Phone Cases!

As I mentioned on August 3rd, some of my pictures on Redbubble look awesome as phone cases.  So to show that off, I created a new collection featuring all of those pictures!

The collection is a fun mish-mash of my photos.  There are Lego pictures (which make some very fun cases!), flower pictures (which make for some very pretty cases), animal pictures, and even some landscapes (like this fun picture of Duluth, Minnesota's Aerial Lift Bridge).  But not everything I have available on Redbubble is available as a case - some pictures just didn't look good, so they didn't make the cut.  And one picture, "The Crystal King's Closeup," looks fine as an iPhone case, but terrible as a Samsung case (so it's only available for iPhones). 

After making the new collection, I ended up removing my old Animals collection, combining it with the Miscellaneous one.  I like that there are only five collections on my profile page so it doesn't look too busy.  The new collection is now at the top of the page, giving it center stage to the other collections. 

Tink

Last week, I showcased the three pictures of mine which have made Flickr's Explore pages.  Today I want to talk about the cat in the second picture, Tink.

Tink was my aunt and uncle's cat.  They moved out of province and weren't able to take him with them.  We agreed to take him as a trial, to see how our cat, Sasha, would get a long with him.  Of course, as those things go, once he was living with me there was not way I was letting that cat go.  He became my best friend, spending almost every night with me except for the few nights I was away traveling.  Sasha, being Sasha, never liked him, but she slowly let him get closer before she would hiss and growl.

But then the unthinkable happened: I left for Duluth just for the day on Monday, August 21st.  When I left in the morning, Tink seemed absolutely fine.  But a few hours before I got home, he passed away quite suddenly.

From what we can gather, Tink was part Maine Coon.  Maine Coon's have a genetic predisposition to a form of heart disease, where they will seem fine to their owners until their hearts fail.  I don't think there was anything we could have done for him except what we did: we gave him a loving home for the two months he was with us.  He was an awesome cat and I still miss him terribly, even three weeks later.

I've put together an album on Flickr for him, with all of the pictures I took of him and his stuff while he was living with me.  There are a few other pictures of him on my Flickr account as well from when he was living with my aunt and uncle.

Spider in the Rosebush

I've always loved this picture. We used to have a rosebush in our front garden, and these really cool white spiders lived on it.  They were white with a little bit of pink, helping them blend in on the roses.

After updating Redbubble and playing with all the new options, I thought this picture would make a really deadly phone case.  And boy was I right!  I cut out the house in the background, focussing on the spider and the flower; it looks awesome!

I'm also trying something different with this image - it's not available as a print because I'm not really a fan of the house in the background.  I did make it available as a tote bag and throw pillow though because I was able to focus more on the spider and the rose.

Explored!

So it finally happened - I made it into Flickr's Explore pages!  And even more exciting, it's happened three times so far!


The first one was "3 Blooms - March 15 2014 2," a picture I took of my mom's orchid blooming.  This one made it to #79 on the March 15th Explore page.  It has over 9000 views, beating out "Blurry Sasha" (my reigning champion since 2010) by about 1000 views.


The second one was "Tink, Day 4."  That one climbed to #110on May 22nd, 2014.  It's currently got just over 6000 views, about 2000 less than "Blurry Sasha."


Finally was "New Camera!"  I really don't know why everyone was excited about this one, but it climbed to #6 on July 29th, 2014.  It's actually got over 20,000 views right now, beating out "Blurry Sasha" by about 11,000 views!

Redbubble Updated with Cool New Things!

So it's been awhile since I updated my Redbubble site.  In fact, the last time I updated it was when I last posted here.  But I was clearing out some of my emails, when I came across a Redbubble newsletter that had this article.  Realizing I haven't actually gone to Redbubble in months, I decided to look at my profile and see if I could use some of their tips to improve it.

I started out by hiding a bunch of pictures.  Most of them were Lego ones that haven't gotten many views.  I did end up keeping a few on there that had less than my arbitrary view count to stay, just because I liked them.  When that was done, I hid a bunch of other pictures, too; ones that I decided for one reason or another don't need to be there.

It was around this point that I rewrote my bio and decided to upload a few flower pictures I took with my new camera (oh yeah, I got a new camera!)  I chose a couple of flower pictures with ants in them based off of my newly rewritten bio.  And that was when I first noticed that my pictures were able to go onto the new Redbubble throw pillows and iPhone cases.  I didn't think some of my older pictures (ie the ones taken with my Canon PowerShot S3 IS) were capable of being on the new throw pillows and stuff.  But I figured out how to actually get them there.  Around that time, I also decided to drop my prices.  I've been putting a 50% markup on all my pictures since I started on Redbubble.  As per their tips, they suggested that I rethink the price; I decided to go with their suggested 20%, just to see how that goes.

So for the next hour or two, I was changing all my prices, and reuploading pictures so they could be on throw pillows and stuff.   I played around with everything, trying to make all the pictures look good on whatever I'm offering them on now.  If they didn't look good, I didn't enable whatever it was as a buying option (so, for example, if something didn't look good as an iPad case, it is not offered as an iPad case). 

So now I have a smaller selection of pictures available to buy as a greater number of things.  And everything looks gorgeous!  (Doing this really made me want an iPhone - some of my pics look absolutely fantastic as phone cases!)