SOLD YOUR ACEO?

Now Think About Packaging for Shipping....

You don't want to just throw your art in an envelope; although that is perfectly acceptable, a buyer anxiously awating the art they purchased will be pleasently suriprise with a little extra touch to your packaging.

I feel presentation is important when shipping out your art. Here's a few tips to use when sending art work to a customer.

Packaging TIPS:

Adding a personal note in a Thank You or Notecard leaves a good impression with your buyer.

A little handmade envelope to put your art in is an extra goodie for your customer. This website offers free templates for ACEO size envelpoes and many other templates that may be helpful in packaging and also creating art.

http:///www.ruthannzaroff.com/mirkwooddesigns/templates.htm

Protecting your art.

There are several types of clear sleeves to use in shipping your art. They are very affordable and protect your little masterpiece. The "Penny Sleeves" are what I like to use because they fit so nice in the handmade envelopes. The Rigid Top Loaders are also great and offer more protection from being bent in transit. These sleeves are normally used for baseball cards, but I have found them to be a perfect fit for ACEO art.

Using cardstock to stiffen and protect your art from being bent also works well for envelopes.

If you have a business card, add it to your package too!

What About the Outside of your Package?

I like to use rubber stamps with pretty designs. Stamps or stickers that reflect holiday's and seasons is great to use also. You can have a special stamp or sticker made with a logo to announce that your art has arrived!

Painting Eyes - a Susan Alison rush through some pointers

The eyes in a painting can bring it to life or kill it.

These are just a few points to bear in mind when painting eyes in animals, although these pointers can be helpful when painting human eyes, too. The illustrations will be dogs. (Surprise!) Ooh – except for one bear…

Take a good look at an eye – someone else’s, your dog’s or your own if there’s no one else about. Check it out for shape. It’s not flat. It’s not totally round either, but totally round in a drawing is better than totally flat. It’s not a perfect oval, either – there’s the corner of the eye to think about.

Bear in mind that the eye does not sit ON the face – it is part of the face and fits into its own socket. The shape of the skin and bone around the eye, especially the eyelids (top and bottom), gives more of an impression about the roundness of the eye itself because so little of it is actually seen.

Thinking of these things will encourage your drawing to be lifelike. An eye is just part of the whole.


I’M CONSIDERING IT VERY CAREFULLY…





The iris of an eye – the coloured bit - is not a solid tone but has streaks of colour in it and is nearly always dark around its edge. The iris is round. The pupil ie the dark/black bit in the middle of the iris – is round, too.

Remember the rims of the eyelids often show, depending on angle, and quite often there is a highlight (white usually) on the lower eyelid, as there is usually a shadow across the eye underneath the upper eyelid. Light and shadow are always important all through a picture.

You can see the darker colours at the top of the eye and the lighter at the bottom in… HER SPECIAL HAT below



The white of an eye usually has slight colour through it and is not often pure white.

Pure white is best for highlights. The highlight in the eye can be one dot of white or two or three – it can be round or a curved square (curved because the eye is round…). Try to bear in mind what direction the light is coming from when deciding on the highlights.

In KITTYFLIES ATTEMPT TO CHEER UP FRED you can see the highlights are curved – they suggest that the grumpy bear’s eyes are not flat.






Placement is important – eyes halfway up a head create an entirely different feel to an image where the eyes are two thirds of the way up…



In Pretty in Pink she looks a little flighty because of the placement of her eyes.



PRETTY IN PINK




The shape of the eye will change depending on the expression on the face as a whole eg when laughing, eyes are more closed than open, or when startled the reverse is true.

YES, IT IS A TRIFLE BREEZY…





This is especially true when drawing/painting a picture that is more of a cartoon/illustration – when, of course, you can ignore everything I’ve said and exaggerate all the wrong things in order to get a particular expression to work.



SLEEPEE… YOU ARE FEELING SLEEPEEE… YOU WANT TO GIVE ME YOUR STEAK AND KIDNEY PIE…






Or, if you don’t fancy tackling the eyes today, then cover them up…


HELLO PUPPIES!!!




Thanks for making it this far. If you are interestsed in checking out more dogs' eyes then try these links...........

Click here for ebay auctions and Buy it Now items

Click here for collieish present ideas at Cafepress

And here for my shop on Etsy


Find me on MySpace and be my friend!

Thanks so much for looking…..

Susan

Is there tips to selling on Ebay?

Well you see all kinds of things that lead you to believe that there is a secret to selling on ebay, we will look at some of their tips and see if it will help us sell any better!! So here goes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYokLWfqbaU

A Little Fun To Watch Video

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Your Auction Title

That's right, the secret for getting the most traffic to your auction is your auction title. Your auction title is probably the most important feature when someone is searching on eBay.

What makes the title so important?

The keywords in your auction titles!It is a well known fact that the majority of people that find an auction listing, find it through the keywords in the auction title. Most people will only searching in the titles and not selecting the "Search Title and Description" option.If you were to go to eBay and start looking at your competitors auction titles, you would find they are using keywords in their titles to attract buyers. Incorporating those important keywords into your auction titles is a surefire method for improving your auction traffic.Your auction titles must contain the specific keywords that buyers are using in their searching in order for them to be able to find all your auctions. A high percentage of auctions fail because their listings were never found by the buyers.I have seen this happen over and over again. When you take the best strategies, being used by your power seller competitors, in your own auction listings, you are literally very hard to beat!

FEEDBACK

eBay has recently started counting "neutral" feedback marks as negative for the purpose of calculating your feedback rating. In one swoop millions of accounts went from perfect to less than perfect.First, the bright side of this eBay change is that if you can manage to keep your feedback high you'll REALLY stand out now.It's now more important than ever that you educate your customers on the importance of good feedback.Here are a couple ideas:1. IMMEDIATELY leave feedback for all customers that buy from you. There is no benefit in waiting since you can no longer leave them neutral or negative feedback as a seller.2. Next, in all "post sale" email and shipping correspondence with customers include a statement something like this (even BEFORE they pay):
We just left you positive feedback on eBay. Anything short of your 5 Star 100% positive feedback back to us considered to be a TOTAL FAILURE ON OUR PART because we want you 100% happy. If there is anything else we can do to earn your prompt 5 star 100% positive feedback please let us know at (email address). Here's a link to leave us PERFECT feedback once you are pleased with your experience:http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?LeaveFeedback2

How To Search Your Competition
Go to eBay and sign in.If you don't have an account yet, you can create one now for free. 1.Click the "Advanced Search" link located at the top of most eBay pages. 2.Enter your keywords and any other search information. 3.Select the Completed listings only check box. 4.Click the Search button.Note: If you are not currently signed-in, you will be prompted to do so before you can see your search results.Once your search has completed, you will usually see a rather large list where the price is given in either Green or Red text. The Green indicates that the product has sold and the amount that it sold for. The Red indicates that the item was not sold.When you see that your competitor's have been selling a lot of products, it means that the seller is doing something right because of all the successful completed auctions.Now you want to take a look at all those corresponding auction titles and descriptions and then incorporate the keywords into your auction titles.The next step is to test your auctions. List your auctions under different categories with different keywords that are relevant to the product and to category you are listing it in to see which one performs better. Watch for a pattern so that you will know which one is the "keeper". It won't take you long at all to discover which category works best for you, and then you will be able to work that category more effectively to produce the maximum traffic and of course, earn more money.The next secret....Drum Roll....Be sure to use plural words when testing your auction titles.The majority of eBay searchers type in plurals rather than singular words. For example: "domain names" not "domain name". When you test both the singular and plural form of the keywords in your auction titles, you are going to find out which one is more effective, and will then bring you more money!

Start Your Items At A Low Price
First you have to decide on what the minimum price is that you would accept for your item. If you start your listing at $1.00, which is the new minimum price that you can list at, you will attract more bidders at the beginning of the auction. The next minimum price you would want to use for a higher priced item, is $9.99. $10 to $24.99, your listing fee goes up, and so on. NO RESERVE A reserve price is a set price that must be met before the item will be sold. If the reserve price is not met, then the seller is not obliged to sell the item. An example would be if you have an reserve of $20, and your item sells for $13.99 you do not have to complete the sale & release the item. eBay will list it again for free, but if it does sell the second time around they will take their fees.Most people don't want to bid on reserved prices. Psychologically, they want the option of being able to win the auction at a lower price, even though they are willing to pay more if the bidding gets up there, in their minds they think they may get it for less. Even if you have something that is a very high dollar item, it is better to have the bidding start at a higher bid amount and pay the higher fee, than it is to put a reserve on the item.

How to Keep Your eBay Listings In Constant View Seven Days a Week
By Avril Harper
It's important to be selling continuously on eBay, literally day by day, giving you constant stock turnover and regular daily profits. You do it by getting potential buyers to focus on your products over rival listings but you have very limited time to achieve your objective.Most importantly, your products must appear in the first few pages of eBay's search listings whenever someone keys in words to describe items such as you are selling. But there is a big problem here.The problem's down to eBay's listings appearing in reverse order, from those closest to ending, through to items only recently listed. Items listed on the first pages of any popular category will be those ending in the next few minutes or hours, and few people will search beyond the current day's listings.To illustrate, imagine I want to buy some CDs, featuring Roy Orbison, for example, and Willie Nelson, Neil Diamond, John Denver, and others. If I go online right now and key those names into eBay's search engine, I'll almost certainly have dozens of pages of suitable product listings to search through.Given I definitely don't want to spend hours looking for CDs with so many similar items listed I'll probably order something from the first or second page and ignore the rest.Now imagine you are selling those CDs, but you only list on Sundays, and today is Tuesday. Your listings have six more days to go before they'll appear on the first few pages so I almost certainly won't buy from you today.By listing all your products the same day, they'll also all be selling the same day, so you're only going to reach page one of eBay's listings for an insignificant part of the week ahead. You are reaching just a tiny part of your target audience.You circumvent the problem by listing all your products daily, which by implication means you have product listings ending daily, and consequently everything you sell features in the first few pages returned by eBay when someone searches for items such as you are selling.

Well maybe you can find a few secret tips out of these that will help you too! Share your thoughts on all of these! :) Lisa

A Bit About China Painting

China or porcelain painting is an ancient art. Like any other piece of art, composition, color, design, perspective, etc. all apply. The process which was developed in 1400 AD in China. In the late 16th century Europe was introduced to the process, however, it was not introduced to the United States until 1769. Groups of women would come together in a painting circle to paint tea or chocolate sets.

China Painting is a method of painting on white glazed porcelain. Glazed porcelain comes in many forms, the traditional teacups, teapots and plates, You can also find porcelain pieces suitable for painting in jewelry, thimbles, coffee mugs, even tape dispensers! China paints are an overglaze paint. Overglaze paints are painted on top of the glaze and then the piece is fired in a kiln multiple times. Most china requires 3 fires, some may require up to 10 firings.

Paints are in powder form and mixed with a special oil medium. Each porcelain piece is painted multiple times. Paint is applied very lightly on the piece. The piece is then fired fired. Another coat of paint is applied and the piece is fired again. This goes on, painting and firing, until the colors are vivid enough for the artist. During the firing process the glaze actually opens up to receive the paint. It becomes part of the finish. Additional firing could be required if the artist applies lusters, gold or platinum which are fired on top of the glaze.

Because the paint becomes part of the glaze is the reason china painted pieces will never wear off and are dishwasher and microwave safe (unless they have gold or lusters applied) Many of the china painted pieces resemble watercolors in their translucence. There is no white on the porcelain artist palette. The white showing through is actually the porcelain.
Today because of the time involved to paint a single piece of china and the necessary to have a kiln for firing, not to mention the lack of teachers passing along the art, there are very few china painters. Visit me at:
Http://jywheeler.etsy.com

Art for charity

Good morning bloggers! There may be two of us blogging today, but that is because I was supposed to do yesterday and I totally forgot! Some days life is sooo hectic.

Right now, I am involved in a group of artists who are trying to raise funds to help a cat rescue/sanctuary build a new building. They do a wonderful thing and all the cats are healthy. they have placed many in homes, but the ones who aren't placed have a forever place to live.

Since I can't do that myself, I thought this would be a great way to help. More than 20 artists have pitched in and are donating all or a portion of the proceeds made on their art to this charity. If you love cats, and animals in general, this is a worthwhile way to show it.

I will include the link to my auction and if you scroll down you can read more about FieldHaven Feline Rescue, and also there is a link that shows all the other artists involved. Click on that and be ready to see some pretty awe-inspiring art.

It's a great cause! Please go bid ...and remember, it is for some pretty precious feline friends.

http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZcatdancing51


Chrissie

Leaving town again Hurricane IKE

First off, Let me say that this is not my day to post. I am supposed to post on this blog. on the 14th. I will be out of town for IKE. I do hope I have a home to come home to..This ACEO is Ryan fishing and he is mounted on a mat board and framed in a 7"x5" frame. I am going to visit my MOM. She lives in Mount Pleasant Texas and she is very happy we are coming to visit.
Thanks so much.
Barbara

Starting Something New

I have decided to start a few new art creations for awhile! I will be working on some Halloween art for the next few weeks, hoping to get inspired into creating some new and colorful art creations, I decided to change my name on ebay. Look for my now at PaperMoonDelights on Ebay. I need to expand my horizons for awhile. Break out of my shell and I am in a rut and my inner artist is slowing turning to mush I do believe! LOL

I have some of my artcards marked down in my store so get while they are hot I will be adding some more today~~

Click below

PAPER MOON DELIGHTS

I am blessed by God's Grace that he has allowed me to be able to create things from my hands with just my mind to do them, I have never had any formal training with any of my crafts and so what little talent I do have it is all from God! I am truly thankful for all that he has allowed me to have. I do hope you will check out my store above and be on the watch out for my new creations. Also check out my stores on etsy too! God Bless your day, Lisa

http://www.artbylisak.etsy.com/

http://www.blushingbridepoems.etsy.com/

http://www.therubyboutique.etsy.com/