07.20.09

Creating Zazzle Posters

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:54 pm by Administrator

Hi! I’m going to be moving in a few months, so I have been going through my drawings and paintings that have been collecting dust in boxes and scrapbooks for years. Self, I said, “the time has come to start doing something with all this stuff, before you have to pack it all up again.”

I go through these drawing and painting frenzies, where I produce a lot of work that may be just an idea, or may become a full blown painting. That is how I accumulated this large collection of sketches and ideas that wait for me to come back to them to finish.

To make a long story short, I selected a few works that I thought would make good posters. I have a Zazzle store, and hadn’t really spent any time learning how to use the Poster design tool. After I prepared the images for publishing, as I talked about in Preparing Images for Publishing, I uploaded the images to Zazzle to start making some posters. I had a few posters that I created earlier, but, they just didn’t look very good, in my opinion. I wanted to add backgrounds, borders and text to jazz them up a little. I realized that if I took an existing product, and then used the Customize It feature, I could create a new product, by saving it with a new name without having to start from scratch. Aha!

I like the Zazzle design interface, it makes it easy to change backgrounds, borders, text and product descriptions. When I finished making my Posters, I made a Zazzle panel that just shows Posters, nothing else. These are my new posters in my Zazzle panel.

make custom gifts at Zazzle

Please visit my website Rosie’s Workshop, my Zazzle Store, my Imagekind Gallery or follow me on Twitter.

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07.19.09

Preparing images for publishing

Posted in Zazzle, designs at 7:59 pm by Administrator

Many times, when trying to come up with a new design idea, I will review my drawing notebooks for ideas. Today, I found a drawing of my dog Lucy in colored pencil that would make a nice poster or other product.

Original scan of my Lucy drawing

After scanning the original drawing at 300dpi and saving the image, I start by making a duplicate layer, leaving the original image intact and hidden. If you make a mistake or change your mind you don’t have to start all over again. The duplicate layer can easily deleted. That way you can experiment with different styles and filters but still have the option of going back to the original design.

Usually, scanned pencil drawings will need to be darkened and enhanced to look good for printing, in my opinion. I often use the automatic color correction and color variations in Adobe Photoshop Elements to darken and enhance the image. To create the oval border, I use the select tool to create an oval around the design then invert the selection and fill it with color. To make the image suitable for a large poster, I increased the image size to 11″ x 16.5″. Save a copy of the image as a png file for uploading. If you are going to be using the image for email or the web, also make a jpg copy.

This is my published image on Zazzle.com