Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Book Squee!

Here's a preview of my 60 page art book available now in a soft cover and iPad edition, The link below the preview will take you to the page to purchase it!


Saturday, September 1, 2012

New Fabrics, Just in time for Halloween!

New Costume Fabrics Available, Two different color schemes for scales, one in pink, teal and purple (great for Mermaid tails!) and one in yellow, green and purple (perfect for your fierce little dragon!)

Also a hand painted water color turtle/tortoise shell repeat, and a digitally drawn chain mail design, excellent for lining actual chain mail pieces to cut down on any chaffing or irritation without compromising the look of the piece or for making some Kid safe armor for your little valiant knights,

They are ready to go for all your costuming needs, just in time to order for Halloween!







They are available on any one of Spoonflowers' yummy cottons or their lovely silk.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

All of the things under the sun...

So with The Craft Star opening today, and the successful publishing of 37 new fabrics on spoonflower, I am ready to write a nice blog post about the fantastic life of "Ditzy Sun".

Earlier this year I decided to sit down and do some elements for a series of ditzy patterns.

I cut some stock for the base designs, decided to go with watercolor and ink for them, and then made a list of elements I wanted each set to contain, this resulted in a fish dtizy , a chicken ditzy , a pond ditzy , and a Celestial Ditzy .

Then I started working on them. One element in particular satisfied me perfectly, I felt like it had come out really, really well. Which isn't to say I was unhappy with the others, it was just this one was exactly how I wanted it to be, there wasn't a thing I would change or a tiny mistake screaming at me in a voice only I could hear from it.

And that was this


I mean, look at that happy face! How could you not love it?

I went about getting it ready for various things, both as part of its' ditzy set and as a stand alone work. People seemed to like it, Then my friend from ArtFire, Gail Pither, who is the needle genius behind Cross Stitch Cards, suggested this design would make a fantastic cross-stitch pattern. My sister had already been yammering at me to make a cross stitch pattern of "SnowBot", so I thought,
"This is a good idea and if it works, maybe I can shut my sister up about "SnowBot"."

However the big hurdle for me, was:  cross stitch is not my "thing". I like it, I think it's pretty and admire the handiwork of it, but I just don't do it. I sew, I make lace, but other needle arts have never really grabbed my attention, so my understanding of the ins and outs is EXTREMELY limited to what I have forced myself to politely listen to my best friend, Pinki, babble about (in much the same way she forces herself to listen to me ramble about art). So Gail was a bolt of fantastic out of the blue. She very kindly answered my excessively stupid questions, and did an amazing amount of patient work and tinkering (which I paid her for, 'cause (let's all say it together people) "it's not a fucking hobby") and turned my design into a test pattern.

I sent the test pattern to my sister and said "Do this, or SnowBot gets it right between the rivets!" (or something like that... I may have been more polite about it, I can't recall now...)

So as you can see here

She Did.

I sent Gail her notes and the pictures of the finished piece and from here she again worked some secret magic I am convinced she alone possesses and should be worshiped like a goddess for, and went over the pattern to adjust it for issues my sister came across.

Then because neither Gail or myself had the forethought to discuss it before we did the actual work, we discussed how to sell it and settled on me paying her for the pattern work and just offering it for digital download on The Craft Star.



So here's where it gets fun, I turned on the coordinating fabrics in the last batch of spoonflower proofs



Just the sun in a repeat on a sky blue field 

The sun the moon the earth and the stars on a dark blue field

So fabrics can be had for making pillow backs or whatever to coordinate with the cross stitch.  fabrics start at around 15$ a yard depending on amount and type of fabric. (or if you can work it smaller, 8" x 8" swatches of fabric are 5$ a piece, not really sure if that's a thing you can do with cross stitch, make it smaller or larger, but I am pretty sure if I ask Pinki again to try and explain it to me, she will stab me in the eyeball with a knitting needle)


So leaving the land of needle work and back to my native hearth of pretty pictures... I also have this design on various items on zazzle, including
Celestial Ditzy Canvas Bag
Celestial Ditzy Canvas Bag by amyelyseneer

And on redbubble we have 
Stickers:


Tees in sizes from baby to grown-up 3xl

Framed prints

Also there's posters and cards, too at those links.




So check it all out and make sure to visit Cross Stitch Cards to see just how fabulous Gail is.


A little Blog hop of summer stuff!

Monday, June 11, 2012

Happy time!


Handmade Gifts




So the other day SU-UCKED, so to cheer up I asked my fellow ArtFire Artisans to show me their happy.

Take a moment to check out this collection!

Friday, April 13, 2012

The Entire Set

I made a collection for JUST the birth flowers so you can view them all at once even after they get pushed off my front page. As they sell the plan is to replace them in different styles or with the alternate flowers for the months that have alternates. Of course as with all AF collections there's a handy "Buy the entire collection" button if you want them all!

Fabric ditzy patterns on spoonflower are being worked on (the designs are up, but I am waiting till I have a full book to order before turning them on, so you can see them, here, but they are not for sale yet)




Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Cleaning Copper

Cleaning Copper is up for voting on threadless, your vote can help it get printed!




Score this design: "Cleaning Copper," to help it get printed on Threadless!

" />

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Art Thievery: help stop it!

So my stuff is being stolen by scraper sites (mine and a lot of other artists who use sites to sell their stuff)

What they do basically is steal my images, descriptions and keywords to make their meta data  weight their site over the actual site where you can buy art. they do not credit me or link back to me or sell the art, they are using it without my permission to get people searching for me or the type of things I paint to land on their page which is an ad farm.

Basically they pay godaddy a dollar or whatever, register a domain, then steal content that google's search algorithm likes, do not link to the actual sites and instead link to a ton of unrelated ads hoping to trick people into clicking on stuff so they make referral money for the ads.

Over the next few weeks I will be linking a lot of legitimate links on my social media sites to my products and my pages in general.

I've already filed DMCA's for the ones I've found so far, which that and trying to reassert valid links, are just about the only things I can do on my end to try and get my search results back.

You can help in two ways.

When You see a link to a product from me take a moment to click through to the hosting page for the product, this will help on the social end and give more weight to the correct link in search results.

When I post links you can re-tweet and share and like them and +1 them, this will again add more weight to the legitimate links.

The main problem is Panda SEO from google required us to pretty much redo everything , so the more optimized you made your content the more panda rewards people who steal your content. Cause these sties are not JUST my stolen stuff, but the stolen art of thousands of artists who have all been scrambling to make sure their listings can get found, they take them and concentrate all that panda bait in one place, and this forces them to the top of the search ranking whenever someone goes looking for art.

so over the next few weeks, any time ANY of your friends or pages you fan post their art links on social media, click like it's going out of style! It will take you two seconds and cost you nothing and support your local artists by helping them reclaim their search results from the thieves.

This is happening to fine art america artists, zazzle artists, redbubble artists, it's all over the forums on those sites. It's also happening to deviant art artists, (although I do not use that site, so I do not know if the forums are abuzz over there, but I imagine they probably are) Pretty much any site where a lot of fine, visual and graphic art is shown off or for sale or PoD.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Front page!

Today and Tomorrow I am the featured artisan on ArtFire The interview will be available archived from now till the end of ArtFire at this link and will be on the front page today and tomorrow. Stop by and check it out!

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Contest... win a free tee from redbubble!

Step one... Check out my tees here Pick the one you like most make sure you are following @redbubble on twitter

then, once you have picked out the one you like, click the tweet button



 and add the hashtag  #Tweets4Tees
(like this)








Then share it!


You can enter as many times as you like till January 31st, and they'll be picking one winner a day!


Official Rules are here