Tag Archives: design

RedBubble

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Another online community.

RedBubbleI recently discovered RedBubble, an online community for creative people. RedBubble offers members and visitors three things:

  • A community of photographers, artists, and writers. This is a place where you can meet other creative people, view and comment on their work, and get feedback on your own work. For me, seeing the work done by other members has re-energized me, giving me a real desire to get back into photography, which has been one of my hobbies since my college days.
  • A place to sell your artwork. One of RedBubble’s draws is that once you have uploaded artwork to their server, you can make that artwork available for sale in a number of formats, including cards, laminated prints, canvas prints, and framed prints. You can take that idea a step farther (as I did) and use it as a place to get quality prints of your own photos for your own use.
  • A place to buy quality artwork by amateur and professional photographers and artists. Just about all the images online are available for sale as cards and prints. On my first visit, I found about a dozen photos I liked enough to order as cards. But not all artwork online is photos. There are also drawings/paintings and t-shirt designs. So if you’re looking for interesting artwork, I recommend giving RedBubble a try.

The community is small and its members are mature and relatively friendly. (Or the ones that aren’t are keeping to themselves.) That alone is a good reason to get onboard.

Selling Your Own Artwork

Here’s how artwork sales works:

You start by uploading your artwork and providing information about it, including a name, description, and keywords. You want to upload the highest resolution images you have; the higher the resolution, the more formats it can be made available in. For example, if you upload a 5 megapixel photo, it’ll only be available as a card or as a small (approximately 8 x 12) print. There just isn’t enough data for the larger sized formats.

As part of the upload process, you specify a markup percentage. All products have a minimum price, which is how RedBubble covers its costs and makes money. The base prices are reasonable (in my opinion, anyway) with cards starting at $2.50 each and small laminated prints starting at $15 each. The markup percentage is the profit you can make on the sale of one of your images. For example, the default 20% markup will earn you 50¢ on a card and $3 on a small print. If you want to make more money, just up the percentage. But keep in mind that if you make your products too costly, you could price yourself out of the market.

My RedBubble PortfolioOnce you’ve saved all this information, the artwork appears in your portfolio. If you’re lucky, it might also appear in the Gallery of featured work, which is how many people find work to comment on or buy. Members and site visitors can look at your work and buy it. Members can also comment on it. In general, members are very polite and complementary. I think that if they see something they don’t like, they just don’t comment. (Isn’t that refreshing in an online community!)

RedBubble’s shipping rates are incredibly reasonable. For example, I ordered 10 cards last week and the total shipping was only $2.73. Shipping is also reasonable on framed prints, which are notoriously expensive to ship. So the cost of buying artwork can be very reasonable.

As for quality, most users seem happy with what they’ve been ordering. I’m waiting for my cards to arrive. If the quality is good, I’ll take the next step and order a print or two. Since I’m extremely quality conscious, I won’t hesitate to let you know if I think RedBubble doesn’t make the grade.

For Writers

As for the writing side of RedBubble, it’s not as obvious, but it’s there. You can find writing exercises and challenges in the public forums. Each member also has a journal — like a personal, RedBubble blog — to share thoughts and ideas. Some folks are using both features to share poetry and very short stories. I wrote my first haiku in years based on a challenge in the forums. (That’s about the limit of my poetry capabilities these days.)

Give it a Try!

If you’d like to check out my RedBubble portfolio, you can find it at http://www.redbubble.com/people/mlanger. You’ll see some of the photos I’ve shown off here on my site, as well as a few that haven’t found their way online yet. I’d be tickled pink (yes, I did say that) if I got some comments or sold a card or two.

Are you an artist, photographer, or writer? If so, I highly recommend checking out RedBubble. I don’t think it’ll disappoint you.

My Cactus is Growing an Arm

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The 20-foot saguaro in my front yard is finally becoming more than just a “big pole.”

When we moved into our home a little more than 10 years ago, it had absolutely no vegetation in the yard around the house. Due to some problems with septic system paperwork — not the septic system itself, mind you — it was two years before we were able to plant anything.

We had a landscape designer come over. He had a grand plan for our empty canvas of a yard. It included waterfalls and all kinds of non-native vegetation. When we told him we wanted a saguaro, he said, “What for? It just looks like a big pole in your yard.”

Needless to say, he didn’t get a contract with us.

Instead, we decided to do it ourself. Although it may not have been the best decision, it certainly wasn’t a bad one. We were able to plant whatever we liked wherever we liked it. And since we wanted a saguaro, we bought…well, two of them.

If you’re not familiar with the saguaro cactus, it’s a very tall, very slow-growing plant that grows in Arizona and northern Mexico. Propagated by seed, it takes at least 5 years for the plant to reach a size that can even be seen on the desert floor. When the cactus reaches 50-75 years old, it may begin to sprout “arms” that give it its characteristic look. Indeed, the saguaro cactus is an icon for the American Southwest.

When you buy a saguaro, it is always a transplant from somewhere else — often from vacant land being developed for homes or mining. It’s illegal in Arizona to dig up or cut down a saguaro without a permit. Indeed, if you hit one of these with your car and it falls down (hopefully not on you), you’ll be fined. So you must buy from a reliable source and you must ensure that it has been properly tagged by the folks responsible for monitoring this kind of stuff.

Saguaro prices are determined by size. When we bought ours, the going rate was $35 per foot. One of ours was only 5 feet tall; the other was about 16. Neither one had arms. If a saguaro does have arms, the arms are measured, too. So if you have a 10-foot cactus with 2 3-foot arms, you’ve got a total of 16 feet of cactus. Obviously, the ones with arms are more costly, which is why ours didn’t have any.

How do you plant a 16-foot cactus? Fortunately, we didn’t have to do it. The guy we bought it from did it for us. He had a special truck that cradled the cactus almost horizontally for transportation. When he got to our yard, he backed the truck up to the hole he’d dug for it. He then raised the top end of the cactus with a lift on the truck. There was a lot of rope holding and pulling and the constant fear that the thing would topple over. But he managed nicely and the cactus stands upright to this day, 8 years later, now close to 20 feet tall.

Cactus ArmWe always worried about this investment in cactus. After all, when a saguaro dies, it doesn’t do it immediately. It takes years. He guaranteed it for 5 years. In reality, it would take at least that long to die. Although the one in the back yard seems very happy and looks healthy, the one out front has become home to birds, which have burrowed nests in the side of it. And it doesn’t always look as healthy as it should.

But it must be healthy because it is now growing an arm. I first noticed it about a month ago when I photographed the snake on top of it. Now it appears to be growing remarkably quickly (for a saguaro) and, if I’m not mistaken, there’s a new arm bud for a second arm growing nearby!

You can see the new arm clearly in the WebCam image for this site, in case you want to monitor it. I’ll try to take another photo in six months or a year to bring readers up to date.

Skycrane

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In Wickenburg.

Sikorsky S-64 SkycraneIn May 2006, a Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane stopped at Wickenburg for fuel on its way to Tucson. Three of Wickenburg’s four resident helicopter owners — including me — were on hand, attracted to the helicopter like bees to honey.

The helicopter, painted bright orange and carrying a crew of three and firefighting equipment, landed at Wickenburg Municipal Airport just after 10 AM on a Sunday morning. It had flown directly to Wickenburg from its last refueling stop at Bullhead City on the Colorado River near Laughlin, NV.

The crew took some time to chat with onlookers and provide information about the rare helicopter. At the time, Tanker 733, as this helicopter was designated for firefighting, was one of only three Skycranes operating in the United States. All other Skycranes were abroad on other missions.

According to the crew, the Skycrane, which weighs over 20,000 pounds, can lift over 25,000 pounds. Its firefighting equipment enables it to suck several thousand gallons of water from a water source at least 18 inches deep in less than a minute. The water is then mixed on board with fire retardant chemicals and sprayed with precision over fires. The helicopter burns approximately 500 gallons of fuel per hour — and you thought your SUV was a gas hog!