Valentines day cheeky wishes voucher

Have some cheeky fun with your Valentine!!

A customisable wishes voucher

This Valentine Voucher entitles the bearer to one of the Valentines Wishes on offer...
(available wishes are fully customisable by the giver)

...or how about the voucher as part of a Valentines Card? The voucher is printed on the inside and again is fully customisable with the choice of wishes the giver wants to include.

I will love you until... Valentine Voucher card by HightonRidley

comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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I made some sales through my Zazzle store

I'm finding the creative work on Zazzle rewarding, almost in it's own right and, bonus, I make sales, too!

It's not always my fine art that sells...

Here are some of my sales in the last few days, not a black and white / art photo amongst them!

Lose it at the weekend - poster

DJ on the decks - birthday card

Salsa dance fun

Daddy from Princess birthday card & verse 

My sales pitch...

All are customisable with your own words / pictures. See how easy it is to do on my Zazzle store: HightonRidley

I've got lots of blank cards with a selection of my artwork ready for your own message, have a look and let me know what you think. ...And for kids you might like gifts and cards from my Spudpeeps range.

If you're the type who likes to say the extra special things on a greetings card, you should probably see my Thinking of You, Thank You and Inspirational ranges.
I've even got a Gothic range, for those whose tastes tend that way. And if you're a romantic at heart, see everything with traditional poetry.

If you like what you see, you'll probably want to spread the word and tell friends and relatives alike, I'm sure. Folks do like to hear personal recommendations because there's so much dross and so many scams around—so help them out and let them know.

Go on, right now - strike while the iron's hot!  :) If you twitter, then click the tweet button, or maybe you do lots with stumbleupon - click the Stumble It button. It all helps, so thanks in advance!!

Own a piece of my affordable artwork

...on something useful. Remember, the very best of my shots are available on items to suit all pockets. If you find an image in my galleries you like, there'll be a panel next to it showing all items available with that image. I know that many, many of my followers really like my work, and if you are one of them, you'll find something affordable to own, whether t-shirt, poster, card or mug.

I love to read your feedback and you can be sure I take it into account as my art progresses...

comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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I apologise in advance...

...for the birthday card verse I wrote—it's a right groaner (you can avoid it by reading no further!)

From a Pretty Pink Princess to her Mummy

(or Mommy)

I love my Mummy because...

She helps me play dress-up, I get to use makeup,
We giggle and laugh a lot.
She chooses the dresses, the shoeses and tresses,
And ties up my hair in a knot.

She's now my hand-maiden, with eyes of black raven,
And maybe a hint of a witch,
In dreamland at Camelot, I rule and I'm Queen a lot,
With Mummy to see there's no hitch!

Copyright 2010 HightonRidley

What did you think of my cheek, rhyming "shoeses" with "chooses" and "Queen a lot" with "Camelot"? Anyway, here's the card I wrote it for:

And while I'm on about my Zazzle store, I did another Potato Patch character - Spudpeep Paddy, who is the first aider there. If any of the other Spudpeeps have an accident, he sorts out any cuts, bumps and bruises.

see all my Spudpeep Paddy items in my Zazzle store

You may now punish me in the comments for my dreadful rhyming!

comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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Happy New Year! from Spudgirl Daisy - my latest Spudpeeps character for children

Happy New Year!—this message brought to you by...

Spudgirl Daisy

I'm pleased to introduce you to Spudgirl Daisy. She is the official artist of the potato patch and is always busy with banners, pamphlets for tourists, t-shirts and so on - she does them all! Spudgirl Daisy likes flowers and bright colours. Do you see the red and yellow daisy she's wearing?

See the kids gear and gifts she appears on over on my Zazzle Store

I'd love to hear what you think of her....

comments / feedback always welcome :)

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Desiderata Poster - love it or hate it?

This just goes to show...

I Have Time

I took this picture ages ago now and returning to it recently, I wondered why it's not proved more popular. My artistic intent was to use it to portray a sense of facing the future, one with portent and hazard but with a feeling of being in control of your own destiny.

A serene horizon shows the outlook is potentially good but the overhead clouds curling down, almost reaching for you (the pillar), acts as an omen, warning of the potential danger that lies all round.

I processed it with that in mind, going for heavy contrast and lots of grainy, dirty noise in the sky. Maybe it was lacking something else? This is the one:

I Have Time

As I said, its not done so well in views, comments or with real-world galleries. But I was confident in its 'worth' as an image so I scratched around in my head for ideas and Desiderata (that great verse, starting "Go placidly amidst the noise and haste...") came to mind.

It's a wonderful verse, imparting great wisdom from a father to his son. Written in the 1920s it was, and still is to this day, great guidance for any teenager.

There's such a great fit between my artistic intent for the image and the verse, that I put the two together for a poster in my Zazzle store ...and a couple of days later I sold two!
Here it is with the verse in place.

Desiderata poster by HightonRidley
More Inspiration Posters

Yaay for me!

The lesson? Don't give up on an image that you feel is great. All you have to do is find the right venue and audience. Like that's easy! lol, but at least you know where to put your effort.

comments / feedback always welcome :)

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Another verse, Gothic this time...

Well, I don't know if I'm any good at this 'ere poetry, but needs must when the devil drives!

Folley's Dream

I created a poster that felt like it needed a verse. I was feeling a bit gothic and came up with:

In fright she fled
From love foreseen.

The fears she felt,
The tears she shed
- blood red! My heart!

In flight from Folly's Dream

Copyright © Highton-Ridley 2009

Here's the poster

Folly's Dream poster with verse by HightonRidley
Shop the other artwork at zazzle.co.uk

comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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New Zazzle Promo Panels and more poetry

I'm finding the Google Gadget I called Zazzlit! very useful in my publicity drive and I've been trying my hand at more poetry with another verse, for a Christmas Card this time.

New Zazzle Promos

As promised to my Zazzle community, I've just added another three panels, one for Christmas (HRXms), one for Hanukkah (HRHnk) and one for New Year (HRNyr) gear. See the promo page and its top product lines.

Christmas Card and Verse

Cathedral Stained Glass - Christmas card by HightonRidley
Make custom note cards at zazzle

Here's the verse:

In lowly manger gathered they,
Who, led by star to holy crib,
Brought gifts of Olibanum,
Gold and Myrrh

And, joining feather, hide and wool,
Gave praise to God for our Lord Jesus
Born to save us all

Copyright © Highton-Ridley 2009


comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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More poetry - well, a card verse...

I actually did this a couple of days ago but haven't found the time to post about it. Giving you plenty of time to recover from my last verse! Hehe!

Another card verse

I wanted to do some Thinking Of You cards for my Zazzle store. Again I had to write a short verse for the sentiment. What do you think, is it up to scratch?

It's been too long since last we met
Since strolling where
our feet would lead
And chatting all the while

So, friend of mine, here's hoping soon
Our paths again will cross, and
Once again we'll chew the cud
Until the time to part

Copyright © 2009 Highton Ridley

Here are the cards that the verse is in:
create & buy custom products at Zazzle

So, what do you think of my little ditty? I'd love to get some feedback...

comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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To Zazzle store owners...

Find out how to promote your Zazzle store's gear more widely

Getting greater exposure

No, not in the camera sense of the word! I've written a promo page on my site specifically for featuring the best of the best designs on t-shirts, cards an more, by some fantastic artists and funny folk in the Zazzle community.

Storekeepr? You can find out how to take part and find out what the immense benefits are by checking out my post about it on my other blog HintsNtips.info


Good luck promoting!

comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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I tried some Card Sentiment poetry

I've been a busy chap, juggling various activities...

This evening, I'm a poet...

...maybe :)

For my Zazzle store I thought I'd do a couple of thankyou cards with a poem for the sentiment. Hmm, not quite sure, what do you think? Does it catch the sentiment ok or should I think about changing it?

Thank you for being you
For always being there

For shielding me from all the hurts
When thoughts became despair

But most of all you have my thanks
The answer to my prayers

But due the most, are thanks for being
An answer to my prayers

Copyright © 2009 Highton Ridley


create & buy custom products at Zazzle

Don't be shy, I'd love to hear what you think—yes, you blokes as well!!

comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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I made some sales at Zazzle!

I know some of you are thinking about joining Zazzle so I thought I'd report back on recent progress.

Sales made

Sold 2: Dog Rose - notelet / card by HightonRidley
Browse more of my Cards

Sold 1: Grazing Pony - postcard by HightonRidley
Browse more of my Postcards

Sold 1: You Lift My Spirits postcard by HightonRidley
Browse my postcards

Products designed

I've laid my designs on 425 products from 40 images so far. The most popular fine art ones are shown in the panel:

make custom gifts at Zazzle

How easy is it to have and manage a Zazzle store?

In a word, relatively straightforward. I created my store on 11th Nov, so I'm three weeks into it (not many sales yet - but that's to be expected for such a new store) and haven't found anything that irks too much.

Like with any new arena, it takes a little while to orientate yourself to their way of thinking but once you've done that all works well.

The basic principles are:

Zazzle is..

...a Print on Demand store. Your designs get put on their product blanks and when they sell them, you get a royalty payment.
You don't even have to have any designs yourself, you can promote others' work and still earn a goodly commission from it.

Store Setup

• There are no setup fees or running costs. When an order comes in and they fill it, you get a royalty fee, based on a commission you set
• You create a store, choose a template / theme  and give it a name. Your store is located at www.zazzle.com/your_store_name
• It's also mirrored at .co.uk .au .ca and others, with all prices displayed in the local currency

Making products

• You place your uploaded images onto the various product blanks that Zazzle stocks
• You fine-tune your design for a product using a pretty neat design tool, sizing and placing the image. You can also add text with a huge number of typefaces / fonts to choose from.
  
• You give the product a title, description and a bunch of tags
  
• They have a Marketplace where you can put your stuff for sale, or you can keep your gear private
  (once in the marketplace, you can't change the image of a product)

Managing and promoting your store

• You get to create category folders and can have nested subcategories. You put the products in them and it's up to you how you organise this.
  
• They make it dead easy to promote your store or individual products, with the same sort of sharing facilities you see all over the web. They give you html for pasting into blogs and emails and generally make it easy to show off your stuff in places other than Zazzle
• I've used some of their promotion facilities in this post—all I had to do was copy and paste.
• They give you a Zazzle blog panel for putting in your blog sidebar though I find it a bit limiting. Instead I use Zazzlit! a Google gadget I created for the purpose. Look over in my sidebar at the top. See a tutorial on using it.
  
• Most blogging platforms are supported
• If you're feeling brave and aren't too afraid of changing CSS and HTML, they have a store builder and you can then control all aspects of your store layout
• ...and, no, I haven't been brave enough yet!
  

Most of my followers are other artists so I'm guessing you're one too? If you are, why not give Zazzle a go for your artwork?

If you decide to have a go, let me know so we can hook up on Zazzle :)

comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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Tutorial on using my new Zazzlit Gadget on your blog or web site

After something like five or six intense days, I've finished both my Zazzlit Gadget and the tutorial on adding and using it.

What is it?

Regular readers will know that I've recently opened a Zazzle shop (basically they make it dead easy to get your images onto products. No set-up fees.)

In these tough economic times, sales of my work through my web site have dropped off. People aren't really spending on fine art the way they used to. Not mine, anyway (and I keep hearing the same story from other artists).

The shop is a way to offer my work, albeit in a different way, at a much more affordable price. And it's starting to work.

So what is the Zazzlit Gadget? It's a way for Zazzle storekeepers to display just the products they want, in a small gadget in their blogger side panel or on their web site. Zazzle provide a couple of brilliant panels but they don't allow you to narrow down the products displayed.

But my Zazzlit does! I had to write it because I couldn't find one anywhere that did the job half decently, one that any shopkeeper could use. The thing about the Zazzlit Gadget is that I can put one on each of my sites / blogs and get them to display the type of gear most suitable to the folks who visit those places.

Tutorial - a piece of cake

My tutorial shows you in 5 easy-to-follow steps, with live working examples, how to point and click a Zazzlit onto your blogger blog.

Another revenue trickle / stream is always good...

I'd encourage any of the serious artists who follow me to sign up for a Zazzle shop - apart from the effort in uploading images and applying them to products, any sales made are pure profit. If you do, get things moving by using Zazzlit.

I'm not saying this is an instant earner but if you already sell your work and have a good handful or two of regular followers, then with Zazzlit you should see some additional revenue.

As usual, I'm after your feedback. What I want to know is, was the tutorial easy to follow and understand or did it frighten you?!

Secondly would you/will you use Zazzlit on your Zazzle store or does it have any drawbacks that need fixing?

comments / feedback always welcome :)

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I fought Google Gadgets and won!

[UPDATE: 22 Nov. This brief tutorial is now out of date. Please see the new, full-blown tutorial at its new location.]
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[UPDATE:] There was a flaw: clicked links opened the product page in the gadget window. Now fixed to open in a new window / tab. 
New filename is v1_1 (full name: http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/100521288542998786592/zazzle-by-highton-ridley-v1_1.xml)
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It's been a long eleven hours! ([update: now 25!!]

Google gadget for Zazzle

I couldn't find a way of displaying search results from my Zazzle store in a small panel, suitable for my blog.

So I wrote my own - which other zazzle storekeepers can use too.

The key things it does are:

• Searches your store for the tags you decide
• displays the products, matching the search
• Make sure you use your associate id in the config (see below) so you get the credit for referrals 
  
• clicking the picture takes you to that item in your store

See it  in action at the top of my right hand panel (I can't get it to work in posts).

The really great thing is that you can have lots of them, each for a different search. Wouldn't it be great if you could put all your fun products on a page you've got which is to do with humour?

Simple, use the gadget with a search for all your products that are tagged with "fun". Do the same for your page about your favourite band. The list goes on...

So exactly how do you do this? Well, read on...

Blogger Blog

To get it onto your Blogger blog, from dashboard, choose "layout" and "add a gadget". In the window that pops up to let you choose your gadget, choose "add your own" and give it the following url

http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/100521288542998786592/zazzle-by-highton-ridley-v1_1.xml

You then get a chance to configure it. The settings you'll want are

• Title: Whatever you want.
  
• Height: 220 (or, I guess, a multiple of 220 [Update: two require 434]
• Show Dates: (go on, you can guess this time!)
• Number of entries: 99
• Zazzle rss feed. This deserves a few words. Look at mine

• http://www.zazzle.com/HightonRidley/rss?qs=fun&at=238582202591969585
• "fun" is the search query - all your tags are searched. If you want the tag "fine art", use fine+art
• the number at the end is your associate id. Get it from your store.
  Then you'll get the credit from any referrals
  
• Note: When you change the Zazzle rss feed (including the query string etc), the preview won't show the changes. You'll only see them once you've completed adding the gadget (grrr!)
  

• Box colour: Each product returned is surrounded by an outline. Set the colour here.
  

Ordinary webpage

(or an FTP blogger blog)

Here's the code I use: Copy and replace the relevant bits and put on your page or in your blogger (classic) template sidebar:

<div style="width: 200px;">
<script src="http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/100521288542998786592/zazzle-by-highton-ridley-v1_1.xml&amp;up_show_date=1&amp;up_num_entries=99&amp;up_MyZazzleFeed=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zazzle.com%2FHightonRidley%2Frss%3Fqs%3Dfine%2Bart%26at%3D238582202591969585&amp;up_ItemBoxColour=96%2C96%2C96&amp;synd=open&amp;w=200&amp;h=220&amp;title=My+Zazzle&amp;border=%23ffffff%7C3px%2C1px+solid+%23999999&amp;output=js"></script></div>

The relevant bits are:

• HightonRidley: change to your own store name
• qs%3Dfine%2Bart: change to qs%3Dyour_search_query%26
  (this does a search for fine+art, note that %2B is used in place of the "+" symbol)
  
• 238582202591969585 change to your_associate_id
• &amp;title=My+Zazzle change to the title you want.
  Note the + is used in place of a space here
• ItemBoxColour=96%2C96%2C96 change to ItemBoxColour=red_value%2Cgreen_value%2Cblue_value

Whew! Well, that's it. If you have any questions, I'll try and answer them but remember that I'm not techy. I know just enough to be dangerous! hehe!

If you use the gadget, drop off a link to your page / blog in the comments, I'd love to see how you use it :)
comments / feedback always welcome :)

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Christmas prize draw

I can't quite call this a freebie draw because it's only open to those who have made a purchase from my zazzle store.

What's up for grabs?

Win a mounted, signed fine art print, your choice of print. They sell for around £75 ($125) in the galleries where I have work. Imagine it, you buy something from my shop as a Christmas present for someone else and you could win the print of your choice for yourself!

As usual, there will be three winners (if enough folks enter) selected from The Hat of Wonder And Hope.

Rules

[Update] Ends 14th December

• Buy something from my zazzle shop (see panel below)
• Make a post about it on your own blog
• In your post, link to my shop using http:zazzle.co.ukhightonridley* as the destination url (note the asterisk on the end)
  
• Comment on this post to let me know you're in and what you bought. Or if you prefer, email me at highton dot ridley (at) gmail.com to tell me instead.
  

Just think, with three prizes an' all, if I only make a few sales, you're almost bound to win!

There's funny, romantic and inspirational cards and wares available here:

create & buy custom products at Zazzle

Doh!

I had a Doh! moment when I sent out my occasional mailing earlier. I mentioned that you, my great followers, with all your interaction, have helped me to become a Gooogle-recommended example site -- yay! \o/

And I forgot to give a link to it! So without further ado, here it is, Google's page of example sites that are using Friend Connect effectively.

comments / feedback always welcome :)

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My first Zazzle award!

As you know, I've just opened a zazzle shop (I think US folks have to use the US version of my shop to see the prices in dollars—let me know if otherwise, please.)

Lucky day for some...

Well on Friday 13th I happened to notice I was getting postings on my zazzle wall from peeps congratulating me on my "TBA". As I'm a complete zazzle newbie, I had no idea what this was. Some digging around later and I see it's quite an accolade—a Todays Best Award.

The product was a greetings / note card featuring my barbican steps image.

How exciting!

comments / feedback always welcome :)

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