How I Make Mockups

 

What a rabbit hole that mockups can be for me.  I can spend hours just looking at all the thousands of photo options that pixabay.com or unsplash.com (my 2 favorite reference photo sites) have to offer.  So many choices.  I find it very mesmerizing and a huge time sucker. 

I've recently made the commitment to step up my game when it comes to my listing photos.  Every Etsy expert on YouTube mentions that your photos are one of the most important aspects of your shop's success.  To get fresh eyes on the subject, I bumped up my monthly membership on Erank.com to the Pro account level so that I could compare more of my competitor shops to my own.  I sell a variety of items so I really had to find a couple of shops for each category so that I could see what a successful sticker shop or say a bookmark seller looks like.  It has been rather an eye-opening experience because they have SO MANY more sales on a weekly basis than I do.  Now you can't let that discourage you, but rather use that information to help you set higher goals for yourself.  Erank.com allows you to track your competition and to see what keywords they use in their listings.  It a wonderful research tool and I can't recommend it enough.  It's an essential tool for any online business, especially in the current economic environment we are navigating through as small business owners.

I mentioned before that I could spend hours finding just the right background photo to use as a mockup and so recently, I've actually purchased some mockup sets from other Etsy Shops.  I've not been disappointed, especially when you can find them on sale for just a few dollars.  I'm going to show you what I've done with mockups that I've purchased and with those that I have created completely on my own.

Let's take a look at a framed art print mockup with a Christmas holiday theme.  Here is one of my favorite ones this year that I on unsplash.com for free and I absolutely love it.  It matches my art style very well and at the same time the artwork is the well seen. It's a perfect 8 x 10-inch frame with no objects that are interfering with the framed area.  Most of my artwork is at a vertical orientation so this is perfect.  But for those few pieces that are at a horizontal layout, this wasn't a difficult to adjust.  I simply rotated the whole picture 90 degrees counterclockwise, and I've accomplished maintaining a cohesiveness to my listing photos that I love.  This is my primary listing photo for all my Christmas art this year.  I love it!  Let me show you how it turned out.

This is my adorable highland cow drawing I did earlier in 2023.  I've put sunflowers on her head but here I've given her a Christmas doo.  She is just the sweetest and I'm in love with that shy expression on her face.  I have so many favorite Christmas pieces this year, but little "Sunshine" is way up there on the list.  All I did was add the photo inside the frame and put my branded watermark on the bottom.  Be sure you save all your photos that you are going to use on your listings at a lower resolution so that you don't make it easy on all those Gypsie's, pirates and thieves that are out there that are lurking in the cyber shadows.  If you don't you will find your artwork all over the place faster than you can say, "Bobs your uncle."

I mentioned that some of my Christmas artwork has a horizontal orientation and so I just wanted to show you an example of how I took this same photo and flipped it on its side to make another great mockup option.  You can't do that with every mockup but this one was perfect.  This piece is called "Christmas on the Farm" and it a compilation of all the cute Christmas Critters in my 2022 collection.  It is SO cute!  I just love how this one turned out. 

I can talk about mockups all day but let me show you another example of one that I purchased and why I decided to do that.  Recipe cards are a good seller for me, and I love all the cards I have designed in the past few years.  In order for them to stand out on any online platform that first primary listing photo has to be stunning and honestly, I've struggled with that, but that struggle is now a thing of the past.  Here is my newest recipe card mockup that I purchased from the Esty Shop- Studio 163.  Just how cute is that?  Simple, bright and yet very eye catching.  I paid about $2.50 for this mockup and let me tell you that is a real bargain if you factor in all the time, I will have to spend trying to find something that is even close to this.  I actually purchased 2 mockups from this shop for my recipe cards and I think this $5 investment will pay for itself hundreds of times over.  In this mockup I just added a little text at the top right corner to clearly explain that you are getting a set of cards and their size.  Finally, I just added my branded watermark, and I was done.  Of course, I had to do this like 40 times so that all my recipe card listings had a fresh new look. 

 I do sell one 3 x 5 card so all I did for that was add a white rectangle to the easel to cover up the predetermined 4 x 6 size.  I then just added my recipe card design and just made it appear a bit smaller on the easel.  It is amazing what you can accomplish if you just learn a little Photoshop.

I hope you weren't too bored with all this mockup mumbo jumbo, but I can't stress just how important good photos are.  I do hope to start actually taking a lot of my own product photos and videos in the next year and I'm sure I will be blogging lots about that journey so follow my blog for more content like this.  Let me know if there are any questions you have.  I LOVE sharing my limited knowledge with other artists.  

My art makes great gifts so hop on over to my website and check out all my cute critters.  JULIE TOWNSEND STUDIO

Set Up Your Own Website Shop Yesterday!

Do you have an online shop?  Maybe you have an Etsy Shop like I do.  I actually have been working hard to gain a presence on several new online marketplaces along with my own website shop.  The internet is full of Etsy horror stories.  That old adage, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" has never been truer.  If you don't have a website up and running yet, then I strongly suggest that you get started today setting it up.  

I've actually had a website for years through Weebly.com.  I used it mostly like an artist's resume, but about two years ago, I decided rather than just directing the traffic from my website to my purchases on my Etsy Shop, that I needed to set up my own store and sell my art myself.  There were two events that occurred around that time that brought a real urgency to this decision.  One, I had discovered that the images of my art had been stolen from my Etsy Shop and were all over the internet, especially on Amazon.  I found some even on other Etsy Shops too.  I was devastated to say the least.  In most of the pirated images they didn't even bother to remove my name from the art.  These thieves were so lazy that in many cases they just threw up the images and even stole the mockup photos I had created. 

Months of work went into reporting them and getting their listing taken down with Amazon.  I had an attorney write a cease-and-desist letter for those listings that were not on Amazon.  I went back into each of my listings and recreated the mockups by adding a watermark and lowering the photo resolution to less than 1mb.  I was no longer just handing over my work to these unscrupulous thieves but making them really work for it. 

Here's that Naughty Pig

The second instance was that I received a trademark infringement letter from Etsy regarding one of my listings.  I was in complete shock because I am very careful to create all my own artwork.  It wasn't that I had stolen an image or had something Disney or Taylor Swift in my shop like so many other products for sale on Etsy that you find.  I had unknowingly titled one of my little nursery art drawings "Percy Pig".   I just wanted a cute name that started with a "P" and Percy popped into my head.  What I didn't know, was that Percy Pig was a trademarked candy company based in England.  I think I would have been okay if I hadn't used the name of the artwork in the searchable title in my Etsy listing.  

I contacted the individual via email that had brought up the claim with Etsy and apologized for my mistake and assured them I had already renamed the artwork.  This should have resolved the issue, in my mind, but this company refused to remove the complaint with Etsy. 

Me in the Hoosegow

I was placed in what I call "Etsy Jail" for 90 days on account reserve where a large percentage of my money was held until I could provide a tracking number for each of my orders.  That shouldn't have been much of an issue for me because I mail out my orders within one day and I use the Etsy mailing label option even for my 1st class postage orders. There is a tracking number assigned to every order I ship out. However, Etsy had a glitch in the process and none of my 1st class postage orders were processed as delivered with the USPS.  A month into this account reserve issue, they were holding over $200 of my money and refused to release it even after I proved the item had been received.  It was a nightmare and one I NEVER want to repeat.  

What is clear to me is that I already have that one strike on my account and therefore I feel they could close my shop down for basically no reason.  I can't depend on Etsy to treat my shop in a professional manner because they rely heavily on botts and not a human with reasoning capabilities.  I felt like I'm out there skating on thin ice that will never be solid again.

That was a real wakeup call and so once, again, I combed through all of my listings looking for any keyword or searchable term that might cause me an issue.  Hours and hours spent, once again not creating new content but rather covering my butt.  It is exhausting.

It was that moment that I made some real changes in my business plan.  Market myself by directing all my social media traffic to my website rather than to Etsy.  That includes all my Pinterest pins going forward.  Also, to create as many selling options as possible so that I can have my art appear all over the Google search engine.  In the past few months, I've worked to open Julie Townsend Studio shops on the following marketplaces -Tedooo.com, Goimagine.com and the new Michaels marketplace called MakerPlace.com.  There is a lot of work involved and I have yet to see many fruits, but I hope these shops will start producing sales during the upcoming holiday season.  That is my goal, at least.  

My closing advice is to get a website TODAY! I've got a great idea! Why not check out my website and follow this blog for more of my old lady art journey. Julie Townsend Studio