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