Transcripts
1. Spoonflower Success Secrets: Patterns for Print on Demand: Hi. My name is Carrie Cantwell, and I'm a surface pattern
designer and educator. Are you a surface
pattern designer struggling to get your
patterns out in the world? Do you feel like it's
impossible to stand out in a sea of other
pattern designers? Well, I've discovered an amazing platform
that has helped me achieve success and recognition as a surface pattern designer. It's a print on-demand
website called Spoonflower. In this class, I'll teach you how I discover what's trending, make the most of my patterns, and stand out online. I'll show you best practices for everything from tags to proofing your art and showing off your patterns using
Spoonflower's free mockups. If you've never used
Spoonflower before, this class is a great
place to get started. If you're already a
Spoonflower artist, you'll learn some
helpful tips to make the most of your
art and your shop. You don't need any special
software to take this class. You can create
patterns in Procreate, Photoshop,
Illustrator, Affinity. There are lots of choices. With this class, I'm giving you a free bundle with
tons of trending tags, popular themes, and access
to awesome mockups, free color palettes and more. In this class, I'll
be showing you some special tricks
for leveraging your patterns in
Adobe Illustrator. If you've never made a
pattern using Illustrator, check out my Skillshare class on creating half-drop patterns. If you worry that Spoonflower
is too saturated, I'm here to put
your mind at ease. Trends come and go, but your unique voice is what will make your
art stand out. I'm living proof
that you can get noticed as an artist
through Spoonflower. I was even featured in Peppermint magazine because
they found me on Spoonflower. Are you ready to jump in? Let's do this.
2. Project: Share One (or More) Photos Using Spoonflower’s Mockups: Before I launched this class, I shared a one question survey asking what you wanted
to learn from me. The top choice was by far, using Spoonflower's product
mockups for self-promotion, so I'm tailoring this project
to help you with just that. Creating art gives me joy but there's a
special excitement I get when I see my art come alive on actual products
like wallpaper, fabric, curtains and pillows. It's great to put your
patterns on Spoonflower, and with the tricks I'm
teaching in this class, you'll learn how to leverage
and optimize your art so you can be found on
the Spoonflower website. It's even better to
be able to share your Spoonflower products
with your followers. This project will give you the
tools you need to show off your beautiful artwork with
slick product mockups, the best part is it
won't cost you a penny. Did you know
Spoonflower wants to help you promote
your products on their website by using their mockups and sharing
them with your audience? For this project, I'd
like you to share one or more product
mockup photos that you've downloaded for free
directly from Spoonflower. It's easy, quick and fun. I'm sharing one of
my product photos so you can see just how
amazing they look. Head on over to my lesson called show off your art
to learn exactly how to grab these
awesome product mockups right from the
Spoonflower website.
3. Create Your Spoonflower Profile: Let's get started with
this Spoonflower class. One of the things I
want to go over first is your Spoonflower account. I find that it really
does make a difference. If you have your Spoonflower
account set so that people can really see who you are and they can get
in touch with you. You can create a shop image and you can use any
image you want. You can use an
image of your art, but a lot of people
seem to like seeing a picture of me or
you, of course. I have a picture of myself as my shop image because
it's my shop. You don't have to do this, but I think it really does
add a personal feel to it, especially on a website
that has so many people, you really want to stand
out and make people feel like there really is a
person behind the patterns. When you do choose your profile picture
for your shop and you want to have a square
image and they have all of their parameters
here and of course, you can upload it
from your computer. I have my profile shown
to the public because I do want people to be able to see the person behind my art. I have my favorites shared. I love favoriting other
people's work because there's so much amazing
work on Spoonflower, and I think that really
does show a lot to the community if
you share yourself, you share things transparently, and you favorite other
people's work because you show that you're part
of this community. I also share my connections because I love connecting
with people on here. There's so many great artists. I don't feel like hiding any of that
stuff does me any good, and I'm an open book. Then we come to your screen
name because my brand is me. I just use my first
and last name. If you have a name that you'd
run together as one word, it can get a little
jumble-looking. I separated mine with an underscore so it's
easily readable. If you look at the little
block here on the right, it says 160 characters about me. This is your chance
to really shine and really allow people
to be able to get in touch with you or see
more of your art. I cannot stress how
important it is to have your contact
information in here. You can put in this
little box here, please contact me on
Spoonflower if you would like a different scale
or something like that. But the thing is that I want
people to go to my website. I want people to be able to email me because
let me tell you, I get customer
requests all the time via email from Spoonflower
customers that are like, I have this product, I really needed at this
scale or in this color. Would you be able
to do that for me? When someone can message
you on a site that has thousands of other users and
you can respond to them, it really feels so personal, even though this is
this big giant website that has so many users on it and can seem a little impersonal because
it's not your website. It really can feel personal. I have my email address here. The other thing is that if a company that maybe
you want to sell your art to or
license your art to looks at your stuff on
Spoonflower and says, wow, I really love their work. I want to license their art. If you have this set to just message me on Spoonflower versus your email address
and you don't have your website or your Instagram
or anything on here, I feel like you could
be missing out. Now you don't have
to have a website, you can have an Instagram. I would rather just be on
the safe side and just put my email address here so people can just
email me directly, it won't get lost
and then I have my Spoonflower store
as my store here. I believe you can put an external link if you have
an online store; I do not. Then of course, if you
have a blog or whatever, minus just on my website, you can put that as well. You really have a lot of
great opportunities here to really make this feel
like a personal experience. Then finally, you
have a shop banner. The reason I have my photo
here for my shop image is because I do have my
art in my shop banner. I chose a piece of art that I particularly love.
It's a recent piece. I'll probably update
it if I end up with another recent one
that I really love. You can showcase your art
in the shop banner and really that is the first
thing that people see. Let's go to your, if you go to view my shop. If you go up here, you're signed in to your
little person icon here. Then you go down
to View My Shop. You can see what other
people are going to see and now you can see here. This is your banner. This is the art that I'm
showcasing and it's at the top of the page so people aren't going
to lose your art. Also, all your art
is showing up here. To put your art for your
shop image, you can do that, but I feel like it's a little
bit redundant and this is really your only chance on
Spoonflower to show your face. A lot of people and a lot of successful people have an
illustration of themselves. If you're an
illustration artist and all of your patterns
are very illustrative, then sure you can do that. But I feel like
it loses a bit of personality even though you can do some really
cool illustrations, people can't actually
see what you look like. Back in the old days when
you would go into a store, if you had a store
experience with a customer service person or if you met the
owner of the store, how did that feel? Didn't it feel so much
more personal and didn't you want to come back
to that store more often? I think it really does help
to have an actual photo. It doesn't have to
be the best photo. I took this myself on my phone. This is not a photoshoot photo. Having your own face on there and having it
be a real photo and not an abstract illustration or representation of you
and not your art, is really the best way to
put your best face forward. No pun intended or I guess
pun intended and really make a difference for
someone's experience. Yeah, that's all I guess I have to say about your profile, but just use these opportunities
as much as you can. See you guys in the next lesson.
4. Upload & Scale Your Pattern Block: All right. So let's start
with the exciting part, which is uploading your
art to Spoonflower. So all I have to do is go to
the little person icon here at the top right
of Spoonflower and drop down to upload a design. And now, I'm going to click
on this button that says, Choose Files, and
I'm going to go ahead and select the
pattern block that I have. This is my seamless repeat, and I'm going to click on Open. And now we are getting a warning here or I guess a disclaimer, basically saying that
the work that you're uploading is not in violation of Spoonflowers
terms of service, et cetera, you're not using
intellectual property. You're not allowed to use,
et cetera. We are not. This is something
that I drew myself. So I'm going to click
on agree and continue. And then I am going to
let it do its magic. It's going to start uploading. Now, you're going to
get this pop up here. You should at least for
the next little while. This is the new design
edit experience. It's showing us how to
replace our art and where and also how to edit it, how to change the
scale and the repeat. You can select. Don't show
me this again if you want. I suggest not doing that until you've done
this and uploaded at least a few patterns a few times until you get really
comfortable with the process. I'm going to leave
that unchecked. But yeah, if you want
to edit your thumbnail, now you can click on the
edit thumbnail button. If you want to
replace the file and you want to upload a
totally new pattern block. You can click on
that. As always, you can also download
the existing file, and you can do this forever, or you can delete it, and then you can
actually edit it underneath the image there
with the edit button. So I'm going to click on Close. This is really just a
little tutorial and yeah. It says here, now, we have this is our file name. I have not named
the product yet. This is the actual file name on my computer. That's normal. It's always done that. Right now it's showing it as private, and it even has all
of the things here. It lets me replace the file, download the file, delete it, or edit the thumbnail. Now, if I want to
edit these products, I'm going to be editing
them down here. So the first thing that
we see though is edit the title and search. I'm
going to click on that. If you click on that
little bar there, now we have a whole little
drop down that's brand new. It's so nice. It's so
much easier to see. This is where we're
going to put our title, our description, and our tags. And there are some really
cool helpful tags here. For now, I'm just going to call this woodland Flora flowers, and mushrooms, bright
retro palette. So basically, this is
one of my little tricks. I like to say what it is. Sometimes I'll throw a couple
more little keywords in there because Woodland flora doesn't tell you there's
mushrooms in it. I'm also including
the word flowers. It's a sneaky way to drop
that into the title, where it still makes
sense logically. Then I'm also getting some keywords here and
describing the color palette. I'm just going to do
a description here. I'm just going to
call it flowers and mushrooms in a bright
retro color palette. Cool. And it's even showing us how many characters we
have left and all that. Now, we still have 13 tags, but we have all these great little helpful hints for tags. If you see here where
it says styles, you can click on this. If you see here where
it says styles, see this little drop down
here where it says select. We can actually choose some
styles of our art here. What's cool about
this is these are commonly used tags that are I'm assuming also
commonly searched for. I don't know because Spoonflower hasn't released
that information, but my guess is that
they want to help you sell your art because they make money when you make money. They want to give
us a lot of help with getting our art
found so we can sell it. So I would imagine that it is in our best
interest to listen to their advice and try to use
some of the suggested styles, also suggested patterns
and techniques, and suggested holidays and occasions that they
already are giving us in these dropdowns
because these are probably likely to help
us get found more easily. So I'm I'm going to
click on styles here, and I'm just going to
look through some of these and see if any of
these apply to my patterns. So my pattern is this
really bright kind of retro mushrooms
and flowers pattern. I would say it is definitely mid century,
mid century modern. It's definitely retro. And let's see if
there's anything else. Vintage, I always think of vintage as more
like cottage core. I don't think this would fit. It's not tropical. Yeah, I think it could be
novelty, but not really. I mean, novelty is usually something that's like
my trains pattern. It's definitely not modern. Yeah, I think we're good
with these two for now. L et's try patterns
and techniques. Let's see. This is
definitely a botanical. I'm going to select that and
see when you click on it, it just automatically populates it right here for
you. Isn't that nice? It's so much easier.
I'm going to go down here and look at
what else I can see. Let's see hand drawn, Geometric. Oh, here we go. Floral.
That's a really good one. Let's see what else there is. It's not brush strokes. It's not damask. It's geometric. I'm going to leave that
out though because it's not very rigid geometric. I mean, it's hand drawn, but that always confuses me because everything
I do is hand drawn, but some stuff looks more
doodily than others. I always think of my doodly work as more hand drawn looking. It doesn't have any texture. No, I would say this
is probably fine. I'm just going to
leave it at those two. Now holidays and occasions
So this is really great for when you have something
that's really meant for something like Christmas
or Valentine's Day. If you have lips and hearts, those are great for
Valentine's Day. Of course, if you have
Holly and snowmen, that's really good
for Christmas. I feel like my pattern
is maybe good for fall, maybe because of the mushrooms, but the thing is the colors are so bright, it's more summer. So it falls in between, I might just leave this out. And now that's fine. I've only used four
of my 13 tags. That means I have nine left. Here's a little
helpful hint here. I have nine left. What else
am I going to put in here? Look, when you
click in this box, now it's giving us some of these same suggested
tags that we saw above. These are not I think these are all in
alphabetical order. But I'm going to, no, they're not actually.
I'm going to look. Yeah, it's all the same
ones that we saw earlier. I might ignore these
because I believe these are all part of these three
dropdowns, these other tags. I'm definitely going to
use the word mushroom. I'm going to hit the comma, as soon as I hit the
comma, it populates it. If I click out of here, you can now see I have
these tags five tags, and I have eight left.
What else should I do? Did I put floral? I have floral already? Normally, I would type
floral, but I don't need to. I don't want to be redundant
because I'm using up a valuable one of my 13
tags if I repeat a tag. This right here is
telling us that that's already one of my tags. So I would say bright is one of the
ones that I want to use, so I'm going to hit a comma. What else would I
say, Let's see. I'm going to do some
of these colors. I have pink orange and green. I'm going to do
pink, orange, green. Now I've let's see, four left to use. What else can we think of
that would work for this? Maybe flowers. How about 60s? This is really, to me, very like sites looking, I'm going to do 60s and let's
do groovy, maybe? Yeah. Sure. Let's try that. I always tell people and I do
this too all the time. Go look at other art that's
best selling on spoon flower. And you can use tags that other people use
as long as they're generic words like retro. Don't use someone else's name. But I'm not going to
do that in this case, but I often will
go in and look at other people's best
selling patterns and see if it's similar to mine. Are they using keywords
like retro or vintage. It's that kind of difference
that you want to really pay attention to.
Actually, you know what? I'm also going to
include the color brown because that is a
key color in my art, and I'm just going to do hippie. Because you know what? It's
hippish. I think it's fun. Okay, perfect. I now have
used all of my tags. I really recommend
using all 13 of these. Do not waste any. Don't
have any that you have left out because this
is your one chance other than your title
to really get found. It's not mature content, and I want to add this to some collections
that I already have. If you click in this
bar right here, it's actually pulling up
my existing collections. I would say beauty
and nature is one. That's a generic collection
that I have let's see. Dramatic florals is another one. What else do I have that's in
here, and it's not loading. You might want to
scroll scroll school because it didn't load
all of them initially. I'd say this is whimsical, This is also wild flowers because they're wild
growing botanical items. I have a wonderful
woodland collection, but this is not one
of those pieces, so that's a traditional
collection. Yeah, I feel like
that's pretty good. I feel like this is enough of my collections that,
here we go. Here's one. I forgot. I created
a collection just called mushrooms because
mushrooms and I guess, are still so trendy. That is just everything
I have with mushrooms. It's not a traditional
collection. I'm not going to add
any additional details, but sometimes I like
to Sometimes I'll say, in my additional details, if I don't have room in my description because you
only have 150 characters. Sometimes if I want to say, this uses the pantone color, bright blue or whatever. Or this is something that would look great
on gold wallpaper. I'll put that in there
and you have more room. You have 255 characters. So go ahead and hit Save. Now I want you to look at
a pattern that you want to upload and take a look at
what you see in your pattern. Start writing down keywords that you think
would work as tags. Look at your colors, look at your motifs, look
at your medium. Think about what mood is
being evoked by this art. Those are the kind of tags you want to think about adding, and try to write
down a few now for the next piece of art that you want to upload
to spoon flower. Going to edit these products. This is where we're
going to look at scale. So the file scale is actually being shown
here, which is cool. Of course, it's enormous
because I always like to create stuff
that's really big. Some of these look like
they're still loading, but I'm just going to
click on Edit here and I'm going to adjust
the scale And you guys, this is so much better than
their previous interface. I'm so excited. Thank
you, Spoonflower. We can adjust the
scale with a slider. How amazing is this? And now I can look at this handy dandy little
measuring tool here along the bottom and along
the top of the left side. And really look at, Okay, this is 8 " right here, which means that's one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight. On inch is like this
space right here. I can really get
a better idea now for what scale this is. I actually might make
it a little bit bigger. You can even change it to
centimeters, if you want. You can change your repeat
I always have mine at a basic repeat because I create my half drop
patterns as rectangles, so they can repeat as
essentially a basic repeat, even though they're half drop. I know that's confusing, but if you took my other
half drop patterns class, you'll know what
I'm talking about. Then optional selling
setting here, So I can actually choose now what materials
I want this on, but I'm going to
leave it at all. I think sometimes there might be a case for if you're really, really intent on making something that's
only for swim suits, you could choose
like sport Lira, but I would rather not do that because I just
want to have this available as every fabric
possible because you never know what people are
going to want to buy these fabrics for, what they're
going to make with that. Check this out down here
on the bottom left. We can look at 52
inch preview here. So I can now see this
is where it scales on a 52 inch wide roll or
bolt, 54 inch fabrics. These are all and it's
even giving us a list. This is like the linen cotton
canvas, stuff like that. That looks fine to me, and
then the preview cut size. Here's a fat quarter,
for instance. So This is actually this
fat quarter right here on the bottom left
under preview cut size. This is a really
great or swatch. See how this is a really
great way to really see what size it's actually
going to print on a swatch. I think this could
even be smaller. You can still see the elements. I don't think anything's
getting lost. Let's go back and
do a yard here. Yeah, I think
that's pretty good. So I'm going to go ahead
and click on Save, and now I'm going to let
this work its magic, but you may notice
up here, it says, images may take one to
3 minutes to update. So you can reload the page, but I am actually fine, just waiting a second here. Now you'll see because we
clicked on Edit right here, For the fabric, all
of these things, the pillow sham, the T towel, the wall hanging, the napkin. All of these products down here are basically being
informed by the fabric. And if you click on view
all products at the bottom, you can see everything. I can see how this looks on a throw pillow, a table runner. That looks pretty good. I
actually really like that. I think it works at that scale. One thing I like to do too is look at something
that's really big and see how it looks
like a tablecloth, but also look at something
that's small like a napkin. And you can see the
elements on the napkin, and they look pretty cool, but you can see lots
of elements together, but then they still look good on 11 large piece of fabric. So that's looking really
good to me so far. I'm going to click
on the wallpaper and I'm going to click on edit. Now what we're going
to want to do is your wallpaper has to
be scaled separately. Here's a little helpful mock up, and this is showing two feet. This is 24 " right here. That is two feet, and then of course, this is 8 ". But you can do the
same thing with the wallpaper now,
which is amazing. We can really fine tune this. I want to see if I go down
here to the bottom left, you can also toggle on
and off the mock up. I like the mock up because it's giving me a
scale with this hat. But if you go to preview
here on the bottom left, see where it says one
rule wide, 24 inch, you can also change
it to two rules wide, and now we're getting
a much bigger mock up. We can really get an idea if you were standing in a
room and you were looking across the room
and you were seeing a hat and a table, how
big would this be? And I think that's
really helpful. I like looking at this with the 48 inch two roll wide
preview and the mock up, so I can really look from a distance at the big picture
here no pun intended. I'm going to leave it
at the largest size. I think that actually
looks pretty good. And then that's
where it was before, so I didn't really
make any changes, which is why this
is great out here. See where I can't click on Save. If I change the scale, now I can click on Save, but because I'm at
the original scale, then the save is great out because I
didn't make any changes. I can click on Cancel here. I assume you can see that. It's being hidden by this little speech bubble,
but that says cancel. I'm just going to
click on Cancel. The preview is having a little
bit of trouble loading, but I just previewed
it in detail. I feel pretty confident
that it's in good shape. And now we should have
all of our sizes saved, so we want to proof this so
we can make it for sale. Now you do not have to order sample swatches in the mail anymore to sell your
products on spoon flour. You just have to proof them. If I click on not proof here, I'm going to click on that and then it's going to pull
up the new proofing tool. So this may be familiar to you. This has been in effect for several months now
since the summer, at least, maybe the
spring of 2024. But it's showing the outline for where my pattern
block borders are, and it's just giving
me some helpful hints. So I'm going to click on Start. And it starts really, really zoomed in, and you
see how pixelated that is? I am not going to
stress about that. I'm not exactly sure why it starts with an incredibly
zoomed in view like this, but all you have to
do is go down here to the bottom right and do you see that little magnifying
glass with a minus sign? It's next to the one with the plus sign, it's
to the left of it. I'm just going to click on
that little magnifying glass that's on the left and zoom
out and out and out and out a bunch until I can
see the whole thing and you can I'm holding
my mouse down over this. You can drag this
around and look at everything and see
where your repeat is. I tested this in photoshop
before I uploaded it. I am 100% confident that
this repeat is perfect. I actually always use the
same method I teach in my half drop patterns class to test everything in photoshop
before I upload it. That basically
just guarantees me no hairlines and it guarantees a perfect
repeat every single time. It has never let
me down not once. This looks great.
I'm going to click on the little blue button
here that says looks good. If you see an issue,
what that's going to do if you click on that is it's going to take you back to the edit tool that we were
just at the edit page, and then you can upload
a revision if you want. But I think this looks fine. I'm going to click
on looks good, I'm going to give it a second. And now the design is available to be made for sale
because it's been proofed. So I think that's
everything, right? Yeah. All the way down to the bottom of the
page. We're good. I'm just going to click
on this nice little for sale button here that's
to the right of private, and I can choose once
I click on that, there's a little pop up,
what I want to sell it on. So There are some
certain cases where if you are setting up something that you just
want on wallpaper, you would want to just select that and leave fabric blank. Same thing for if you want to sell fabric and not wallpaper. The reason you might want
to do this is if you licensed your design with
a wallpaper company, and they are saying that your design is exclusive
to that company, but only on wallpaper, then you could just make it available as fabric
and home to core, but you would want to
skip the wallpaper because that way there's
no conflict of interest. I'm not worried about that, so I'm going to select
both of these. Now you can select an option. When you have something
that is just going to be for sale as a wall
hanging or a T towel, you can just toggle
this box on right here, and it is not going to put it
on home decor or wallpaper. This is not a wall hanging, so I'm going to leave that out. I'm good. I'm going
to click on Save. It's saving the Design up
there. Design updated. See that on the top right, and now it's for sale.
Isn't that cool?
5. Use Tags to Get Noticed: I've been featured in
tons of Spoonflower's trending curated
collections and even in Peppermint magazine
because I used the best practices I'm
going to show you for tags. Head on down to the
resources tab below, and you will see a link
to my free bundle. I am giving you a ton of resources that are going
to be very helpful for you when creating tags and also identifying popular themes. What are tags exactly? Tags are the words that you use when you are creating
a Spoonflower product. They are keywords. The tags are how
your art is found by users on Spoonflower
when they search. When it comes to getting
noticed on Spoonflower, one of the most
effective things you can do is use good tags. Tags are probably the best way to get found other
than your title. This is a big bold tropical
floral. I'm looking at it. I'm like, I definitely want
to use the word tropical. If I can spell that
would be great. If my computer did
this, yours may. If I start typing
the word tropical, I've used all of these before, so maybe I could use
tropical flowers. Now if you use a tag
like tropical flowers, it's not necessarily
going to show up as someone just
searches for tropical. You often want to
stick to simple with your keywords
and your tags. You can use tropical
and tropical floral, but remember you only have
13 tags that you can use. You want to use
them wisely and you also want to think
about general terms, not super general, not like art, but something like general enough so that if someone
searches for tropical flowers, they might find yours because it has the word tropical in it. You want to do maybe flowers, and maybe floral also because
floral is very trending. I have so many specifics that I've done in
the past too like floral wallpaper because I know that the print is really big. It's got leaves. Maybe you want to do leaf and leaves if that's a really
big part of your print. I think this is. Now let me point something out. Color is so important. People really respond to color and customers really
search by color. I made sure to include navy
blue here in my title, in name of my product, but you may also want to
use that in your tags. If you type navy blue, and now if someone
searches for that, they'll probably find
it with your title, but it's not going to hurt
anything to use it here. Also, I definitely
want to use green. Look at your print. Think about who
your end user is. I'm going to put swim here, a swim suit as well. Just think about who's
going to buy this? What is it? What are
the colors in it? You really want to use
relevant tags that are going to be specific
enough to help you be found, but not so specific. I don t think I would put
something like jungle island, tropical floral, and actually you really only
have a 20 character limit. But if I were to
put jungle floral, that means if someone
searches for tropical floral, they may not find it. But if you have
tropical and floral, see how those work together, people are going to find it. Just keep that in mind. Remember, don't ever
leave this blank. You definitely want to use tags. Right now, Spoonflower
allows you to use 13 tags. You can always if you go, you know what,
instead of navy blue, I'm just going to use blue. You can change your
mind whenever you want. It also auto saves for you so you don't
have to save these. But if you change your
mind, just click on that little x. I can just upload this and
then think about tags. Navy blue leaves, whatever. But how do you know
that those tags are going to be what
people search for? How do you know how
successful those tags are? You may think that
the word jungle, for instance, or island, is a great one, and it may be. But the thing is if people
aren't searching for that, it doesn't matter how
cool you think it is, no one's going to find
your stuff or not no one, but not as many people. Let me show you a trick I use. If I'm on Spoonflower, I want to find out with something
like a tropical floral. What is this good seller? I'm literally typing
tropical floral into the search bar and
I'm going to click Search. Now you can sort by best
selling, trending, et cetera. I will alternate between
trending and best selling. I tend to focus more
on best selling because I know
Spoonflower has the data that these are the best selling
tropical floral patterns. Now, I'm not saying
don't copy anyone's art, but you can copy their marketing methods because there's nothing wrong
with doing that. One thing that I will do is let me go back
and look at mine. Mine is really graphic. It's very simple. It's very stylized. If I'm looking and I see a watercolor pattern
or one with animals, that isn't really
that similar to mine. It may have Monstera, but this is obviously
like a painted pattern. I'm going to look for stuff that's a little bit
similar to mine. Actually according to them, this is their number 1
best seller for now. This moody tropical
floral is a popular one. If you click on that, and then we're going
to look at it. Now we're looking at it
like we're a customer. If you scroll down, you can see the tags they used. If you look on the right here, you'll see this is the
artist information. This is where your bio would be. Then if you click on More
here under about the design, it's about halfway down
the page on the right, you can see that this
is the description, and that's what I was
showing you earlier. But these right here, and you can see. See how this word
wallpaper tropical moody. If I actually click on that, that actually will do a new
search for just that word, moody. I'm going to go back. Here's a little tip for you. We know that this design
is a popular one. It's a top seller. It's a tropical floral. Its graphic enough and obviously illustrated,
it's Vectory. It's similar enough to
this one that I have here. If someone is searching
for tropical floral, they find this, they like
it and it's a best seller, they're more likely
to then like mine. Versus if someone of
that watercolor 1, if their tags are
watercolor and stuff, you're not going to
want to use that. Some people really
prefer watercolors, some people really
prefer graphic. You can use these same tags. Now, let's take a
look at these tags. Let's examine this and see
why this is successful. Other than the fact that
it's a beautiful design, the colors are gorgeous. The rhythm is great, it's
a wonderful pattern. This person is obviously
very talented. But let's look at
what these tags are. Wallpaper. I generally don't use product names like
wallpaper fabric, but like tropical. That's great. That means that people
are searching for the word tropical enough
so that they sells. Moody is another one. Now the moody part is describing this dark muted tones
that they're using, which really isn't
relevant for us. We have some bright
pinks and yellows. Flora though, that's one that is absolutely relevant that
they used and you can use. Tropical floral, same thing. Bright floral,
birds of paradise. Now that's a specific flower. We aren't using that,
but guess what? Birds of paradise is the type
of flower so then we could put maybe hibiscus in here. Something like that or Monstera. Monstera leaves, there you go. Monstera leaves. maybe you're like, I
want to use the word Monstera or Monstera
plant or leaf. Well, take a look because Monstera leaves literally
those exact two words together as one tag are somehow what's contributing to the success
of the sales of this pattern. You're really just learning
from the data that's Spoonflower collects and
gives us generously. That is, look, these are top sellers and
here are what the tags are. Again, I don't usually
worry too much about descriptions and I don't
copy other people's work. We're not really
copying anything, we're just learning from
their marketing data, from Spoonflower's
public marketing data. Like this person has her
name here, which is great. You can put your name there, but don't do anything
unethical like use someone else's name or
use copywritten word. But you can use these are general terms that
are descriptors. That is a huge tip for
getting found on Spoonflower. Look at the heart. Look at the likes
here, 1,058 likes. We can tell not only
is this a top seller, but a lot of people
like it. It's trending. A lot of companies pay
hundreds of thousands of dollars for marketing data like this and you're
getting it for free. So take advantage of it. But remember, make sure
that it's relevant. Don't go searching like earlier. Let's check this out again. That is a watercolor. If that's a best seller
and they use certain tags, it's not probably going
to be as relevant to the one that I created. Same thing. This one has snakes. Well, maybe the people that like this and buy it aren't going to
be the same customers. You want to think about
who are your customers. But here we go. Look at this one. This is a great
pattern and look how graphic it is. It
has the Monstera. They're almost in
like an outline, which is pretty
much what this is. Think about who the customer is. If they like this, they would likely like this. You can do that for
all kinds of things. If you have a pattern
with different animals, whatever, look for
those animals, but try to keep it within the same general feel because then you're more
likely to be more successful. Spoonflower offers a ton of
excellent free resources. If you didn't see a
pop-up that looks like this when you first went to
the Spoonflower website, you can easily get
it if you open a new incognito window in a browser and go to
Spoonflower website. Spoonflower has a ton of free resources that
they will email you. They offer a lot of
webinars and they also have a surface design symposium
once a year with talks on everything from
marketing to design to business. I will see you in
the next lesson.
6. Discover Trends: Let me talk to you about
discovering trends. I mentioned this in
a previous lesson, but Spoonflower
provides so much free, valuable information
to help you learn about trends if you're on
the Spoonflower website, to the Spoonflower blog. Then if you click on "Blog", if you click on
"Business resources", there are so many awesome free
articles here that you can read and here's some information about their symposium
and webinars. They have replays available
to watch for free. But check this out. Here's one, the latest
wallpaper trends for artists and
interior designers. This is amazing. You don't have to go out and get marketing data and do
all your own research. Spoonflower is giving you so much awesome data
on what is trending. You can learn all
about trends just from the Spoonflower website and from the emails that
they will send you, their symposiums,
their webinars, and just take a look. This is really
useful information, examine what is trending. Muted colors, greens
and like light grays, terracotta tones, etc.
Here's the thing. If you have a pattern that is, let's say like ours, like the tropical floral. Well, what if you did a colorway of it with
some terracotta tones. You don't have to edit your art. You don't have to
redraw anything. You can just change the
colors and then follow these trends and really take advantage of what
is currently trending. Check this out. Remember
earlier we were looking at a moody tropical. Well those are trending. One of the things
that make something moody is look at these colors. They're really
muted, they're dark. Well, we could do that with the one we were
creating earlier, that tropical floral, even though it has
bright colors in it, we can just adjust
the colors and make it feel more
moody then you can use that tag moody and you can actually take
advantage of that trend. Pantone is one of the
authorities on color. They have a color of the year every year they come out with. You can follow them. I subscribed to their
email newsletter. The Pantone color of the year, this year is viva magenta. I always refresh my designs every year with the
Pantone color of the year. I am up-to-date. I
actually did that for my flower market. If I go back here, those are both, I did
them in the reverse. I did two. I did one
where the background was viva magenta and one where
the flowers are viva magenta. I made sure to use tags
that were relevant. There it is. Viva magenta. Celebrate viva magenta,
That's one that they use. Then I have it as one
word and two words, and then just the word magenta. If someone's really into
and you see my title here, I want to have the latest
color of the year, they can find us. Benjamin Moore is another one of the color
authorities that I use. Because Spoonflower
cells, things like wall coverings and fabric
and home decor items. People often want them
to coordinate with their paint colors on their wall and a lot of
people use Benjamin Moore. Most interior
designers use them. They're the industry standard. You can order a Benjamin
Moore fan deck. That is a physical booklet where you can see these colors. Benjamin Moore also has a
color of the year every year. The Benjamin Moore
color of the year for 2023 is raspberry blush. As you can see,
raspberry blush is one of the trending
tags on Spoonflower. Lots of people, myself included, design our patterns with the latest trending colors
from Benjamin Moore. How cool is it that
a customer who painted their walls
raspberry blush, can get a perfectly
matched pair of curtains. You can ensure your
patterns match Benjamin Moore
perfectly by using Benjamin Moore's free
color palette plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator,
Photoshop and more. Benjamin Moore offers
free color palettes for Adobe Illustrator
Photoshop and more. Those colors coordinate directly with the colors in the
physical fan deck. You can grab the link to
those free color palettes for Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and more in the bundle I'm
giving you with this class. Just head down to the resources tab below
to grab the bundle. Benjamin Moore wants you to use these free color palettes because they want
you to design with them and Pantone has built-in color palettes in Adobe
Illustrator and Photoshop. The Etsy seller handbook is also an excellent source
for trend tracking. Did you know that Etsy puts out a color of the
year every year, I've included a link to the Etsy seller
handbook in my bundle. Remember how I said that
the Pantone color of the year for 2023
is viva magenta. Well, Spoonflower is always
on top of the trends. Their design challenge
at the end of 2022 was all about the
Pantone color of the year. Paying attention to
Spoonflower's design challenges is a great way to stay
on top of trends. Another great resource for tracking trends is Spoonflower. Spoonflower has
curated themes and curated collections under
home decor categories like living into core
dining, betting. Another way to find
out what's trending is to just search and then sort. I hope that was helpful and
you feel a little bit more confident about being able to
track and identify trends. I will see you in
the next lesson.
7. Create Collections: I use collections to keep myself organized and
help people find my art. You can have public collections
for all kinds of themes. You can have formal collections with coordinating patterns. And you can have
collections with general themes like
animals and florals. But I also use collections
to keep myself organized. I use private collections
that only I can see to keep track of what I
need to order proofs for. If you're anything
like me and you start uploading a
lot of patterns, it's really easy to get
confused and lost and not be able to keep track of what proofs you
need to order. Here is how I do that. There are two ways that
I use collections. If I want to create
a public collection, if I'm on the
spoonflower website, I just go to the person icon here and I go to collections. Then at the beginning of
every collections page, when you are logged
in, you'll see this little plus sign
here on the left. You want to click on that
to create a new collection. Now you can create
a public collection that is called
birds, for instance. You can give it a description and then you can make it
available to the public. Now, right now, there's
nothing in there, there are no images. This lock is showing
that it's private, but you can make it available
to the public and then everyone can see it and you
can describe it and say, I love birds, here's some
bird patterns, et cetera. But let me show you how I use private collections to
keep myself organized. Let me exit out of
here and go back. If you're on spoon flour and
you go to the person icon, go to collections,
that's where we are now. I'm going to create
a new collection. Now I'm going to
leave it private and I'm going to call it
needs proof order. Now this is going to be where I put all of my
new patterns that I've uploaded that still have
not had proofs ordered yet. That way I can keep track of what I need
to order proofs for. Then I just don't
make it visible to the public because for me, this is just like
an internal folder to keep me organized. And then I just click on this button here
that says Create. This is my collection
that's called needs proof order.
No one can see this. It's a private collection. You can see that with
a little lock icon. But let's go back here. So if I go to my
little person icon and I go to the design library and that'll show you
your most recent, or at least I have it set. I think that's the
default, newest to oldest. Let's go back to our pattern that we were uploading
for this class. So I chose a few collections. These are public collections. But you know what, I haven't
ordered a proof of this yet. I don't want to forget to
order a proof of this. So what I'll do is
because you can have multiple collections on top of having it in the
public collections, I will choose, I will
go to the dropdown, I have so many and I will click on Needs Proof Order this way. Now if I go to Spoonflower
site and I'm like, how many patterns do I have
that I haven't ordered yet? I can go to my
collections and then I can go and look at
needs proof order. So this is just for me
and now I know I've got three designs right now that
I don't have proofs for. So when you're ready to start creating your first proof order, you can do it right
from this page. And then the cool thing is
when you have done your proof, and I'm going to go over
this in a future lesson, once you make it public, you can just remove it
from that collection. But because you chose multiple
collections to put it in, like we did here, you know, don't just put it in
your needs proof order or whatever you want
to call it collection. You might as well put it in everything you feel
like is relevant. So then you'll
save yourself time in the future once you've gotten your proof and you can just remove it from
this collection. Now let me go over a couple
of my other collections here. Do you see this one
called VP Collection? So I actually had
a customer contact me recently and she said, hey, we're selling these products and we want to use your prints, but we want them at
really small scale. And these are prints
that are already live and for sale on
my spoonflower shop. And they said, but, you know,
yours are really big and we really need these
as really tiny. What I did was I actually
made a collection for this customer because they
wanted six of my designs. So then I can just send them directly to
if I click on it. This link right up here, do you see in the URL
it says VP Collection. So then I sent them
an e mail and said, hey, these are ready, they're live, they're
available for sale. And here is the link. So then they don't
have to go wading through thousands
of patterns and look for what I or
I don't have to send them individual
links to each one either. Collections are great for that. And also so these
are all public. Let me show you guys
sometimes when I'm uploading a lot as I also have this collection
called proof ordered. So if I ordered the proof and I'm waiting
on it to show up in the mail at my house
and then I start uploading more stuff that
hasn't even been ordered. I will move everything
that's in needs proof order to proof ordered so I can keep track of what
I've already ordered, what's on its way, and then what has not even
been ordered yet. So you can use these
for any kind of organizational way to keep track of your files
and it really, really makes a big difference, especially when you
start uploading a lot. All right. So I hope that was
some helpful information. I will see you in
the next lesson.
8. Leverage Your Patterns: Let's talk about how to
leverage your patterns. I often turn one pattern
into many products just by creating different color ways and multiple sizes for each one. I often create three
sizes for each color way. I'll often create dozens of
color ways of one pattern, especially if I notice
it getting a lot of love from the spoon
flower community. I originally created
this pattern and then it started selling. And it started
selling like crazy. And I was like, wow, a lot
of people really like this. That's exciting. How can
I make the most of that? Well, one way you can
do that is to upload different color ways for a
pattern that you already have. Especially if you know
that it's popular, you see all these
different color ways. So here's what I did. There are many, many
ways you can do this. I design in Adobe Illustrator. This black square
here is my artboard. But that was my
original color palette. And I actually have the background color
separated here by, and then the graphics
separated in two layers. You can upload hundreds of color ways of one
piece of artwork. And here's what's cool, you don't have to design
anything again. All you have to do is
change some colors. Let me show you real quick. This is a cool illustrator tip. I'm going to unlock
my background layer. If you're in Illustrator
and you go over to your toolbar and you click
on your artboard tool, see how it selected
this artboard. You can duplicate this artboard really quickly and easily. I'm on my keyboard, I'm holding down the option key. And then as I do that, I'm pulling this
over and dragging the artboard over here,
I'm duplicating it. That option key, I unlocked my background layer
that was originally locked. If this had been lock would not have duplicated
that background layer. But what it does is it
duplicates all the art here. And that's how I
do this. So I just go into Illustrator and I will duplicate artboards and come up with all these
different color ways. But see how now
this is duplicated. I can go in and I actually
have saved palettes. So I'm going to add this
to my Swatches palette, and then I go to Edit, Edit
Colors, Recolor Artwork. You can manually
change your color, see how the color is changing. This is an additional product and all of these are
individual products. And then the way I do this is, and I go over this
in either class, I go to file export a. And I will, you
know, if you want me to do this a little slower, watch my other class,
but I'll do PNG. And then what you can do is
you can choose by art board, or you can choose all with my multiple artboards in
one Illustrator file. I choose all and hit Export. If you export this,
this will export each one of these as
an individual file. As it writes those
files, check this out. Now that is all your
individual art boards. So those are all your pattern
blocks for spoon flour, so you don't even
have to do much, it just exports each of them. Now they're not named,
anything fancy, you could go in and name that
Tropical blue or whatever. Name the file, but at least
they're all separated. So these are all products. So you had one design. You duplicated an artboard. You can do it lots of times. You export it in
different color ways. And now this is so cool. So now you have all
these products. Now you do have to manually upload each of these products. But you look at
all these products I got out of this
one flower pattern. So it's a great way to stretch your products and make the most of art that
you've already created. And save yourself time. Here's an example of one
of my patterns that I love and that has gotten some love from the
spoonflower community. I created additional scales, more sizes of the same design
in the same color way. Here's an example
of the jumbo scale. See my DPI here is
150 pixels per inch. Here's the medium version of it. This is 600 pixels per inch. And here is the small scale. This is 900 DPI, or 900 pixels per inch. Remember, these are all, each one of them
individual products. You do have to go through
the upload process, name them, and use tags. All the sizes are adjusted with the DPI which I showed
you in an earlier lesson. The original product
is size large, and I indicated
that in the title. What I made sure to do with these additional scales is to indicate the scale
in each item title. This one is Jumbo, this one is small, and so on. So let's talk about what spoonflower calls
design distribution. What do I mean by
design distribution? If you are on
spoonflowers website and you go to the little person
icon on the top right, you drop down to
account settings. If you look on the far right, you'll see this tab that
says Design Distribution. If you click on that,
when it says here, this bottom option, it says,
External market places. Now this is in beta. I have this option here
checked. I have, yes, I do. I've read and agree to
the terms of service. Please distribute my designs on external marketplaces
free of charge. So what does that mean? Spoon Flour has an Etsy shop, and they actually sell the products that they
have on their websites. Not all of them, a few
like chosen products on all kinds of different
things, fabric and wallpaper. And I believe they are working on selling
some home decor items. But basically what it
means if you check this. Yes, here you're allowing
spoonflower to resell your patterns on the same
fabric and wallpaper on Etsy. Judge, it's kind of like a
sale on your spoonflower shop. It's actually a purchase
from Etsy Distro, that's the name
of their account. And then if they purchase
your fabric or wallpaper, they will put it on Ets for you and then
they will sell it. But it does and
you're not going to get any extra money from that. But you're making
sales on spoon flower, so they're basically
kind of acting like they're a of spoon flour. So I hope you found
that helpful and you now feel like you can really
leverage your patterns. Don't forget, you can
create more color ways and more scales as well as allow
for design distribution. I will see you in
the next lesson.
9. Proof Your Art: Each time I upload a new
pattern to spoon flour, I put it in a collection
called Needs Proof Order. It's a private collection
that's visible only to me. And you can tell because
of this lock icon. If you go to your collection
called Needs Proof Order, you can start creating your
proofs right from this page. Just click on the button
that says Designing. If you click on Start Designing from your collection
called Needs Proof Order, you will get to this page. This is the way I do it. There are lots of
ways to do this. I like to save money and put a lot of my
patterns in one order. What I usually do is I will wait until I have about 42 designs. Remember, if you're creating
different color ways, you can really add up
to a lot of patterns. Then what I will do is create what's called a cheater quilt. Now you can do this with up
to 48 designs and so on. All of your options are here, but I find that this
works pretty well for me. I click on one,
up to 42 designs. Then I choose my fabric as petal signature cotton
for two reasons. Number one, it's spoon flowers,
least expensive fabric. I save money this way. Number two, I feel like it is
a good indicator of color. Everything seems to print pretty uniformly on petal
signature cotton. Then all you have to do is
click on Design Your project. Now we are in the
page where we're going to be making what's
called a Che quilt. What is a cheater quilt? It's not really an actual quilt, but it is in a sense
because it is a patchwork of multiple patterns on
one piece of fabric. What we're seeing here in
this view is this gray area. These are all individual
little squares where they're all
going to be printed. And this is one large
piece of fabric, but you can put a pattern in each one of these
little squares. All you have to do is look
on the right hand side and these are your patterns that are in your needs proof order. All you do is click once on the actual image
on the right, then click left in this
little gray square here. It is going to
populate your cheater quilt with a sample
of that pattern. Then I'm going to go over
here to the right again. Click once in this box, and I'm going to do it again
in a different square. What we're doing is
creating a patchwork of multiple patterns
that we are going to put together on one piece
of fabric to save money, But we'll still be able
to see how these print, what the colors look
like, et cetera. Then what you're going to
do is do that for each of your 42 patterns on
the right hand side. Click once on the right and then click on the left in the associated square
where you want it to go. I'm going to go through
that really quickly here. And then once you've filled up your cheater quilt
with one of each of the 42 patterns in your needs
proof order collection, just click on Add to Cart and go through the
checkout process. Then once you've checked out
and paid for your order, you're going to get
your Cheater quilt in the mail and it's going to
look something like this. What this is is literally
what we just created. It is a patchwork of samples of your patterns on
one piece of fabric. I always find this part really satisfying and exciting
every single time I do it. Because it is really
cool to be able to see my patterns printed
out in front of me. Now, this is where you can
actually check the colors, the scale, and all
of those things. If you see anything
that you don't like or you feel like the color is
off or the scale is off, you can upload a revision. All you have to do is
click on Edit Design. Then once you're in the edit
view on the left hand side, you'll see Upload Revision. Click on that and then you can choose your updated file, La. It is absolutely ready
to sell and it is live on Spoon Flour Bundle. I give you a direct
link to multiple really helpful
spoonflower resources for color and fabric samples. Spoonflower has a welcome
kit that is going to help you really be able
to fine tune your colors. And you can also see
what stuff looks like in person when it's printed
on different materials. I highly recommend
getting one of these. I will see you in the
next lesson where we're going to go over wall
hangings and tea towels.
10. Wall Hangings & Tea Towels: Spoon flower has t towels and wall hangings that have
the same settings. This is one of the T towels, this is one of mine, and then this is one of the
wall hangings. It's not on wallpaper
and it's not on pillow cases or
anything like that. If you want to upload a design where it's not a repeat pattern, it's an individual design for like a wall
hanging or a T towel. Spoon flower has specific
parameters that have to be met, and they need you to set up your file a specific
way in order to have a design display correctly on a wall
hanging or a T towel. In my bundle, I link directly to the Spoonflower
instructions page, which has their template
that you can use to create your wall hanging
and T towel design. They have specific
parameters they need for wall hangings
and T towels. They have specific sizes, and also in order to get it to show up correctly
and print correctly, you have to rotate it. If you have a design, and like, for instance, I had this snowman. I downloaded the
spoonflower template. And what I did was, I have it on a layer, I'm in photoshop right now
above where my art is. So there's my art. There's
my background color. If I turn it off, it goes away. And then that's their template. What I did was I actually adjusted the opacity
of the template, so I can see where
their safe area is, but this is what
their safe area is. This is where it'll display. That's where the cutoff is. And then this is the
bleed right here. But you will take your art and you will rotate it
this direction. See how it has top of T
towel wall hanging here. So you will do that and then you will save it as a JPEG or a PNG, and then you will
want to upload it. This is an update that I
recorded for September 2024, because things have changed with spoon flowers upload process, including how you upload and activate your wall
hangings and T towels. So you may recognize
this snowman. This snowman is the same one that I used in the
original lesson, and it is a single illustration, so it is going to be meant for
wall hangings and T tails. But what's different is, I went ahead and
uploaded this using the same process that I used in a previous
lesson in this class, which is uploading and scaling. Now I have my standalone
illustration, but I still have to do a couple of things to make this show up correctly and only activate it on wall
hangings and Tels. So right now, I just uploaded it and what
I'm going to want to do is go down here to the third option after
fabric and wallpaper. Do you see right here where
it says wall hanging? So right below this, it has a button that says
rotate Design, which is great. I'm going to click on that. And now you actually can see a preview where it's showing you what it
looks like rotated. I'm going to go ahead
and click on rotate, and then I'm going
to click on Save. And now we can see that it
has already been rotated, and if you look at
your tags, previously, you had to use a tag
that said SF rotate, you don't have to
do that anymore, which means you get
to use all 13 of your tags before you only got 12 because you had to use
one of them for that. So This is super cool. Now we know that this is going to show up exactly the
way we want it to. Now when we go
ahead and proof it, I'm going to click
on not proof here. I'm going to go ahead
and click on Start and if I zoom out a whole bunch, I can see it Now, this is my design and
that's where the repeat is. I'm not really concerned
about the repeat. All I'm concerned
about is that mock up that preview of the
wall hanging in T towel. I'm going to click on Looks good because it does look
fine. Click on that. And now when we go
to make it for sale, what you want to do is click
on the for sale option here. And do you see this? It automatically selected
the third option which is the one that says, sell on a wall hanging, T towel and fabric only. So now all you have
to do is click Save. If for some reason,
this is not toggled on. All you have to
do is toggle that third option on in this pop up. But now you can
actually activate it, and it will not be for sale
on home decor or wallpaper. It will only be for sale on fabric wall
hangings and T towels. And then all you have to do is click save, and you are done.
11. Connect With The Community: I'm a firm believer
that in life, and especially with spoon
flower with the community, you really get out
what you put in. That's why I think it's so
important to connect with the spoonflower community
in the class bundle. I'm giving you some
great links to connect with other spoonflower
artists in the community. Every time someone favorites
your art on spoonflower, you'll get a message that
looks something like this. I cannot tell you how
exciting it is and I still get excited every time
I get messages like this. I favorite people's
art that I like because they will see me and, you know, they might
come and look at my shop and favorite my art. And also I just like telling
people that I love sharing, you know, with other artists
that I like their work. Because as an artist myself, when I get validation like that, it feels really good, you know? And especially if it's from another artist, it's like wow. And I'll look at their
stuff and go geez, you think my stuff is good
and you're so talented, you know, It's just like
a really nice feeling. You can also, if you
go to your shop, I'm going to go to the icon here and then I'm going
to go to view my shop. If you go to your shop homepage, you'll see on the left here, you have your followers, your favorites,
and your follows. Right here I went
to my followers. I have 37 followers. I'm sorry, I don't have 37. I have 37 pages of followers. I follow a lot of people. So if you click on
Follows versus Followers, you can see who
you are following. And if you really
like something and I have 74 pages of
people that I followed. Because I just love, you know, engaging
with the community. It really is a great
community of awesome artists. It's so much fun. I love seeing how other people approach art. If you have a lot of
followers on spoon flour, when a customer comes to your page, they're
going to see that. I think that somehow
subconsciously, they're going to see that
you really have a lot of great stuff to offer and other artists really
appreciate your artwork. It just kind of validates
you and you know, other people can see this. So you know, this isn't
private information. So anybody can go to your shop and click on See who
your followers are, see which you favorite
it or your followers. Now you can hide that,
but I just I'm like, why would I? It doesn't matter. I want people to see that. If you see a design you
like on Spoon flower Art, it, you just have to click
the little heart here. And also you may notice, but right here,
this information, this is the artist's
information. So if you click on
this artist's name, that'll take you to her shop. And right here on the left, you can follow that artist, especially if you like
her art, which I do. It's beautiful. Just click
on the follow button. And now I'm following
her and she is going to get a notification that
I am following her. Here's an example of an e mail I got when someone followed me. And I have to tell you, it feels really good
every time this happens. I just think it really
makes a difference when you are active in the spoonflower
artist community. Because it is a community. I have had so many other
artists message me and say, I love your art, thank
you for favoriting me. And you know, it's just great. It's like you've got this huge site with thousands of people, but you really can build
personal relationships. I'm telling you from experience, it is absolutely possible
and highly recommended. Another great way
to connect with the spoonflower community is to connect with your customers. One great way to show your appreciation is to send a personalized
thank you message. So if you're on spoon
flour and you go to the little person icon and
you drop down to messages. You'll see on the
far right there, there's a tab that says
Automated Message Settings. And this is just
a default message that you can turn off and on. That will just be
the same one that everyone gets from spoon flour when they purchase something. But you can also have
a saved message. So if you click on
that little tab right there that says Saved
Message Settings, you can write your own personalized thank you
message to customers. I actually chose this
option because I want to make sure that
customers know that I really, personally am appreciative that they purchased
something from me. And, you know, you can develop relationships with customers
and companies this way. I have written my personal
thank you message here. I have my Instagram. I'm thanking them
and I'm saying, you know, I'd love to
see what you made. You can tag me, here's my
website, here's my e mail. And I hope you enjoy
your purchase. This is a great
opportunity to make connections with people and
promote yourself and yeah, just don't, you never
know what will happen. And the cool thing
is when someone purchases from you unless
they are a guest user. Now if someone is a
guest user and they purchase from you from
your spoonflower shop, their contact information
is not stored. So this message here will
not get sent to them. In order to make sure you
receive e mail messages. Every time you make a sale, get a like or a favorite on
the spoonflower website, go to the person icon on the top right and drop
down to account settings. At the bottom of
this page is where you can set your e
mail notifications. I have mind set to notify
me immediately via e mail, but for every other purchase, every time you make a sale, you're going to get an
e mail notification and you can also check it. If you go to your notifications, you can actually see who purchased what from
you, what's been liked. And you can see,
here's a good example. This is my
notifications section, and this was an actual real user with contact information stored. There's going to be this
little button here. And you can just go there and click on Send your
Saved Thank you. So that will send that personal
message to the customer. You can also send a
completely unique message to them by clicking on
Send them a message. But yeah, your
notifications panel again, which is right here, is a great way to you Just see
how your stuff is doing. See what you have favorited. Here's an example. So I have a guest user
purchased my design. You'll notice that send your saved thank
you is not there. I highly recommend writing your own personal thank
you message and adding your contact information and anything else you
think you want to add. Because you have lots of
opportunities to really develop personal relationships
through spoon flour. Let me tell you why it's a great idea to work
with custom requests. I recently had a shoe company in France contact me asking
for custom scales of some of my patterns
so they could use them in the soles of their
luxury women's slippers. I cannot even tell
you how cool that is. I'm a sucker for fashion. I responded promptly and
professionally to their message. I was friendly and
willing to help. I was able to make this
company's day and I'll be getting a mention
on their website for licensing my art with them. I feel like it's really
beneficial to you to work with custom
requests on Spoon Flour. This company that contacted me, they're a really nice
shoe company in France. They asked for an
additional scale of this. So it was originally 900 and they asked for a
third of the size. So I made it, instead
of 900 pixels per inch, which was what the original was, I multiplied that by three to make it a third of the size. And so I changed it to
2,700 pixels per inch. I was really able to
make this company's day. And you know, I created a
custom collection for them, so they feel really special. Like this is your
collection, It is public, so anyone can see it and
anyone could purchase from it, but they also know
that that's for them. So you never know what kinds of relationships you could
build your spoonflower. I hope that was
helpful and you feel like you can really engage with the spoonflower community. Now I will see you in the next lesson
where we're going to talk about design challenges, which are another great way
to engage with the community.
12. Design Challenges: Entering your work in Spoon
Flowers Design challenges is a great way to get seen. It's a wonderful way to
get inspired and it's an excellent way to connect with the community And other
spoonflower artists. I visit spoon flowers,
design, challenge, and vote for other
artists patterns. I also like their patterns by
clicking on the heart icon. And I often end up visiting other artists shops and following them because
I love their work. If you go to the
Spoonflower main website and you go to design and sell, you'll notice in the dropdown
it says design challenges. This is their main
design challenges page. One thing that's
important to note about design challenges
is that you are expected to create
new art for them. There's actually two ways to get to the design challenges. Now if you're on Spoon flower
and this was here before, if you go to the Design and Sell tab and you hover over it, it's the second option. Down when you hover over it, right here, you
can click on that. And that will take you to
the design challenges page. And this has all the
information on how they work. It's pretty much the same information that's
been there before, but it's easier to see now. Then you can see if
you click on this too, but you can basically see what the current
challenges are. And then if you click on one of these challenges, you
can look at the details. This is a really
great example of a spoonflower design challenge that goes a little further. For example, in this spoonflower design challenge
for the winners, they'll be featured in Peppermint Magazine.
Which is awesome. Instead of just,
or more than just winning this design challenge
or getting the first, second or third place, you can really get some
awesome exposure. Spoonflower does this kind
of thing all the time. Sometimes they will partner with companies like
East Fork is one. If you win or you place
in the top three, often they will
license your art with, for instance, East Fork. You can actually
license your art by participating in
these design challenges. If you're on here, if you're on the design challenge
page and you're on a specific detail page, if you click on
Enter Your Design, it's actually going to open
a new window or a new tab. And then it's going
to take you to your entire design library. Which to me is not as intuitive. But I mean, I don't
really know a better way to do it, actually. I'm going to show
you guys two things. I have actually
entered this design that I just did recently
into this design challenge. What a wonderful world.
One. First of all, this is a brand new design. They stress, and I will
stress too that you don't want to just take an old design and enter it
in the design challenge. In fact, that will
disqualify you. The reason they do the
design challenges is, A, it's a great way
to get exposure. And B, they want you to
keep creating new art. It's an incentive to keep
spoon flower artists active, basically because you don't want to just let your
account sit there. I mean you can, but you're
going to probably be more likely to be successful if you're continually
entering new designs. You don't have to enter
something new every week, but it's just a
great way to stay fresh and stay on
top of everything. I'm going to show you
guys first how to withdraw something from
a design challenge. Then I'll show you how to enter. The reason I'm doing
it backwards is because I have a design that I've already entered
and it's a little bit complicated to figure
out how to withdraw it. That's more
difficult, my design, I've entered it in
the design challenge. But let's say I'm like, oh man, I want to make a change, or I want to enter a totally
different design. Where would you even
go to do that now? You don't want to
delete it unless you really just don't want to
keep the design at all. But how would you do that to me? I actually had a hard time figuring that out. It
was a little confusing. The way you would do that
is you actually have to go to my design challenges. You can get to that from
any design detail page. It's over here on the left. If you just click on
My Design Challenges, it's going to open a new tab. Then it's going to take you to your personal design
challenges page. You can actually look at all the design challenges
that you've entered. See where you came
in, of course. Don't feel bad if you guys
rank low, look at that. That's really low. I love that. I thought that was great.
But sometimes you don't get the top 400th place or
whatever. That's okay. Sometimes you get
eighth. It's not random, but you just have
to keep trying. Don't give up. Here I am. And now it says on this main
design challenges page. My challenges page. It's showing what I've entered. It even says like voting hasn't started versus
voting in progress. Or it'll give you
your status, right? I'm going to show you
how to withdraw first. Here's a design,
let's say I'm like, oh, I want to change it or I want to use a totally
different design. All you have to do is
click on Withdraw, and then you can just click
on Yes, Withdraw here. This is the same one.
I'm just going to re enter it so you guys
can watch me do it. If you go to your
design library, which is go to your
little person icon. And drop down to
the design library, that's where I am right now and you click on
the actual design. So you can go to your
design detail page. This is how you will enter. Do you see where it says
right here on the left, Enter a challenge, right? So that's what you
want to click on. I like to do it right from the page because
it's like that way. Before I enter it, I'm going to go through and make sure okay, I have everything set up. I've used all my tags. I have this linking to
my new mini collection, which is called Gokaya. I've got my title
and my collections. Okay, So that's my thumbnails. Everything looks good, and
my scales are looking good. This was huge, So I
made it 1,000 DPI. And I also checked my wallpaper. I thought that this
was a good scale. And now I'm just
going to click on Enter A Challenge.
And here we go. So this is where you will be entering your new design
into a challenge. So this is you
reviewing your entry, it's giving you a little
kind of synopsis. And what you want to do is first this little
drop down here, you want to choose what design challenge
you want to enter. I'm going to choose this
one. What a wonderful world. Now you can really see, okay, look how nicely
this space is and this whole thing fits
together nicely, right? If you think this fits the theme or prompt,
well, mine does. I'm going to click
yes. Now, it's just showing you your title
and your description. My title and description
are pretty relevant. You could change these, I guess. But here's one thing I want to show you before we enter this. If you look down here, see
where it says Submit Entry, and then it says Edit
Design Thumbnail. Look what happens when
you click on that. It says you're returning
to your design library. Would you like to save the
changes you've made to your design title and
design description? Now, we didn't make
any changes here. But if you would
change the title here, I guess it would
have changed that. I don't plan on doing that. But let's click on
Yes, Save Changes. Then it says a site. Basically what it's saying is, even if you've made changes, they're not going to get
saved, leaving the site. It's taking me back to
my design detail page. What is that thumbnail that will show up in the
design challenge? That's down here at
the bottom left. So we're back to our main
design detail page here. This is what we were
looking at a second ago. So these are your thumbnails. So when you enter a
design challenge, you might want to check out what you're using as your
thumbnail ahead of time, because that is what people
are going to see when they're scrolling and they're looking at what they want to vote on, these are the images
they're going to see. I like that. I think that works, which is why I chose it. I'm going to go
back and then I'm going to go back to
the Enter A challenge. So everything looks good. I'm going to click
what a wonderful world that thumbnail is
perfect for me. I'm going to click yes, because it does fit the theme or prompt. Well then of course, this will just bring you
back to your design library. You just want to click
on Submit Entry. I'm ready to submit this,
I'm going to click on that. And you see this little
green pop up here. It says, thanks for your entry. Voting will open on
Thursday, May 25. Now it nicely took me to my design challenges
overview page so I can confirm that yes, this has been entered. I typically handle the design challenge
timeline like this. I'll see a theme announced, and if it strikes my fancy, I'll create a
pattern, upload it, and make it public before the
design challenge deadline. Design challenges
aren't as much about making sales as they are
about getting noticed, so just focus on that
and celebrate it. If you go to Spoon
Flower and you go to Design and Sell and
Design Challenges, that's the page I'm on now. You can scroll down
and see the winners. So you can see what one. If you click on Seymour
Past challenge winners, look how far back it goes. It goes back over ten years. You can go back and
look at designs that we design challenges
back in 2010. You can go by year, it shows
you the theme and you know, it's just a great way to learn what does well on spoonflower,
what people like. I recommend you use design challenges as a
way to try new mediums, connect with other artists, and just get involved in the spoonflower
artist community. It is really fun and inspiring. Do you normally create
patterns digitally? Try creating a watercolor. Do you only draw flowers? Maybe try creating a
pattern with animals. Look at the design,
challenge themes as an opportunity to grow
and try something new. I will see you guys
in the next lesson.
13. Show Off Your Art!: One of the best ways you can
show off your artwork and show off your patterns on
products is with mockups. Spoonflower has
mockups that you can grab so you can show
off your artwork. Let's show off that artwork. You have uploaded a pattern
block to Spoonflower. You've got your
collections selected. You've got a title. Got some description. If you're on your
product page and you go to view all products, you're going to be
able to see all of the products that have
your pattern on them. I'm going to click
on cocktail napkins here and then it's going
to take you to the page. It's not publicly
available for sale yet, but it is publicly
available to view. There are three mockups
in this product. This one has a nice little, I guess that's a gin and
tonic, I don't know, on a little marble table and
it's great, it looks cool. This is a square
image which just so happens to be the right
format for Instagram. Did you know that you can
grab these mockups right from the Spoonflower website
to show off your patterns? Spoonflower actually wants you to use these mockups because you can link directly back
to your Spoonflower profile. Let me show you guys
how to do this. If you hover over any image, and this is your mockup, you can right-click on a PC
or control-click on a Mac. See where it says Save As? I'm going to save this to
my desktop as whatever. It doesn't matter what
the filename is and it's saving it as a
webpage. That's fine. Click "Save". Then go ahead and open the saved folder
on your computer. You see here on my desktop, I have the HTML file
and then I also have all these other
files in this folder. It's basically taken everything from that webpage and saved it as actual individual
files, all the images. If you scroll down and there are quite a few files in here, you'll start seeing these JPEGs. These are those mockups. There's all different
mockups in here, but you'll see if you
click through them, see all these mockups. Now, you notice how that
one looks a little blurry, and that one looks a little
blurry and then you go to the next one and that one
looks a little more clear? Then that one looks
really crisp, you can see the file size here, so they use different
sizes for their images. You want to grab
the largest one, so if I double-click
on this and you can open this in
photoshop or whatever, that is a nice high resolution
JPEG mockup that you can literally upload that JPEG to your Instagram
or your website. You don't have to buy a mockup. They have excellent mockups. Now this one is really
cool because it's what they call a
lifestyle mockup, which is showing a lifestyle. You have your gin
and tonic and you've got your cool cocktail napkins. One thing that makes
this a lifestyle mockup as well is it's not just a photo of the product
floating in blank space, it shows it in context. Spoonflower has mockups
for all products, including their home decor
items and their wallpaper. Let's look at that euro
pillow sham again. I'm going to click
on that. Do you notice how it's
not in a setting? Now the second one here is, this is it on a bed, even got some sheets
there or duvets. But this one in the
beginning here, this one right here it's
like floating in space. Let's say you were like
[NOISE] that's really cool, I would love to have that
on a blue background. If you were to go and
right click on it, and actually I'm going to go
to the second image here. I actually just right-click on that and nothing happened, I control-click on a Mac. I'm going to go to the
second one, do it again. Sometimes this happens, I don't really know why. If you want to download mockups, one of the things
that I've noticed is some products aren't as easy
to download the images for, but there is a work-around. If I'm on this page here, this is the small lumbar pillow. If I were to download
this as a mockup, and I hover my mouse
over the image and on a Mac I'm ''Control-clicking" and on a PC you would
just right-click, you'll notice nothing
is happening. I'm clicking on this right
now and nothing's happening. Go to the next image, even though this is not
even your pattern on here, this is an example
of their sizing. Now if with this image, you hold your mouse
over the image and control-click on a Mac
or right-click on a PC, now, you can click ''Save As''. What that is going to do is save all of the images
with this listing, so it's going to save this one, high and low res, but it is also going
to save this one. It's actually going to save the whole web page and
I'll show you what I mean. If I click on this
and go to Save As, I'm just going to save
it on my desktop, you'll notice it's
saving it as a webpage. Just click ''Save''. Now I'm going to go
to my desktop here. There's the HTML file, that's the webpage, and
then there's this folder, but what you want to look for is the images with the
really long numbers that are JPEGs and you notice there's a few different ones
here, so there's three. This one is not wallpaper, that's a pretty low res
one because it's 32K. I'm not going to
worry about that. But there are two
images here that are the ones that I'm concerned
about using as a mockup. Grab the higher
resolution one from here and that is going to be the mockup that you are
going to be able to use. Then once you've moved that, I often will take it and move it out of that
folder and then I will just delete the entire folder because I don't need that on my computer. Let's go back to the mockup
we were just working on. I have gone ahead and right-clicked on
the image and saved it onto my computer and now I have my folder with
all of the images. Now I'm going to go ahead
and open Photoshop. I'm in Photoshop now, I hit ''File'' Open, actually I hit ''Command
0'', the letter 0. We're going through now,
here's those images and you want to get the highest resolution
image possible. There's those mockups
that you can use, but you see this one right here, this is pretty crisp. That's the floating image
so I'm going to open that. In Photoshop, they have what's called
a magic wand tool, I believe that
what's going to show up as a default for you. If you use a magic wand tool
in any image you selected, right now it's working but
sometimes if you do it, like if this was off-white, this flower and I clicked
outside of this pillow here, it would probably grab
some of that flower. Especially if you
have a lot of white in your designs, it's
going to do that. It's working okay on this one but let me
show you another trick. If you had this
design and you click the magic wand
tool and you click outside of this pillow
and the whitespace, and it starts grabbing
parts of the pillow, we want to remove
this background. Well, under the magic wand tool, if you hold it down, there's what's called an
Object Selection tool. I use that all the time, especially if I have a mockup that has a
lot of white in it. I'm just going to click
on the pillow right now. Here's the way Spoonflower
and all these mockups work. This here is actually an image that doesn't
have a background, they added that
white background, so really when this was
originally created, it was created in
Photoshop most likely. They plopped that in there, so this white background
is completely blank space even though you're seeing it. I just selected that pillow and then now I'm going
to go to my layers. I'm going to click
on that lock arrow. I'm going to unlock it. I want to do select and
inverse, there we go. Now you've selected, you can see the highlight
here, the whitespace. I'm going to go to
edit and clear. You have a perfect
floating pillow mockup that if you want to, I'm going to add a
background color, I think this is probably not
going to work very well, but whatever, you can change the background color around
that floating image. Now, you might get
a little halo. You might want to adjust that, what I would do is go to the
magic wand tool and now if I go to select and I go to
modify and I go to Expand, you can actually
expand the selection, let's say by two pixels and then you can
do Edit and clear. That might get rid of the halo. I may have had to do more
of it, it helped a little. It's a little smoother now. Also sometimes you might
get these real hard edges, so I actually use the
blur tool for that, that's right here and sometimes I will
just go through and brush over the edges just a
little bit to soften those. But you can take
this image here, you got this with no background. You can take this and
drop this on all things. You could have one image with multiple pillows or
whatever you want to do. That's a little trick I use to handle their mockups and to really make
the most of it. See if you go through and
see how that softens it because if this was
disappearing back into space, three-dimensional which
is what it's doing, it might blur a little. I'll show you, if I go
through and blur the edges. Now, it's a little softer. It looks a little bit more realistic but that's
totally a matter of taste. Those mockups are great. You can use those for Instagram
and promote your work. I highly recommend doing that, they want you to
use those mockups. Now it's time for the fun part. Go ahead and share the
mockups you've gotten from this Spoonflower
website so we can see your beautiful
patterns on products.
14. Final Thoughts: You did it. You just created your first Spoonflower product, or if you were already
a Spoonflower artist, you've learned how to
optimize your shop and make the most of
your art on Spoonflower. I would love to see your
Spoonflower creations. Please share your
product mock-ups in the project gallery
and on social media. Please tag me on Instagram
@CarrieCantwellArt, so I can see and comment on
your beautiful creations. I am rooting for you and
your success on Spoonflower. I want to sincerely thank
you for watching this class. I felt like this was the
perfect class for me to teach after my pattern design in
Adobe Illustrator class, also on Skillshare, you can
find it through my profile. I thought it would be
helpful for students not just to learn how
to create patterns, but in this class, I wanted to show you what you
can do with them. Please follow me using
the follow link next to my profile and stay tuned. I do plan to teach more
Skillshare classes in the future. I'll see you next time. Bye.
Carrie Cantwell, Illustrator | Surface Designer | Teacher
