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IQBR 1.3
So back to the present, all the previous sales and products are in the past, it’s given me invaluable experience even at this low level of the business spectrum. The new pictures are very simple linescapes which allow me to create them quickly and easily with less complicated software. They still take a few hours to create, as mentioned previously there are artistic and compositional choices to be made, the colour palette to consider and tweak. The colour palette I save and import into each image, something most software will do these days, this is important as although the palette doesn’t suite every image, I add new colours frequently, it…
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PoD 1.1
So time for launch is nearly upon us, some research done, more to do, and some products and designs to create. For Cafepress, Zazzle and Amazon Merch I’m thinking of a few themes. Firstly 80s retro, Lucky Number 7, a sort of brand I’m trying to create (the theme is the number 7 but with 2 horizontal bars through the centre, making almost a currency symbol and therefore ‘lucky’), something to do with race cars, especially retro styles and colours. This appeals as the sky blue and pale orange racing colours of the seventies, plus British Racing Green with yellow stripes all evoke a nostalgic feel that I connect with.…
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Project Plan 2.0
This lesson was taught to me by my father, he was an antique dealer for many years, the successful ones last, and the others burn out quick. Many people have the idea of retiring and running either a country pub, I advise you don’t as it’s long hours and hard work. Or some would setup an antique shop, the plan they would follow was to go to the salerooms and just outbid the professional dealers. The reasoning behind this was if the pros can make a living buying at this price, I outbid them then put it in my shop. Although I don’t make as much profit buying at the…
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Project Plan 1.9
So time for a project summary, we now have a total of 5 projects currently;
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USR 1.0
Looking at upcycling the various now obsolete Apple and other tech items I have I then began to list the various products I should look at making, clocks were a good one, as mentioned before a quartz movement can be bought cheaply, with modern or simple hands that suit the design, I shy away from fancy scrolled hands as they don’t suit. The movements often come with a ‘tick’ or smooth sweeping hands, the smooth ones look good, especially with the larger hands, they evoke a sense of quality. The customer I was aiming for was not only the fanboys, and girls, but also business or entrepreneurial types who may…
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Project Plan 1.8
The next project (in danger of spreading too thin here but…) the next project is to make a lightbox. So this would be a papercut lightbox, I’ve seen some very good ones on Instagram, someone who goes by the name of dr.papperoni. These lightboxes are hand made and you can buy the paper cut kits from his website and the DIY videos and reels he puts out are a real inspiration. The ones he does are also very popular and cover a lot of well known themes like cult movies and games. I want to steer away from this though as I’m always wary of copyright and also there…
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PoD 1.0
PoD is something I’d like to progress, the idea of passive income, something often bandied about on YouTube and similar as easy money that just rolls in without effort. We all know that’s not true of course and most people will tell you that once you actually get into the video further but it is possible to generate income passively if you initially put some work in. The idea being create once, and sell many! I’ve done some PoD work as previously mentioned and had some limited success. I plan to have another crack at it, this will be a 2 pronged attack. Firstly out and out PoD, create good…
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Social Media 1.0
I’ve done some research and it looks like the main social media I need to be in is the ubiquitous Facebook as well as Instagram, Twitter and maybe Pinterest. These seem to be the most suitable and what most people recommend for the type of promotion I’m aiming for. What I need to decide next is do I promote myself, or through my personal social media accounts, which I have mostly yet to create or in some cases fill out the ‘forgot my password’ to reclaim a long abandoned account. Or do I create a business account and a brand to go with that, or in fact several brands. Now…
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Project Plan 1.7
Ok so this project is something new I’m working on and as yet it’s a secret so it will be known as “Project Spooky” this is something you may now be able to have a good guess at but the actual name and the ideas behind will be secret until closer to launch or maybe even after launch depending on progress. I’m hoping this will be a mix of up cycling, candles and even online NFTs, so yes it’s a very mixed bag and sounds, well sounds kind of horrendous but once revealed it will make sense, but for now, its “Project Spooky” and this is just a placeholder
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IQBR 1.0 (ItsQuickerByRail)
For the local aspect of picture selling my plan was this, in the past I’ve used Illustrator to create my posters. The posters are created like the old railway posters, such as LNER etc would produce pre-war. These posters would be created in large format and then displayed on train stations and notice boards adverting places to go and visit to encourage tourism and hence ticket sales. These posters have an often twenties or nostalgic theme about them and are highly collectible in their original format and reproductions abound. These posters often used classic fonts like Gill Sans so I used the same font in my posters, twinned with a…