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…

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…

When I created the cricket on The Ashes image I made a PDF and sent it to my friend whose father was a university lecturer in art and design, his mother also a water colour artist with many years experience. They gave me some excellent constructive criticism, some of which I took note and I changed my picture accordingly, some I didn’t ignore but decided not to use and I’ll explain why. I seem to remember there were 3 criticisms, firstly the shadow on the large tree on the right was too dominating, it was – so I shrunk it accordingly. The second that the trees in the background were…

However although this history is good and proves my product would sell there are some issues. I’ve almost flooded the market with the current styles having sold about 80 or so of the half dozen designs I created. There are only so many people who you can sell to in a small market town who want such a product. The other issue is I need Illustrator and a lot of time to produce these posters and you need the subject matter. I’d used up most if not all the local beauty spots as subjects and scratching my head as to any more locations I could use The idea now is…

So here I’ll layout the 1st of the project and it will be known as IQBR, or itsquickerbyrail, a relaunch of an existing project where I initially created an “Its Quicker By Rail” LNER type poster of my hometown. Initially for myself it caught the eye of some of my friends and relatives who said I should print it and sell it Now prior to this I had dabbled in generating online and specifically passive income, I’d put some images into Cafepress, unfortunately it was just after they drastically cut the commission fees so it never really amounted to much, I used to make approx $50 per year if that.…