One of the biggest factors that has determined the progress of August has been me living in Cumbria. Due to situations not entirely going in my favour, I ended up staying back home for the first month of the project. During the welcome week I had laid the groundwork of things to be doing for the time ahead, as well as sorting out communication with Beth and Merry.
Things did turn out a little differently to how I expected though. Work at home was far more intense than I'd expected, with the summer workload proving a lot to deal with. I worked in a school uniform shop, so this is by far the busiest time of year for them. Trying to get work done after a day of that was proving more difficult than expected.
The next minor issue came from the fact that the three members of the group were somewhat fragmented. Merry was keen to wait for Beth before commencing work on the Captive North project, so the first few weeks for archive were filled in mostly with web designing work. With my position in Cumbria proving less useful in this regard, I began to focus my time towards other directions.
One of my more popular outputs is my robot artwork. It's what most people know me for. Over the last few years I've flirted with ways of monetizing my art, and usually settled for prints, which I've sold at art fairs and in local cafes and shops to a decent degree of success. So with this extra inclination to be doing enterprising work, I decided to branch out a little and produced a series of greeting cards with my artwork on. Thanks to my artwork being black-and-white, I managed to get them printed really cheaply, and in the following week tracked down envelopes and plastic sleeves at good prices too.
I've had some mixed successes so far with the cards. I've sold some alongside my latest couple of exhibitions, and also sold small numbers to local businesses as well as some further afield in the Lake District. But most importantly I've sold a batch to a local Hallmark branch. Out of all of these, this stands the strongest chance of bringing in more work, especially if they pass the word along. I just have to hope they sell now.
It hasn't been a perfect road though. I have to admit that production ended up being fairly rushed and as such didn't have the chance to do as much picture editing as I would have liked, resulting in a few cards where the artwork doesn't fill the space as well as I would like. I also made an assumption that the regular size of cards would be A5, rather than the actual slightly smaller size they are, resulting in some customers reporting poor sales due to them not fitting in card racks.
If I progress this venture beyond the current batch of stock, I would like to spend a bit more time progressing the cards before I print them. I would like to add some hand-drawn typography to them, as well as fixing the designs. Time-permitting, I would also like to do some more card-appropriate cards, with birthday and Christmas themes. I'm proud of the progress I've made, and it's been an interesting chance to dip my toes into unknown territory, but it's also shown me a lot about where I need to go from here to enjoy more than a modest success.
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