Personalized Items with Photos of Purple and Orange Pansies

Every now and then I take the time to look through my photo archives. For an amateur photographer, the stash I've collected for myself is a little mind-boggling. It's one of the many reasons I decided to start putting my work on merchandise I can buy for myself or others, and you, too, can give as gifts when you like.

The first fun thing I did with a few of the shots featured here is put them on leggings. I realized one day that even though I've designed hundreds of pairs of leggings (print on demand makes it possible to design tons of things that only have to be made when someone is ready to buy them... whew!) almost none of them had photos on them. (And those that did were super-abstract and maybe a little weird for your average Jane. For example.) Back to my story. I'd been designing fairly abstract leggings for a little stretch there, so when I looked through the photos, I thought it would be good to find some that would create an abstract vibe when they were printed on leggings. I felt pretty good about what I came up with. There are 6 so far.

A few days ago I thought of those purple and orange pansies and all the shots I captured the day I took these pictures. I was leaving artist friend Phyllis Sharpe's house and she'd just bought these. Maybe she had planted some that day, if I remember correctly but I think several were still in flats. So I pulled out my camera and tried to capture them in different light. So in some ways they're just sort of ho-hum pictures of flowers. I mean. How many ways are there to shoot photos of flowers and make them really interesting? Well, some people can make those shots really sing but these are kinda nice too. I thought they would look good on cards, a water bottle, mousepad and phone case. I put the shot on a bunch of other things, too, but I've put just the things with template fields for personalization into a collection so far so that's what you'll see here.

As I mentioned, there are quite a few items printed with the photo featured in this second collection. If you're in my store and search "pansies" or even "purple and orange" or "purple and orange pansies" you'll see the other items too. What I'm learning while I work in Zazzle is that whenever possible, it seems to be recommended that you (you the Zazzle designer or, in this case, I) take things further and go ahead and add a template field with names or phrases all ready to go. I'm fascinated by this and have so very much to learn about what sells and what doesn't. There's been no rhyme or reason whatsoever to the things I've sold in the short time I've been at this, so I don't have enough personal data to go on yet. But I love the learning, and there's definitely plenty of that happening in this endeavor.

Why don't I post some of those individual item photos over here at the end, just for fun, then sign off and let you look. Enjoy!