Store update

I've added a few more items to my store (www.zazzle.com/michaelricketson), for my latest painting of our heroine with her cat, skull, and bone collection.  :)  I had to do a little cleaning up of some white anti-aliasing on the painting in order to make it presentable on a dark t-shirt (if I had used layers properly in my paint program, that wouldn't have been necessary)!  Also, a mug, stickers and a coaster are available.  There's always the danger that more is forthcoming, as well!  As mentioned previously, I am still leaning towards creating a vector image version of this artwork, but I won't start working on that immediately.  Right now I'm doing a personal artwork which I'll show shortly!


Here's another Zazzle store which impressed me... The artist, Chad Wiles McCown, does some stylish illustration which has a feminine flair to it, if you'd like to take a look at it!  www.zazzle.com/wiles44

Store's open!

Hooray, technical issues are out of the way, so I'm happy to say, that my store is open!  :)  Now if so inclined, you can buy all sorts of knick knacks which feature my artwork on them.  The store can be reached by going to www.zazzle.com/michaelricketson, or you can click "Michael's Digital Art store" in the right hand sidebar of this blog.  Thanks very much for taking a look.  Regarding the shirts, the style and gender of any shirt can be changed after clicking the image to go to that item's page.   The mugs and key chains also feature variations on them which you can select.  I'll probably be adding a few more items to the store very shortly. I still have to finish the previous image that I was working on, for use as a t-shirt design, but here is another update on it (you can click it for a larger view): 

Ummmm... where'd it go

It may be another day or two before my Zazzle store is functional!  I created a product for sale, but it's not showing as being available in my store.  I'm not sure what's wrong, so I'm waiting for a Zazzle person to get back to me.  Thanks for your patience.  Meanwhile, here is some light music...


The other day I mentioned the artist Arshile Gorky, on whom I saw an exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a little over a year ago.  I find that such exhibits do help to give an appreciation for artists whom I had not spent a lot of time studying previously.  This was the case especially for Gorky, Frida Kahlo, and most recently Amedeo Modigliani (with his appearance in the Marc Chagall exhibit).  Gorky was a highly intellectual abstract artist whose life and work was influenced by his survival of the Armenian Genocide in the former Ottoman Empire.  His mother died shortly after they had fled the suffering in their homeland, and of course he carried the resulting scars for the remainder of his short life.  His most famous painting is "The Liver is the Cock's Comb", a large work which was on display at the exhibit.  In his 40's, Gorky wound up committing suicide after a painful 2 1/2 year period in which he lost a studio, paintings and treasured books in a fire, was diagnosed with cancer, was seriously injured in a car wreck (the car being driven by the influential art dealer Julien Levy) and then was left by his wife and children.  It seems that paintings in an exhibit become that much more touching when one knows the somber events of an artist's life.  Their lives weren't about the great works of art that they created, but rather what they had to survive in order to leave something behind, for us to know them by.  The paintings themselves are like little hands that are thrown up in the air, trying to grasp at a life that might have happened, a life less painful.


I hope that my store is working by tomorrow!

Store almost ready

There's a good chance that by tomorrow, I'll have an online product store operating through Zazzle.com!  I was looking through my existing artwork and trying to determine which pieces meet the minimum specs required for each Zazzle product.  The initial offering will possibly include five different t-shirts, three coffee mugs, a magnet and a key chain.  Not every piece of artwork will be able to be put onto every type of product, due to requirements with image resolution and aspect ratio. But hopefully there will be enough variety to keep the store interesting.  :)  The store will be accessible through my main website, plus this blog, after some tweaking!  I look forward to sharing my artwork on something that you can put your hands on!  :)   

A store pending?

Today I started taking a look at www.zazzle.com... I'm thinking about making some of my artwork available for purchase, on t-shirts, magnets, coffee mugs, etc.!  So I've ordered a few items from Zazzle, because I want to see what the products are like.  Zazzle of course allows an artist to set up an online store, selling all sorts of items with their artwork on them, many of the items being customizable.  Zazzle prints the artwork onto the products, per each customer order, and is able to ship within one day, from what I understand.  I was pretty impressed with the website, with its depth of functionality and ease of use.  I found one artist's Zazzle store that I was particularly fond of, called Retropolis Travel Bureau. There are some very nice looking items for sale there, all with a "retro-future" style of artwork.  The artist is named Bradley W. Schenck.


The question is how much of my previous artwork is suitable to be put on a t-shirt or button or whatever.  I'll have to evaluate the pieces, and meanwhile, I've already started work on an image which will be intentionally t-shirt friendly.  Below are some rough, early sketches.  I plan to make two versions of the artwork...  one to be a painted raster image (shown on the right), and the other to be a vector image using solid colors.  I'm imagining that these graphics will be something preferred by the ladies (ladies who like to crawl around in graveyards and attack zombies for their blood).

I hope to have more news on this soon!  Stay tuned.