Over the last two days I’ve–mostly–finished adding my new photography at Zazzle.  I still have one or two to add, but may leave that for a while.  All of the new photography is also now listed on my photography shop page, as well as on the floral photoshop and animal photoshop.

I also reworked and added a couple of new animal designs:  Wolf and Wolves. Both are a reworking of a “Wolves for Obama” design I did last year.  I thought the wolf was cute, so I redid it without the O.

Also at Zazzle, I started adding the skinny profile card templates, in addition to the “regular sized” business cards.  I’ve got about 40 or so of the skinny ones now, mostly sea turtles, photography, and abstract designs, but also a couple of cat art ones.

I’m adding some new shoes as well; I’d gotten off the shoe designing as they don’t sell well and it’s a pain waiting for approval. But I decided to do a few, as I had some “shoe-able” art.

Next up:  adding more photography to RedBubble. Also, I guess I should add some of my new designs to CP.

Today was another photography day at Zazzle.  Added several new rose photos, plus a couple of new bee photos.

These are the new ones:  Peace rose, Sky bloom, Red Rose , Three Lilies, and another purple salsify seed picture.  The bee photos were a honeybee on a poppy and a bee on a lemon tree leaf.  I also did a little “poppy art” piece with one of my bee/poppy photos:  Honeybee Poppy Art

With these photos –except the seed one– I also did some cropping/ cutting so I could put them on apparel and bags.  These particular roses lent themselves well to the task; I was able to cut them out very nicely.  I even made some of the Zazzle “photo sculptures” with them.  I may go back and try this with some of my other roses.  I have a few that I may be able to cut out as well.

I also split up my photography section of my wingedturtle.com shop today.  As I expected, it didn’t take long.  I left the main photo shop page as is, but added links to floral photography, animal photography, and landscape photography pages.  And I realized doing the animal page that I don’t have some of my Little One photos there.  So I’ll have to add those when I have time.

I still have about nine photos prepared and uploaded to Zazzle to add.  Hopefully I will finish that this weekend.  Thenon to other new designs; I think I’ve spent enough time on the photography this week.

I added six new photography pieces to Zazzle today.  A couple were recent — a rose, and pansies.  The rest were from last summer, pictures that I never got around to uploading.  Four of them were of the purple salsify seed globe, which makes for really interesting pictures. I still have a few more photos ready to go for Zazzle, but I’m taking a bit of a break.  They’re all bee photos.

I also updated my Winged Turtle photography shop page, so that now nearly all the photography I have on Zazzle is listed there.  (Because I was using my CP shop as the template for my site pages, much of the photography was missing as I don’t do as much photography on CP.)  Now everything’s listed on WingedTurtle, and the newest stuff is at the top.

I’m thinking now that I should break out my photography shop page into Floral, Animals, and Landscape, as I already have separate sections in my Z shop.  And I’ve been adding so much lately that the page gets really long, especially as everything is all mixed up together.

And as I add more photography, the more I realize that I really need to find out what these roses and flowers are called.  You can only write “yellow rose, peach-ish rose, pink rose” etc so many times before you forget which is which.  I finally looked up the purple salsify, which ended up being pretty easy — “purple california wildflower” found it easily, but it is pretty distinctive looking.  I also have some flowers that I can probably find in an image search, but the roses I am going to have to ask my mom — she should know, as they’re mostly hers.

Yesterday I added two (well, technically three, but the third is a variation) new sea turtle designs.

The first, Cat’s Eye Turtle, is a black sea turtle design with a bright blue cat’s eye in its back. I started out wanting to do a human eye, but somehow ended up deciding on a cat eye.  Maybe I’ll do a human eye later.  It’s a change from my usual peace symbol turtle backs, anyway.  I’ve also done suns and yin-yang and random patterns.  Why not eyes? The third design I did was a variation on this one, but with 3 of the turtles, large in the middle and two smaller on the sides.

The other new turtle design I did was a “flower” with sea turtles as the petals.  I’m fairly happy with this one; it’s quite colorful and the “turtle base” is a new one that I think I will use for other turtle designs. The flower is a bit more square than I was planning on, but it’s okay. I want to redesign and add to it for the Skreened shirts, since they have such a large print area, I think I will add a stem and leaves coming down, maybe some smaller “flowers” growing. I started a new turtle design based on these turtles today, but have not completed it yet.

I put all three new designs up everywhere but Spreadshirt.

Cat’s Eye Turtle:  Cafepress, Zazzle, Printfection, Skreened.

Three Cat’s Eye Turtles: Cafepress, Zazzle, Printfection, Skreened.

Flower Turtles: Cafepress, Zazzle, Printfection, Skreened.

whew…maybe I really should start separate pages for each design.  Would make it easier to link.

Finally got around to adding my “Little One Spring” design to shops other than Zazzle.  Added mostly apparel, and some of the “square / round stuff” (clocks, ornament, magnets, tiles, etc.) and greeting cards at Cafepress.  I need to crop/ size for posters and prints, which I will do later.  Working with Zazzle makes me realize how time-consuming that part of CP is.  Yes, actually creating sections/products is a bit faster than Zazzle, but making each individual image for each individual product takes up a lot of time.

"Little One Spring" dark shirt

I also added it to Printfection and Skreened, apparel only.

This was a design that I originally made for my Mom this Mother’s day…I made it “from” her cat, Little One.  The card from the cat turned out to be a bigger hit than the one I made “from me”, which was just a basic rose with multicolored background.  Making cards for family–especially my mom–seems to be a major spur to creativity these days.  I also have a sunflower design which I made for her birthday that I need to upload.

Also yesterday:  I finally got my new site, transtees.com, up and running.  It only has about 12 designs right now, as of course all my time has been spent with getting my different sites and shops up to speed after the Great Cafepress Fail.

I am probably going to run TransTees with my own designs plus affiliate feed of related designs from Zazzle with Zstore.  But I’m glad to finally get it up and running, as I bought the domain and put a few trans related designs up at CP and Zazzle a few months ago.

Today is Day Two of Cafepress Opt-Out and the first weekday.  I was getting very few shop sales anyway, so it will be interesting to see how long it takes until the next sale.  (I’ve had no sales since the opt-out.)  I did get a Zazzle sale this morning, for a poster.

There Will Be Light poster from YosefDreams Zazzle store

Also in Zazzle news, they are currently running a free shipping promotion — JUNESHIPFREE, good till June 30.  I put links on several of my shop pages.  Considering shipping costs, that’s a pretty good deal.  Too bad I won’t have money to spend till after the 30th.

I keep saying, “Almost finished, soon I can start designing again” but now I really mean it.  Figured out last night that the only designs I don’t have up at Zazzle are the ones that never sell.  I might put them up eventually but I think my time is better spent on new and better designs.  And I pretty much already had everything up at Skreened and Printfection.  I’ve decided not to spend any more time at Spreadshirt; even though I really like some of their products, their quarterly payment schedule doesn’t work for me.

I’m slowly adding some photography at RedBubble –already added most of my art that I felt was worth adding — and that goes slowly but I’ve decided to just move forward adding a few at a time.

The last couple of days I’ve gotten quite into adding profile card templates at Zazzle.  I hadn’t added any before, as I didn’t “get” the template deal.  But some people have said they sell well, so I added about 60 –mostly abstract and turtle designs, plus some photography.

Ink Cat business cards at Zazzle

I’ve ordered a couple of sets of the Zazzle business cards, and was quite impressed.  The first set I ordered were the cheapest, the skinny profile cards in basic card stock, and they were very nice.  The latest set I ordered, with Zazzle’s last business card sale, were the regular business card size, in the most expensive “indestructible, waterproof” material.  Those were also very nice, bright colors, clear printing, and seem to be living up to the “indestructible” label.

Finally took the plunge and opted my last shop out of the CP marketplace. I was planning to give it until the end of this month, but I have seen both a drop in sales and of course a 70% plus drop in commission due to CP’s new low marketplace sales commissions. Leaving my designs in the marketplace was just not worth it, since as long as they are there, I would be competing with CP’s superior marketing budget and SEO to sell my work.  So now I’m “on my own”. Still keeping all my shops open at CP — except the one that I closed and consolidated into an older one–because they have a lot of items that I do sell quite a few of, such as tiles (framed and unframed, as well as the tile boxes), but I am going to focus more of my efforts elsewhere. New designs will be going up first at Zazzle, then CP and elsewhere.

In other news, I got my “name” url at facebook.  Couldn’t decide between wingedturtle, or my name.  Decided to go with my full name, so I’m now facebook.com/michaelyosefrobinson.  Thought about going with just “michaelyosef” but decided on my full name even though it’s a bit unwieldy. Someone had taken michaelrobinson by the time I got there, which was just as well.  Considering getting a myname.com and using it as a central indexing / information site, listing all my individual art/ writing sites and my resume, etc. I’ve been feeling lately that I should have my name more clearly attached to my work.