process using Affinity Designer and I have a whole class where I covered the basics of that app. So if you'd like to get a little bit more info about that program, you can check out that class. But for today we're just going to dive right in and I'm going to show you how I open the image and save it to my drive. So I created this image at 7,500 by 7,500 pixels, which is 25 by 25 inches at 300 DPI and that's the largest square that I can create in Procreate. But I want to be able to increase the size so this fits on all of the Society6 products. So I'm going to use the app called Adobe Image Capture to turn it into a vector and then I can use Affinity Designer to add some color after I vectorize it. So the first step is to create this image. And again, I used the process from my folk art class to make this and the layer layout doesn't really matter, the background doesn't really matter. I just need a black and white JPEG or PNG file to bring into the Adobe Capture app. So once this is all finished, we can click share, and I'll just save this as a JPEG. Save image. Now I'm going to open the Adobe Capture app. So I'll click that one time and it starts by wanting you to take a picture to create a vector, but I don't want to use a picture. I want to use an image that we just saved. So I'm going to click the little X symbol down here and that takes me to my gallery where I have other images that I've turned into vectors. And down here there's a little picture symbol. I'll click that one time. Click camera roll, find that image on my camera roll. And it's now turning it into a vector. So I have to make a choice here about how much detail I want. I pretty much always increase the detail all the way up to the very top and that just allows you to get the most detailed vector possible. That's especially important with these tiny little patterns I created. So once I've moved that threshold all the way up, I'm going to click the check symbol. And so if everything looks good here, I can click save, if not, you can erase or paint. I don't usually touch anything here because I made it just as I wanted it to be in Procreate. So now I can just click save and then it by default just goes back to that camera page and I can click the X to go back to my gallery and click on that image one time. Click the share button down here. Export as SVG. So SVG is a vector file type. I'll click SVG and then it asks me, how do I want to open this? So I'm going to use Affinity Designer. I think you can also use Vectornator, but I've switched over to Affinity. So if you use Vectornator, you can give that a try. I'm going to click copy to designer. And here is my vector. So as you'll see, if you open the layers panel over on the right side here. This has all of the parts of my image in separate layers. We could group all of these parts onto a single group. If you wanted to do that, you could click the move tool. Click and drag over that whole thing. Go back to your layers panel and click group. So now that item is a group. We could also do a group within a group if you just wanted your swans to be a group so you could edit the color of those. So whatever works for your style here. What I'm going to do is just add a few colors to this in some key areas. And so to do that, I'm just going to zoom in, double-click on whatever item I want to color. So I want to color the bottom of that cup and click on my color panel. I'm going to go to swatches where I've saved some colors. And again, I show how to do all of this in my Affinity class, so if you're feeling overwhelmed here and you want to try Affinity, you may want to check out that class. So I'm just going to change that to a yellow. And then I think I'll also change the teapot to a yellow. And so I'm just going to go through and do all of the coloring for that piece. So I've actually already done this, so you don't have to watch me recolor this. I've already colored this piece, just as I want it to be. And so I'm ready to export this image and bring it into Society6 at a really large size. So what I want to do here is make sure this image is a perfect square so when I save it, it saves as a perfect circle. So what I like to do to make that happen is just create a new layer. So just click plus to make a vector layer and then get a rectangle and just drag the rectangle over this whole piece. Go to my color swatches and turn on no stroke and no fill so that this is just a transparent box. I'm going to turn on magnetics, click my move tool. And I'm just going to move this transparent box so that it's a perfect square and it's meeting the top and bottom of my square. So I want to make sure that's a square by clicking on the transform button and being sure here that this has the same dimension for the width and height. So it does, this is a perfect square. And now I just want to save this whole image and save it without a background. So I'm going to click and drag to select everything, including that rectangle that we just created. If you don't create that rectangle, it might smoosh your image a little bit if your image doesn't go perfectly to the edge of the canvas, which mine doesn't, as you can see. It's like maybe a half an inch away from the edge. So I've got everything selected. I'm going to click on the menu, click export, and then I can set the size for this image. So the dimensions of this current image is 3,000 by 3,000 pixels. But this is a vector and we can resize a vector to any size. So I'm just going to click on dimensions, and I'm going to change this to 11,000 by 11,000. I'm also going to change this to selection without background because I want this image to be transparent. It makes it a lot easier to see as you're uploading your products. So I'm just going to double-check this. I'm saving a PNG 11,000 by 11,000, selection without background. And so once all of that looks good, you have to wait just a second for it to generate the upload and then you can click share. And again, I'm just going to save that to my drive. Just like we did before I'm going to name it, Tea colored 11,000. So I'm making sure I've got my file name and that I'm saving it in the right folder and then I'll click upload. I want to show you one other orientation before we upload this image because this is something that I do often when I want to have a background. So this image, for example, I want to be able to upload this to a ton of products. But I wanted to have a nice background too. So because this is a vector, I can make this any size. So what I like to do is make this circle really small in the center of the canvas. So I'm going to click about center so that when I resize it, it stays in the middle. And I'm just going to make it about a third of the canvas. So I've got one third here and one third here. Maybe a tiny bit smaller even. And then I would export this vector at 15,000 by 15,000 pixels. So that's going to let it sit on almost every single product. So that's one other option if you do want to do something with a background that has a different color in the center. And you'll see, like all the orientations, this orientation is listed on my cheat sheet, so it's 15,000 by 15,000 with a small image in the center and that's going to be great for so many different products. But for now, let's go ahead and upload our next image that we just created. So sometimes you'll be on this page and you can just click plus art post, or sometimes you'll be on your storefront and you can just press sell. Either way, it gets you to the same upload page. So I'll click browse again and find this image in my drive. Tea colored 11,000. Again, I own the rights to this image, but it's not a mature image. Go to the next step. And I'm going to do something here to save myself a little bit of time. So one thing you'll notice if you do a lot of color versions is that you're having to redo these titles and descriptions and tags all the time. But if you've already done it for one color version, you can really just copy it from the other. So what I like to do is have one browser where I've got that page open and another browser where I have an older post for that same image open. So for example, I did the black and white version of this design, so I clicked on that one time and then I'll click edit info and tags. And here's all that information here, I can just copy and paste it to my other post rather than retyping everything. So I'm going to click and hold. Or some browsers, it's click once and then click and hold. Select all, copy. So I've copied that title. And now I can go to Chrome and paste. And for that one I said black, for this one I'll change it to whatever the color is. So it doesn't allow me to type anything else, so I'll just call that vibrant. Another thing you can do is swipe up from the bottom, really slowly, grab your other browser and put it over here. And then you can just use that stuff over here. So I'm going to click one time, click and hold, select all, copy. Go down to this description, paste. Now I can see my tags over here, and I'm just going to copy that as I type on this browser. So once you have all of your tags taken care of and you've copied your description and title, you can just use this little bar to get rid of that other browser and choose your category. Again, I'll choose drawing and then continue to create products.
11. Circular Orientation on Products: I'm just going to start by resizing these just like we did with the previous images. One thing I don't like is that this canvas print is going right to the edge of this image and I don't really like how that looks. If you want to change something like that, you can just go back to your image and affinity, and again, we've got the about center turned on. When I make that a tiny bit smaller, and I'm putting down my finger to preserve the proportions, I'm just going to decide how much cropping I want for that. That looks good. Now, I'll export this file and I just have to make sure that my rectangle, that square shape that I created is still to the very edge. This saving process is going to save everything that selected with the background, so that rectangle is setting the Save area. I made my transparent rectangle go to the very edge of the canvas, click and drag to select everything, Export, and then I'm going to do the same export process that we did before. Again, first going to selection without background, and then setting the size to 11,000, and in my file name, I'm just going to make sure to save the word art print, so that I know the difference between that and my first art print. Now back on this art print page, I can click Browse, and then find that new file. Now, you can see we have just a little bit of a nicer buffer room around that image. I'll click, Save & Close, and I could repeat that same process with the metal print. Just browse and find that new file. This is the Wood Wall Art, we couldn't do that on the last post because we had a vertical image, but with the circular layout, it looks really nice on the square products. This is the landscape wall hanging, and I think that circular images work fine on this, but you may want to create a horizontal image that's for this purpose. Again, I don't think the curtains work well with this particular design, but the wall tapestry does and the pillow as well. With this wall mural, we again have the issue where the way that I originally crafted, it went all the way to the edge. You can decide here if you want to use that newer image that has the white border, or if you're fine with the cropping to the edge. I feel like on the wall mural it looks fine, crop to the edge, so I'm just going to go ahead and leave it how it is. Here we have the image on a throw blanket, and of course these circular layouts work great for clocks. I'm not going to do the rug, that's a horizontal image, it would just be a circle in the very middle of a horizontal. The same goes for the coffee table and the bench. But I do think this works well on a circular stool, side table and credenza. Again, I'm going to do that open in a new tab process, so I don't have to continue doing so much scrolling, I'm opening each of those in a new tab and closing that tab, and starting with the first product. One thing you'll notice about these tools is that there's two design areas, one is the cut area and one is the safe area. I make my design just barely go over the safe area because that's where the edge of the stool goes under. You wouldn't want to have most of your design in that outer ring. Some things will look fine as they are and you don't even have to open them like the duvet, this just automatically goes right to the outer edge of the duvet, same thing for the comforter and the shower curtain. I just turned those on, I don't even have to open them. I do have to open the pillow sham because that's not cropped right as I look at it in the preview, and same thing with the bath mat. The hand towel is just so long and thin I just don't think it's going to look good with this layout, so I'm not going to turn that one on. Here's my pillow sham and the bath mat. I'm going to open all of these tabletop products in new tabs. This is the coffee mug, you may be okay with putting this single image on a coffee mug, or you may just want to do your mugs as seamless repeats, I do both. Let's look at the preview for this coffee mug. You can see exactly how this is going to be printed on the mug, I'm going to move it a little bit to the left because it's curved around the side too much, but as you can see, you wouldn't want to put it on this side because then it would be on the back of the mug and the preview wouldn't look right. I'm going to leave that here with just a tiny bit of space on the right and click Save. This is the travel mug, so I am fine with that just being in the center. This is the coasters, so we have the option to split the design on the four coasters or repeat this design on all coasters. I don't want to split this circle on the four pieces, I'm going to repeat it on all coasters, and then just reduce the size a tiny bit so it fits a little better in that shape. Here's the serving tray. I can just close all those tabs that I'm done with and I want my most recent tab open here so I can see all my products. Now, I can move on to the office section. I'm just going to keep repeating the same process here. I'm not going to do wrapping paper because I think that's better for seamless repeat patterns, but I am going to do my notebook, stationary cards, and then the sticker just looks great as it is, so I'm just going to turn that on, I'm not even going to open a new tab for that. Again, this is the notebook, and I'm going to make sure I refresh that preview and that it's centered perfectly on the notebook. It's a little too far to the right, so I'm just going to bump it just a little bit, and then I always check the preview, I never just bump it and then leave it, I always double-check that before clicking Save. I don't think this is going to work well on cell phone cases, whereas the last one was perfect for that shape, a circle on the back of a case, I just don't think it's going to look right for this design, but I am going to do my laptop cases, and the tote bag, and then I'll do the T-shirts in the next round. Again, I'm turning off a lot of colors because this has a lot of color in it, so it's not going to look good with every color. I always put this a little bit high on the bag because I've noticed that in the preview, it cuts off part of this, so it just looks a lot better, I think, if it's a little bit higher on the bag. Now, you have just a few more products. The welcome mat, I'm not going to do because nobody wants a white welcome mat, it's just going to be really dirty all the time, picnic blanket, I'll do that, can cooler, I'll do that, folding stool, I think that'll look nice. Sling chair is tall and long and I just don't think that's going to work well with a circle, same thing for the sunshade, the yoga mat, the beach towel, and we could do the outdoor floor cushion if we just put the image on the very top and ignore the other part, so let's do that. Here's our picnic blanket, here is the can cooler, I'm just going to have this on the very front of the cooler, here is the folding stool, and here is the outdoor floor cushion. I need to not only make this smaller, but I need to put it where I want it to be on the cushion. I'm going to set it right there, and click Save. As usual, my next step is just to scroll through and double-check everything, make sure nothing looks off, or that I forgot to turn anything on, or that I accidentally turned something on that I shouldn't have. Once I'm happy with all of that, I'll scroll up to the top and click Publish. Let's go ahead and move on to looking at repeat patterns.
12. Sizing and Saving: Next I want to show you how I resize and apply a repeat pattern to products on Society6. So you'll see that this repeat pattern will fit on so many different products and it looks great on a lot of the products that just don't work well with the single images. So I almost always create a repeat pattern version of every composition that I make for Society6. I created the repeat pattern that you see here using the process from my Affinity Designer class. I created the repeat elements using my Folk art class. Just so you know how I got to this point, the reason I make my repeats in Affinity is number one, we can resize to any size because these are vectors. So if I wanted to do this on 15,000 by 15,000 pixels, I can do that. That's not possible in Procreate. The other reason I make my repeats in here is because this is pixel perfect, you can move elements to be exactly the distance they need to be to make a perfect repeat. In Procreate, you can get really close. You can nudge things to be close to pixel perfect, but it's never going to be mathematically perfect. So if you're just working digitally, I think it's fine to do your repeats in Procreate. But if you're going to print, I think it's really important to create a mathematically perfect repeat. Even a single pixel can show up in a print. It may not be as easy to see on the screen, but then once you print it onto a product, it just looks like a big mess up and Society6 might remove your product if it's not made in a pixel perfect method. So for me it just doesn't work the risks to make her repeat in Procreate and also, you're not getting that smooth, crisp vector quality that you get when you use a vector-based program. So we could export this file just as it is. So this would go on all of the products. But what I really want is for more of these elements to show up on a product. Like if I had a notebook, I would want at least two of these stacked to be the front of the notebook. I wouldn't want the front of the notebook to have just a few elements. So what I want to do is double this image so that it's repeated. So the way I like to do that is click Export. If you're working on art boards, you can click here and say save to art board one. But I'm not working on an art board, so I'm saving this at 11,000 by 11,000 pixels and I'm using PNG as my file type. I'll click share and save this to my Drive folder. I'm calling this my repeat block crafts because this is just the block that I'm going to repeat on a larger canvas. So I'll click Upload. So now I want to get out of this screen. I'll click Cancel and go back to my gallery. Now I'm going to create a new document. I'm going to size this at 11,000 by 11,000 pixels and click, make sure that pixels is selected as the measurement here and the DPI also to 300 I always work at 300 DPI and once all of that is set, I'll click Okay. I just want to show you on our chit sheet, if you're wondering, why did I choose 11,000 pixels? If I open the chit sheet and we go to the products by size. So you can see that the largest product is 14,000, the second-largest is 10,000. But I don't even do duffle bags and I occasionally we'll do yoga mats if my design fits. So 10,650 is the absolute largest I would ever need a design to be. So I just go with 11,000 because that fits everything but duffle bags. If you want to do duffle bags though, you're going to go with 15,000. So back in Affinity, I have got my canvas that's 15,000 by 15,000 pixels. I'll click Place image, import from Cloud, find that image in my drive. Then we get a pop-up that says drag to place your image. So just drag and put that in place and as long as you have the magnetics on, it'll snap. But it doesn't really matter, we're not trying to get this to be a perfect repeat. We're just trying to make a big canvas with the repeat all over it. So I'm going to duplicate by clicking the Menu and clicking Duplicate and then I'm using the magnetic tool to just snap these into place. Duplicate again and it automatically duplicates it into the right place. So I'm just going to repeat the same process, making sure that I'm always getting these little magnetic rulers up and down, left to right every single time I play something. So you can see right there I moved my finger a little bit when I placed it. So I'm just going to zoom in and make sure that's right in place before I release and Affinity is a smart program. It knows because I moved something over that distance. The next duplication moves at the exact same distance again. So you can decide here, do you want to do three layers of your repeat or we could drag the select everything, and maybe we just want to do two layers. I'm putting down one finger to constrain the proportions here. So if you think about a curtain, the curtain would be this panel here in the middle and so you have to think, would that be enough repeat elements for a normal size window curtain, or a strip of wallpaper from floor to ceiling. So that's going to depend on how you layout your repeat. You may want to do another layer of these, but I'm just going to go with four. You can see this doesn't have to be perfect on the edge. It's hanging off the edge here. That doesn't matter. This square doesn't need to be a perfect repeat. We just need to have a repeated pattern on the canvas. So I'm going save this image, export whole document, PNG, making sure that size 11,000 by 11,000 and now I'll save it to my Drive. So I call this crafts final repeat 1,000. One last thing I'm going to do before I go into Society6 is go back to my original repeat block. So this is my repeat pattern that I created. What I need to do is save this at a size that will work for Society6 wallpaper template. So they require 3,600 by 3,600 pixels exactly for a repeat block. So I need to save this image at that size just for the wallpaper product. So when you click the Menu, click Export, change the size here to 3,600 by 3,600, it still says whole document. I'll click Share and then save that to my drive and make sure to note that this is the 3,600 pixel version.
13. Adjusting Products: Back to Society six. I'm going to click Add a new art post, browse from computer and find that file in my drive. What I'm uploading here is the crafts repeat 11000 pixel. I'm not uploading the wallpaper image because you originally want to upload the biggest and then you may have to upload some smaller ones to other particular products. But for the original, we want to work with the biggest possible file. This is my crafts final repeat 11000. Let's say you're just not in the mood to do your titles and descriptions at this moment, you're just ready to start looking at your products. We can just put a period here, choose a category, put a period as a tag and then just click Continue to create products. We're not going to publish this yet. We're just doing this as a place holder and now I can just go straight into doing my products. As you can see when you look at these, some of them will be sized nicely anyway. You have to decide, is a seamless repeat appropriate for an art print in your opinion. Some people might say no, some might say yes. I like these as our prints. I think this would be really nice on a wall. I'm just turning these on, because I'm happy with how they look in the preview. I'm going to do the same thing with the metal print. It does seems a little bit odd to me on the wood wall art, so I'm going to leave that off and same thing with the wall hanging. That's just personal preference, you can do whatever you'd like here. Now we're looking at the curtain and we can decide here exactly what size you want this to be. It needs to at least extend all the way to the orange borders and so about 92 percent is good. We could go all the way to the 100 if you want it to be a tiny bit bigger and then save and enable. But you may just be happy with how it looks in the preview originally and in that case, you can just turn it on. I'm going to open all my pillows in new tabs because I like to really see those up close and make some little adjustments. It's important here to think about the size of this pillow in person. This pillow's about this big, so you have to decide how large do you want these images to be on a product that size. Some products I can just turn on, whereas others I really need to go in and make adjustments. I think this looks good on some of the furniture, but some of these I really just can't see in the preview, so I'm going to open those up and make some adjustments. I think this looks fine and the duvet cover, shower comforter, towel, pillow sham, bath mats. You'll see what these repeats sometimes it's actually quite easy to apply this to products. It will just fly through the process if you size it in a way that, when I'm thinking about it, I'm usually thinking about a notebook. I think if I size it nicely for notebook, it fits on a lot of products. This also will work nicely on wrapping paper but when it comes to the acrylic box, this is way too small. This acrylic box is a very small thing and so for the pattern to be so small on that product is just a little bit odd. I'm going to take a look at the notebook because I really want to be sure that it's filling the entire rectangle and it looks like it is, so that looks good. The sticker like the acrylic box is a really small product. This really tight repeat needs to be upsized to look good on a small sticker. I'm happy with how this looks on cell phones and laptop skins. I don't normally do things like the fanny pack, or the T-bag. I think this pattern just looks cool on the backpack. I'm going to turn that on. Obviously, this doesn't look good on shirts because it's just a really tightly packed and repeat pattern. Middle of a shirt. I've never seen a shirt like that. Personally, I'm not even going to touch the shirts. I'm not going to turn those on. I like how the pouch looks. The welcome mat, can cooler, picnic blanket. Again, if the sizing isn't right on these, just click and go in and change it. It's totally easy to do. I'm not going to turn on the yoga mat here because it's actually the pattern sideways. Yoga mats, you look at them in a portrait fashion. If you put the pattern on sideways to me, it just seems a little bit odd. But you could certainly rotate then engine upload version for the yoga mat if you'd like to do that. But for this pattern, I'm happy with how that turned out, so I would go ahead and click Publish.
14. Building and Sharing: Now that you know how to post a lot of different kinds of images to your society six shop. The next step is to slowly and steadily build your shop. I want to share a few tips for building your shop in a sustainable way. The first tip is to pace yourself rather than trying to upload a tonne of designs at once. It's easy to get burned out after you adjust tonnes of these products and you wait for each page to load. So I really recommend doing this in small doses. It's not just because it can be easy to get burned out. It's also because of the recency factor in search. Remember when we looked at key words, my designs that were newer were showing up higher in search.So if you're constantly putting out a small stream of designs, you're going to be showing up in search in more places. If you just carpet bomb Society six with a 100 designs and then you don't touch it for six months, you're not going to see the best results. The next tip is to not check your sales every day. When I first started Society six, I put up 20 or 30 designs all at once and I got totally burned out. Then I checked my sales every day several times a week and I got discouraged and gave up. Then six months later I went back to society six and found that I'd made a bunch of sales. It takes time. This isn't a one and done job. It's slow and steady and it takes a ton of experimentation and resource. You'll see over time that your sales will give you a lot of information about what's successful and what's not. The next tip is to only upload work that you are proud to share. I remove work that I'm not proud of anymore. You can see I don't have a tonne of designs in my shop because I periodically removed things that I don't like.You don't have to do that, but I do think it increases the quality of your shop overall. The next tip is to focus on a few high-quality designs. Rather than creating a tonne of designs for society six, it would be better to have ten beautiful designs and then do different color versions and orientations of each one. The next tip is to share your work on social media, on your email list, however you like to share images with people.I always recommend sharing beautiful mock-ups rather than screenshots. I see so many of these screenshots of society six products on the web, and they all look exactly the same. Whereas if you make some beautiful mock-ups, you're going to get a lot more attraction for your posts. In this next section, I want to talk about how I create my mock-ups from start to finish. You'll see how this process takes a boring white background image and turns it into something really bright and colorful and makes your product look so much more exciting than it does on those boring white backgrounds. I created a social sharing template that shows all of the image sizes that you need for Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. You can go back to the class resources and downloads page. Click and hold social sharing template and click open in a new tab. Once that downloads, I'll click open and procreate. I have to go back to the gallery to find that image. You'll see here if you open this image, it has some pencil marks to show you the different sharing templates. We have on the outermost Instagram story, red in the middle is Pinterest, and then square here. You can use this to create a single image and then crop it for all of the other social platforms. The first thing I'll do is find the product that I want to show in the mock-up. I go to my society six shop by clicking View storefront. I'm going to start with some wall art framed mini print. I'll take a screenshot by clicking the home button and the power button at the same time. Then back in procreate, I'll click, add, insert a photo, and insert that screenshot. You can up size it a little bit if you want to. Work keeping in mind here the size of the Instagram post. You may want to drag your image below all of these guides, because then you can see all of the guides on top of your image. I'm going to make my image a bit bigger. Typically, we say you should never up size an image. In this case, it's just a mock-up, it's not a printed design and we're going to sharpen it a little bit. So I'm not too worried about doing a little bit of up-sizing. The next thing I'm going to do is sharpen this image.I want to make sure that layer selected click adjustments, sharpen, and then just drag my finger all the way up, which you can see is adjusting the sharpening. That takes that slight bit of blurriness from the screenshot and just makes it a little bit more crisp. Next, I need to get rid of anything that's not the art print itself. I'm going to click the Move tool and move this into the corner. I'm going to turn off magnetics so that I can get this close to the corner. I'm going to turn off all my other layers and zoom in here. I don't want to have any bit of gray that makes it clear that this is a mock-up. I like to crop off a little bit more than necessary so it looks more realistic. I've cropped off just a tiny bit of that wood and now I'm going to zoom out and move it down to this other corner. Get really close, but not all the way, and then zoom in and do the same process. I can put that back in the center, and now I can return my social guides so it can really place this nicely in the center of that Instagram post square. Now I'm going to create a new layer, and this is going to be my background layer. I'm going to fill this with a cream and I went ahead and chose a cream beforehand. On a layer above that, I'm going to get a slightly darker creamed, so tiny bit, and I'm going to go to the brush set that you can download on the resources page and get the wallpaper texture and just brush over that with the wallpaper texture. Zoom in a little just to check and see how that looks. You may want to go to click the N and reduce the opacity of that a little bit of it's too intense. You don't need a lot, you just need a tiny bit of texture. This is just decoration for behind your print, but you wanted to just have a look a little bit moreover realistic field and just a super flat image. On a layer above that, I'm going to get a new color and I'm going to choose one of these wallpapers. I created my own wallpapers that I'm sharing with you here and you can feel free to use that for any of your mockups. But you may want to go ahead and create your own wallpapers too, so you have totally unique mock-ups. I show how to do this repeat pattern brushed process in my class on cutouts. If you want to create your own pattern brush, you can go to that class and you'll see the lesson on creating a pattern brush there. I've also created a P-interest inspiration board that you'll find linked on the class resources page. If you click on that P-interest Board, it's called wallpaper ideas board. You'll see all kinds of ideas here. If you want to create your own pattern brush, you could get an idea from here, single color, multicolor. Maybe you just want to spend a day making mock-up backgrounds and don't worry so much about what products are going to go on them. Just make some beautiful backgrounds or maybe you've already created some patterns that would work well for backgrounds. I do think beautiful backgrounds can really make your work stand out online. I think it's totally worth doing a little bit of extra work just to have some nice background to display your all prints. For this one, I'm going to use one that's in the set and I'll just swipe that down the page, making sure I cover everything before I pick up my brush, and then I just want to make this look a little bit more realistic so that it's not just smashed onto this wall. First I'm going to duplicate this layer that contains my image. The novel layer below it I'm going to swipe my two fingers right to alpha lock it. I'm going to double-click in the black area to get black as my color, and then I'm going to click on that layer and click fill. I basically just created a black square that's the exact same dimensions as the original square. Now I can turn this into a shadow. I'm going to duplicate that black square because I know I'm going to want to at least a couple of shadows on here. I'm just going to go ahead and have two of those ready to go. I'm going to swipe right on each of those so that they're not alpha locked anymore because I want to use a blurring tool and a blurring tool won't work if the alpha lock is on. I'll click on the "Adjustments tool" and click "Gaussian blur." Now, I want to zoom in so you can really see what's going on here and I'm just going to bump up the blur a tiny bit, and you can already see that it's creating a shadow behind this piece. So I'm going to do a really slight shadow here and I'm also going to go to that layer and reduce the opacity so that it's super subtle. I'm also going to remove the shadow from the top and left because I'm going to have my light source coming from over here. That's a good thing to think about before you start adding shadows. Where's your light source coming from? If it's coming from right here, then you've got shadows down here and not on the top. To keep this realistic, I'm going to grab this soft brush. That's at the very top of the set and that's just the air brush that comes with procreate, and I'm just going to erase the shadow from the top and left. Now we've got just a slight shadow down there. On my second square, I'm going to do the same process, gaussian blur but this one I'm going to do a more intense shadow. So that's super intense. I'm not going to leave it like that. This is just to get me started and I'm going to get the move tool and just shift it down a little bit, and then I'm going to reduce your opacity quite a bit, so it has just a tiny bit of a shadow. Then I'm going to get the eraser and again, removing it from the top and thinking about where that light source is coming from, So it's coming from the top. There's going to be a lot of shadow down here and the more intense you make the shadow, the more it makes the piece stand out from the wall. You have to decide how far is this sending out from the wall. Maybe it's just a tiny bit. Maybe its a lot and you can also move it. If it doesn't look quite right, move it around a little, grab your eraser and just make sure there's no shadows on the area where your light source is coming from because that's just going to look really unrealistic. The next thing I'm going to do is add in a little light and dark on this whole image. I'll create a new layer. I'll get white as my color. Get the soft brush from the set and make it on a pretty large size, and then over here outside the canvas, I'm just going to tap one time. Maybe make my brush a little bit bigger and tap again. I'm just trying to get some light to shine through from that side and I'm going to turn the opacity down on that so it's really subtle. Get black as my color and do the same process down here, so that we have a shadow down here, reducing the opacity on that as well. I'm going to remove all my guide so you can really take a look at this. This is a great time to make some changes. If anything doesn't look quite right you can just go to that layer and make some little adjustments. I think my shadows are a little too intense. Just going to bump that down a little bit. Creating these just takes practice. After you make a few, you'll start to see how to make them more and more realistic as you work. We can even change the color of our light. We could get a somewhat yellow light. Alpha lock that layer by swiping two fingers right. Click one time and click fill layer then reduce the opacity on that. Then we've got yellow light shining in instead of white light. This really just depends on your personal style. You can do this however you like. My only recommendation is keep it subtle. Keep all of your little changes like the subtle. The more extreme you make them, the more fake they'll look. Next I want to start cropping this for some other sizes. This is the size, it's perfect for an Instagram story. If you wanted to go ahead and post this on your Instagram, this image would be perfect for that. But let's say you have a different purpose like an Instagram post or a Facebook post and you don't want this size. Click select, click on the image, click duplicate, click on that new image, and then we're just going to crop it to be whatever size you want to use. Let's say this is going to be my next Instagram post. I'm going to go to tools, canvas, crop and resize. Instagram is typically one-to-one, which would be 1800 by 1800 and then I just need to move that crop windows so it's perfectly centering my art print. Click "Done," and so there is my art print. Now I could go ahead and post this on Instagram. Now you can see it's easy to crop these images using this template so that you can share it on any social platform.
15. Background Options and Links: We can do this process with any of the products on Society6, is definitely a little more tricky with the 3D products. But I do want to show you one last option for the mark-ups. In the last one we used a wallpaper and this one I want to use something a little different, maybe a wood background, some texture. What I'm going to do first is find my piece that I want to mock up. I'm going to go to office, stationary cards. I'm going to use this card. But I really like this second mock-up here that shows the envelope and the card itself. I'm going to click on that and just Zoom in a little bit and then take my screenshot. Now that I have the screenshot, I can start thinking about what background would look good with that. I think a dark wood background would be really nice with that. I'm going to go to the side Pixabay. I'm going to do this in Safari because I do find it's a little easier to save images in Safari. I have a list of websites on the class resources page where you can find images that are free for personal and commercial use. This is one of those sites. I'm just going to go to this site and type wood and then start looking for some wood that would look nice with this card. I like this one right here, and I could probably turn it the other way so that we can do an Instagram story this way. Let's go ahead and download this. I'm going to download the largest size. Then it's going to ask me to log in. You can create a free account on this site, it doesn't cost anything to use the images. Then you can download the largest size file, there's no restrictions on using these images. I'll click and hold and click Save image. Now that's saved my camera roll. I'm going to go back and get my social template. One thing I like to do with the social template is click select and duplicate it a few times. Then I just have a few ready to use. There's one that will be my blank template and I'll never touched that one. I'll just duplicate it and then the rest, I can just use them for product mock-ups. I'm going to insert that wood image and I know it's a horizontal image, so I'm going to go ahead and turn my Canvas and insert the photo. Again, it's okay to do a tiny bit of sizing when you're just doing a social media post, but if you're doing actual artwork you never want to up-size an image. Now then I have my wood background, I can go ahead and insert my card and orient that in my Instagram posts format here. The first thing I like to do always is sharpen, adjustments, sharpen and drag that all the way up just to crisp it little bit. Then I'll get the selection tool with free hand. I'm just going to draw basically around this. Doesn't have to be perfect. Then I'll drag three fingers down and click "cut and paste" and cutting it off that layer and pasting it onto a new layer. Then I can make that background layer invisible. Now I can start revealing this card. I'll get my eraser with the soft brush on a very small size. I like to test that out first. The reason I use a soft brush is because as you can see this image has a softness to it because it's a little bit blurred. I don't want to come in with a monoline brush which is super hard because that really contrasts with the blurriness of this area. It's better to try to match what's already going on in the image than to try to make things perfect. One thing I like to do with this airbrush on a really small size is click and drag and then hold. That allows you to really easily crop off a big area. It's important where you start your brush that's going to determine where that line goes. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get that right. Clicking and holding to get that straight line. You can imagine if we were doing this with a pillow for example, you'd have to just go in and erase the background by hand. You'd have to just go in with the soft airbrushed on a really small size and just slowly remove that background. It does take a little time to make these mock-ups, but personally I think it is worth it because it makes your work look way more professional, and these images double as something you could put on your website, something you could put as part of your portfolio. These aren't just social media posts. You could use these for a lot of different uses. Now I'm just going to grab a solid brush like the variable ink or the monoline and just go through and remove the remainder of this. I like to use a soft brush right up against the card. But then for the remainder, just really doesn't matter. Once you've taken care of removing all that extra outer area, we can duplicate that layer and then on the bottom layer swipe right with two fingers to alpha lock, and then click one time and fill layer to fill it with black. We've just got a solid black outline. That's the exact shape of our card. I'm going to alpha lock that by swiping two fingers right. Then click Gaussian Blur and give that a slight blur. I'm trying to copy what's already going on on this card. If I Zoom in, you can see this little shadow right here. It's very subtle. I'm trying to mimic that out here because I want this line here to be seamlessly matching whatever is on the card itself. Keeping an eye on stuff like that. Then this piece really could be done. We could select both of those by swiping right with one finger. Click the Move tool, move this up and grab another card and put it down here. That's an option. You don't just have to do one single product. We can put a pillow. We could say, look at this new drawing on three different things and have a pillow, card and a mug or, whatever looks nice together. That's just a couple examples of the mock-ups. But as you can imagine, there are so many different things that you can do with mock-ups. You can find something that's sitting on a table and then replace it with one of your art prints. You can distort the proportions of the art print so that it fits along a wall like this one. What I did here was first I created a new layer. I turned on Canvas, turned on the drawing guide, edit drawing guide. Make sure symmetry is set to vertical. Then I'm just going to grab any brush here on a small size and make a line that goes up. Originally this was a square image, I just took this as a screenshot from Society6. Rather than it being square straight up and down, I wanted it to be in just a tiny bit like this. I created this little frame here, just using this brush. Then on the art print, click the move tool, click and hold and you can distort the proportions of something. All I did was slightly to distort this image so that it's going in just a tiny bit. That makes the whole image look like it's propped up against the wall and you can see if I remove that, this is just a picture of some sunflowers that I found and I put my art print on top of it. Another thing you can do is create your own mock-up images. You can find a lot of these images online, but honestly a lot of people are going to be using these. I try to always take opportunities. If I see a beautiful place, a table, a shelf, I'm over at someone's house and they just have a beautiful counter-top. I'll just go ahead and snap a picture and that's going to be beautiful for a mock-up. The picture on the left here is one I took at my house. The light was coming in the window and a really nice way. I just snapped a picture of that shelf and moved that vase over to the right and that's a perfect spot for one of my art prints. As you're thinking about sharing your shop, sharing your mock-ups, it's time to start thinking about links. There are a few different links that you could give people. Number one, obviously would be your shop. You can just go to your shop and the website that shows up here is your shop domain. Mine is society6.com/lizkohlerbrown. You could also send someone to a specific section, let's say you do a lot of cards and notebooks. You could send them to your office section. Just click office and then you've got that link up there. You could send someone to a very specific section like notebooks. We've got notebooks here. We could click right here. Then we've got Lizkohlerbrown.com/notebooks. We could also do a very specific product. This is really what I recommend is sharing specific products. Number one, because I think it's easier for people to understand if you're sharing an individual thing like, hey, look at this new notebook I created and sharing that, rather than sharing a whole section, go look at all of my notebooks. That's asking a lot of someone, but asking them to just look at a single item. They're like, maybe I'll go check it out. Another reason for advertising single objects is because you can get an affiliate link. You do have to apply for that and I put a link to that on the class resources and downloads page. I think everyone gets approved. I can't imagine why you wouldn't, and it only takes a couple minutes to apply. What this is is a link. When you click copy here, you've copied it. This link is going to take someone to this product and then it's going to track them on Society6. Let's say they go to Society6 to see your notebook. But then they don't buy your notebook, they buy somebody else's art print. You still get 10 percent from that sale. I think it's worth it to use these individual links even if you don't have the intention of making a lot of money off your own products or you don't think everyone's going to necessarily buy it. You can still make a little money with those affiliate links. I try to always use the link of an individual product.
16. Common Issues and Sales: Next I want to talk about troubleshooting some common issues that happen when you first open a print on demand shop. These are common issues that a lot of people experience when they first open a shop and don't see any sales. There are a few answers to the question, why haven't I made any sales? It really depends a lot on the shop and the person. There are a few questions you can ask yourself to troubleshoot this issue. One answer is that it takes tag research and tweaking. Ask yourself, can you find your work via search? Can you type in a specific search term that a real person would be typing and actually find your work? If the answer to that is no, then you need to do some tag research and tweaking. If the answer is yes and you think a lot of people are seeing your work but they're not buying it, it could be the quality of your work. Ask yourself the question, would you buy your work? Would your cousin buy your work? Would someone who doesn't know you really want to buy your work? If not, then you just need more practice. You just need more time to develop your style and develop your skills so that you're work gets up to that level. The next answer is time. Favorites and sales will increase your searchability and it takes time to get those, and it takes work to get a lot of people to go view your work, but the easiest thing you can do to make that happen is to post consistently. Search results have a newness factor. So the more consistently you post, the more people are going to see your work. It also takes design research. You have to go through a testing phase with your designs to find out what works. Your sales and favorites will tell you a lot about what people are drawn to, and what work you should be making more of for Society6. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start building your Society6 shop. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad. Like how to create botanical illustrations, how to create vintage style lettering, and how to design a font. So check those out on my profile if you want to see more. I also share a lot of free downloads and resources for iPad artists and designers on my website. So if you'd like to get more like you've got for this class, check on my site. I would absolutely love to see your Society6 shop or some individual products once you're ready to share. You can do that here on Skillshare in the project section by taking a screenshot and uploading that as your project or you could upload your mockups to social media and tag me. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, illustrators, letterers, and digital planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting, and digital planning, and get inspired by digital creations from around the world. So if you love creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world, and conversations, sharing ideas, and seeing each other's work, check out the group through the link on my website. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on Skillshare, or you could contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.
Liz Kohler Brown, artist | designer | teacher | author
