I’ve added an item to my Etsy shop, which uses my popular jaunty Eagle saluting as an invitation card for Courts of Honor or other Scout events. This is a downloadable file which makes it quicker and more economical for the buyer to make invitations – no waiting for mail delivery, no postage fee and you can print as many invitations as you need from the one file. The inside text of the card is completely editable so a custom message can be inserted, and it’s easy to work with since it is a Word document.
Court of Honor season is upon all Scout troops right now, so if your family needs fun invitations that can be instantly downloaded and printed at home for quick mailing, take a look at my Eagle Salute Downloadable Invitations at my Etsy shop HERE.
I have some of my cartoon holiday cards and some printed tees for girls available on my Etsy shop – and remember, if you are near the central Bucks County, PA, area and want to avoid the shipping charges Etsy places on packages, email me in case we can arrange for you to pick up your items and avoid the shipping fee!
This holiday I once again have my Rockefeller tree card for sale, done in my classic New Yorker-style ink wash drawing . . .
Click on the photo to go to this card on my Etsy shop!
I’m also re-printing an Elf Card from some time ago, because it seems to fit with 2020 . . .
Click on the photo to go to this card on my Etsy shop!
And I’ve added one more animal musician to my notecard line – a bear playing a French Horn – such beautiful instruments –
Click on the photo to go to this card in my Etsy shop!
I have a number of other cards and notecards in my shop for animal lovers and music lovers and Scout families – please browse through them as you think about holiday gifts for friends, teachers, and business colleagues!
Click the photo to go to my Etsy shop!
Years ago I created cute drawings of angels, dressed in various national costumes, and printed them on long sleeved tee shirts for my girls.
I now have these girls’ tees on my Etsy shop, and they make a lovely Christmas gift for girls interested in their family heritage. I have limited numbers of sizes, with quantities described in detail on the Etsy listing. While the tees are printed in one color, the purchaser may want to use fabric markers to color in the art for a beautiful full-color look – or allow the girls to color them in themselves!
The sample shirts below have been colored with fabric markers, which are not included in the purchase. I have a limited number of colored-in shirts like these, please email me for details.
Thanks for shopping from a small business this holiday season!
Once a year I remind my friends that I have created two illustrations that are quite popular as greeting cards for new Eagle Scouts. My son is an Eagle and he had such a great experience with the Boy Scouts, learning great practical skills and making good friends, while reinforcing the responsibility and morals that we tried to instill as he grew up, that I am happy to share in celebrating these young men.
I drew the whimsical Eagle Salute Congratulations card first, for a friend of my son’s who achieved the rank a few years before him. When my son made Eagle and had his Court of Honor alongside his best friend, I painted the Eagle Scout on a hilltop scene. To see the inside message and ordering info for them, see my Etsy shop here.
The journey to Eagle is guided by Scoutmasters, parents, friends and others who inspire and encourage the Scout to accomplish the challenges needed to achieve Eagle rank. When a Scout makes his Eagle rank and is celebrated with a Court of Honor, there are always some exceptional people to be thanked. For these special mentors in a Scout’s journey, several customers have asked me to produce smaller thank-you notecards for Eagles themselves to send, and I now list them in my Etsy shop too. My Eagle thank-you notecards come 20 to a pack and have my “Eagle Scout on a Hilltop” illustration on the front. To see my Etsy shop for further ordering details, click HERE.
All of my cards are printed in full color on sturdy glossy card stock – the Congratulations cards are greeting-card-size, and the thank you notecards are smaller, invitation-size. Envelopes are included with each order, and the cards take standard first-class postage. The cardstock is made from partially recycled paper and my cards are printed in the USA – in fact, they are printed in my hometown! My thank-you notecards are blank inside so a message can be written by the sender.
I receive many kind comments from purchasers of my cards, who especially like the artwork, sincere message and quick delivery, all recorded on my Etsy page. I’ll mention, if you are in my area of central Bucks County, PA, if you email me on my Contact page you can pick up your cards, saving you some postage.
For special orders of quantity, size or message on these cards please send your questions by clicking HERE to go to my Contact page.
It’s not too early to think about the holidays – I’m already working on three clients’ holiday cards for their businesses
Because of this, I’ve recently added a Christmas card to my listings on Etsy – one I drew last year for my family, in the classic New Yorker black & white style, not long after my first cartoon appeared in the New Yorker. If you’ve ever seen this iconic tree you never forget its overwhelming presence!
I drew this cartoon in black prisma pencil and painted it in ink washes. (Closeups of the art are on my Etsy page) It shows the legendary tree at Rockefeller Center, which about 100 million people visit each year, teeming with lights but with one small dark area; a small child looking up comments, “They missed a spot.”
Inside the card is the message “May your Christmas be filled with Peace and Joy and a thousand twinkling lights!”
Single cards are available on my Etsy shop HERE and boxes of 8 cards are available on my website store HERE.If you’d like more than 8 cards, or would like to use this card for your company holiday card, email me and we’ll work out the details. And if you live near me in the Central Bucks area and want to avoid postage charges, simply email me what you’d like to order and you can pay when you pick up the cards from me.
About a year ago I wrote a post on my own experiences selling my original illustrations and cards on two online platforms, Etsy and Zazzle. It is a post that gets hits almost every day from readers – I presume, mostly artists like me. Then Zazzle changed their policies for the worse, and I deleted my account there. Now Etsy is also changing its policies, also for the worse for small business artists, so I’m updating this post to explain the new unfortunate wrinkle in Etsy’s policies.
Here is my initial post’s review of the two platforms:
My experience of ‘opening a shop on Etsy’ to display my Eagle Scout congratulations cards has been a very good one so far. I would recommend Etsy to other artists, and I’ll explain why for me it is a better fit than another popular platform for selling product art, Zazzle.
At Zazzle you can also open a ‘shop’ page, but a big difference is that Zazzle actually does the production work on your items – whether you wish to sell your art printed on cards, t-shirts, mugs, etc. So when someone orders your Zazzle item, it ships directly from Zazzle and you don’t see the finished product – therefore you cannot judge the quality of the print job. Because Zazzle does the heavy lifting of production and distribution, you, the artist, receive a very small percentage of the asking price.
With Etsy the artist herself has to have the products made and in stock, so she gets to monitor and approve the print quality – I like this aspect better even though it means I have to do the production myself. (I have a terrific printing partner in Cortineo Creative, here in my hometown of Doylestown.) When a buyer orders my cards, I receive the full asking price that I list on my shop page. Etsy also estimates, from a form I filled out on the dimensions & weight of my product, what the postage will be on the package, and that is added onto my asking price so the buyer pays that postage as well. Etsy provides a customized shipping label and packing slip that I can print out and put on the package; when Etsy deposits my earnings, they deduct the cost of the postage from my total earnings, since the buyer initially paid that postage cost to me.
The tradeoff in payment between the two is this: I can list my products on Zazzle for free; with Etsy there is a charge for each item in my shop. The charge is 20 cents per item per quarter of a year. So I do pay 80 cents per year for each individual card on Etsy – so far this seems like a good tradeoff, since I am being paid the full price of my cards. Another disparity is, Zazzle has a threshold you must pass before they will send you your earnings – I believe it is $50 – and it takes a number of sales to accrue that amount since you are making a small percentage of the payment on each purchase. Etsy, on the other hand, deposits your earnings into your associated bank account once a week.
One other detail, on Zazzle, there is an option to allow your buying customers to ‘customize’ the item they are purchasing. These custom changes range from changing the color of the t-shirt and ink color, to adding their own words to your design. While this may be attractive to buyers who want the item for a very specific purpose, as an artist I hesitate to let others adjust and modify my designs. I have complete control with my Etsy products since I do the production. On Etsy, if I offer one item in two or three different colors or other characteristics, I CAN list the variations as an ‘option’ under the main description of the product – but again, I myself have to maintain ALL the varieties of the options in stock, so I can fulfill orders quickly when they come in.
Also important, is, I have done no advertising at all – until this post – to promote my cards on Etsy and yet I’ve made a number of sales, and have received great reviews from my customers, without even soliciting reviews.
Update 01/03/19: When I learned about 2 other options with payment for Zazzle:
Under your payment settings and the PayPal option at the top (in very small print) it says Note: For PayPal there is a minimum threshold of $50 to be paid automatically. If you have less than $50 balance after one month of sales, we will hold your funds for future use, or you may request a PayPal payment for a $2.50 fee. Payment will be made within 45 days.
And if you are purchasing an item from another Zazzle store, you may use your account’s “Cleared Earnings” against the cost of the item you are purchasing, sort of like a store credit.
So those are two ways to ‘use’ your Zazzle earnings, other than waiting for a check when you reach the threshold.
Update 04/17/19: When Zazzle made an unfortunate change
I have now deleted my Zazzle store, mainly because they announced “accounts that have been non-contributing (that is, haven’t either (1) published a public product, or (2) had a Referral Sale attributed to that account) for the previous 15 month period will be charged a “Non-Contributing Account Fee.” I don’t make enough through Zazzle to incur another fee, so I’ve cancelled
Etsy now has announced as follows: “Starting on July 30, 2019, items that ship free and shops that guarantee free shipping to buyers in the US on orders $35 and above will get priority placement in US search results. Shoppers in the US will primarily see items that ship free and shops that offer free shipping on orders of $35 in the top, most visible rows of search. We’ll also begin to prioritize these items wherever Etsy advertises in the US—in email marketing, social media, and television ads.”
Why am I very unhappy with Etsy’s policy change? Consider that currently Etsy takes 3.5% off the top of the selling price (which does not including the shipping fee) of each sale I make – this is their fee, which is a fair commission for the service they provide. If I bundle my shipping fee into my product cost (which would almost double the selling price of my cards) and offer ‘free shipping,’ obviously Etsy will make a bigger commission on each of my sales.
So Etsy wants to make more money off my sales – that’s not a crime, but this is the wrong way to do it. Right now when my customers are about to make a purchase they see exactly what I charge for my items and exactly what they’ll pay in postage, and that kind of transparency is ideal for seller/buyer relationships. I would prefer Etsy be honest and just increase its commission percentage instead of squeezing small artisanal businesses to behave like Amazon, with ‘Free Shipping” as one of their big selling points. Etsy’s brand has never been ‘discount rates’, it has been ‘unique and handcrafted items’ which most buyers accept usually comes with a shipping fee.
Many other Etsy sellers have complained about the difficulty of estimating how much to bundle into their prices, to accommodate selling fees that vary wildly across the US, depending on whether the buyer is in an easily accessible city or out in a rural delivery address. If you notice some Etsy prices jumping up soon, but offering “free shipping,” you’ll know they are bundling in the shipping cost to get a better location on their search pages.
With my narrow margins I can’t afford to absorb shipping costs for my cards. If I bundle my shipping into my product price, my prices will look absurdly high and I’ll certainly lose customers. And if I don’t, my products will be buried under lots of pages of ‘free shipping’ sellers. It’s a lose-lose for me and other sellers who like to be up-front with their customers.
Etsy really has been an excellent platform, but this change is really a step down for the buyer-customer relationship. For now I am keeping my AchillesPortfolio products and prices the same and customers can clearly see what their shipping cost will be before they click to finalize their order, though I might be more difficult to find on the site.
I’ll be speaking on Etsy for Artists on Tuesday, April 24, starting at 7:00 pm with the New Hope Art League. It will be at St. Martin of Tours Church school, 1 Riverstone Circle, New Hope. The meeting is free and open to the public.
Original artwork is one of the main categories of items sold through Etsy. I’ve been selling my illustrated greeting cards on Etsy – at my shop AchillesPortfolio – for about 9 months now; so far I’ve found Etsy a good low cost platform for art selling.
I will explain basic steps in starting an Etsy shop for selling artwork, so if you are thinking about opening a shop, you can get a foundation in what’s involved. I’ll also share the information I have found through research and trial and error, that helps bring more viewers to an Etsy shop. Please join us!
At the invitation of Margaret Matheson, owner of Phoenix Art Supplies and Framing, at 1810 S. Easton Road in Doylestown, I’ll be leading an Etsy Round Table talk for artists on Wednesday, March 14, from 6:30 to 8:00 pm. The meeting is right in the store at Phoenix, and is free. I’ve been selling my illustrated greeting cards on Etsy – at my shop AchillesPortfolio – for about 8 months now; so far I’ve found Etsy a good low cost platform for art selling.
I’ll start the meeting off by explaining basic steps in starting an Etsy shop for selling artwork, so if you are thinking about opening a shop, you can get a foundation in what’s involved. Then we’ll open up discussion for everyone to share tips on what has worked for them and ask questions. I’m hoping that the artists in attendance will share experiences and ideas, and we’ll all leave knowing more about drawing in viewers and buyers for our shops.
Margaret has really made Phoenix a great resource for artists and illustrators, not only in physical art supplies but also in community and learning experiences. She has always been a great friend to our group the Bucks County Illustrators Society! There is parking at Phoenix just behind the store, and if you’ve never been there before, it is located next to Quarry Road, which is a tiny street just north of the intersection of Edison-Furlong Road and Rte. 611 (Easton Rd.). Their phone number is 215-345-0980 . And if you need any supplies while you’re there, the register will be open.
I’m interested to see how it goes listing some of my illustrated notecards on a big platform like Etsy. As I wrote in a previous post, I’m finding Etsy to be very efficient and time-saving in terms of selling my original art products. I’ll write updates as to my success on the site as time progresses.
I drew my ‘Thank You for Sending Business My Way’ notecards when I was a member of a small business support group, to thank the colleagues their who referred me to other businesses. It depicts a traffic cop character waving on an eager gaggle of business people, women and men of various races, and the inside of the card is blank, so the sender has plenty of space to write a personal note of thanks. Full description at my Etsy site.
I drew my melodious little panda cub as part of a series of whimsical animal musicians, for piano teachers or piano students — or for panda fans! — to use for thank yous, congratulations or any other noteworthy occasion. The inside of the card is blank, so the sender has plenty of space to write a personal note. Full description at my Etsy site.
I’ll be speaking on Etsy for Artists on Tuesday, April 24, starting at 7:00 pm with the New Hope Art League. It will be at St. Martin of Tours Church school, 1 Riverstone Circle, New Hope. The meeting is free and open to the public.
At the invitation of Margaret Matheson, owner of 
AchillesPortfolio 