Sales of Prints in September 2024

It’s has been a long time since I reviewed which of my images are being chosen by buyers around the country to decorate their homes or, perhaps, plan to gift them to friends and relatives for the holidays. I’ve been extremely busy with the move of our home from West Virginia to Austin, Texas and so have had very little time to promote my work on the various social media outlets and so it was a lovely surprise to see a number of sales in September. It makes it all worthwhile to think that people actually like my work enough to choose it for their walls!

First, I’d like to talk about my Etsy shop. Etsy is well known globally for artist-made products, and I started to add my images to my store earlier this year. It is quite a complex process and so far, I only have 12 images available on a range of products from small paper prints to huge multi-piece triptychs which would dominate a room! The big difference between Etsy and my other Print on Demand sites is that the Etsy order comes to me and I manage the production and shipping of the chosen print. As a result, I carefully re-process the image to make it the best I can for that particular size and print format. I think that Pictorem does a fantastic job is creating and shipping images from my portfolio, but this extra step makes sure my Etsy products are more like artist proofs.

I want to build my Etsy store and add more and more images over time, but I want to add the ones that really strike a chord with viewers. So, if you are thinking of buying one of my prints and it isn’t yet on Etsy, please contact me and I’ll not only add it to my store, but I’ll create a special discount code for you as well!

My neighbor in Morgantown did exactly that by looking through my portfolio on Pictorem and telling me which images she would like to purchase. This dramatic image of a sunset over the New River Gorge bridge was the first one, and she went on to order a range of prints for both her home and for relatives for gifts and I am so grateful with the help she gave me to get that Etsy store off the ground. Her choices included:

This one, taken in a famous garden in North Wales, reminded her both of spring, but also her Welsh heritage.

A lovely fall view of the trees by Cheat Lake Park near Morgantown, WV. I will really miss this type of scenery here in Texas!

These final two images round out the orders she made from my store. All are places that mean a lot to her personally and I’m so grateful for the orders.

Over on Pictorem, people have been finding my work from all over the USA. It is always a bit of a mystery as to how they discovered my work, especially as I have been absent from social media, but I will never complain.

The month started really well with the sale of a triptych canvas print that measures 72 inches by 38 inches in 3 panels. The underlying image is this black and white view of the dramatic coastline of Na Pali on the north coast of Kauai. I have always loved this image and never thought about how good it would look when split into three.

I believe it will look like this when hung on the wall:

The next print was on canvas and back to West Virginia with a drone image of the Valley Falls on the Tygart river near Fairmont, WV:

The next print really surprised me. I don’t think I have ever publicized this image at all. I took it on a vacation on St Martin in the Caribbean and a hurricane grounded planes coming to the island while we were there – the result was that we visited Grand Case on the French side of the island, had a lovely meal in an empty French restaurant overlooking the beach and then enjoyed being one of a few people on the beach. This image came from that visit:

Another mystery choice next with a view of the rail bridge between Dubuque and East Dubuque in Iowa. I have written about the location, which we visited on a cruise on the Mississippi river, but didn’t use this particular image in the article. I’m so glad that the buyer from East Dubuque came across it and loved it enough to buy a 48×66 inch framed print of the bridge.

My final image was a sale that just occurred this morning. Something that I only do from time to time is to convert a photo into a painting and I thought my photo of the old city of Stockholm worked really well as a watercolor. So, this is Gamla Stan, purchased as a canvas print.

A great month so far – I need to stay off social media if it results in a month of sales like this!