Today is World Peace Day! Here is the link to learn more about this great day on the winter/summer solstice. This is to encourage each of us to spend some time today in prayer and meditation for world peace. A great idea to my mind!!!

Plum Sky, Digital © Diane Clancy

In this journey of printing cards to get to licensing my artwork, I have now chosen Modern Postcard as my printer. If you want to see more of this odyssey, it is in the last several posts. The size of the cards was a decision I needed to make. They had a very reasonable price for cards that are 4.25 x 6.” Their prices (at that time anyway) were very high for 5 x 7″ cards. There are printing concerns regarding the initial paper size each printer uses. For Modern Postcard, they waste a lot of paper with the 5 x 7″ size card. So that made my decision about the size!

Given that I like control and input in how I do things, I wanted to make the file up myself and not use one of their templates. I bet you can guess that I spent some real time choosing the font that I used. A font (especially a decorative font) is another representation of oneself to the world. I eventually chose the Parisian font. It is delicate and elegant … and I love it and it makes my heart sing! And I think it looks great with my work. You can see this font on the images I created lately with words as part of the painting. That is Parisian.

Now for the images. Of course, printing each painting on a card is expensive (at least to me). “They” suggest printing cards in series. I had a buyer already who was kind enough to take a risk on my work and he had already agreed to buy some cards. I was not the first local artist he had done this for either. He outs his values into action!! Dick McLeester of VisionWorks is a great person and sells progressive and uplifting magnets, books, cards and bumper stickers. You may want to check him out.

I decided to choose 6 images that are some of my most distinctive and unusual paintings. You can see what I chose here … and these cards are still for sale. I prepped the images and got the sizes correct and make sure the dpi was right. And I put it all together into a file in a graphic design program for each painting. I used Quark then but now I would use InDesign. You can also do this by uploading your image into their templates …

So I took a deep breath and went to the next step. One can print (or at least back then) in steps of 500. I decided to take a leap of faith and print 1000 of each of the 6 images. So I put them all on a disk and sent them off. Nowadays one would just upload them. Now we will wait to get them back from the printer!

~ Diane Clancy

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