New painting: Companion

Just posted a new painting in my Etsy shop: Companion, an 8"x8"x3/4" acrylics painting on stretched canvas. The sides are painted, so you don't need a frame. Speaking of Etsy, I've sold out of some of my Blush cards, but have ordered more. I also just got word that a Canadian distributor has signed a deal with Blush to distribute their cards, yay!

Up to now, my cards have mainly been sold in the UK, Japan and Australia. It would be nice to start seeing them in local stores. :-)

Anyway, I'll be posting some buttons, mini-paintings and pottery in my Etsy shop soon...it's just a matter of making the time to do the admin involved in posting listings. I'm continuing to enjoy being an Etsy seller. I recently joined Alchemy (custom item program) and got my first Alchemy commission this past weekend.

Some Christmas cards I ordered from my Snarkface Zazzle shop arrived yesterday, and am very happy with the quality -- both the print and the cardstock. I'm going to donate a bunch of them to the National Cartoonists Society (Canadian chapter) holiday party raffle later this month, I think.

It's not too late to order your holiday cards from my shop! Do check out Snarkface. Get 25% off when ordering 10 or more cards, and free shipping if you order $65 or more; see the text at the top of the Snarkface page for details.

Craftiness, Poslfit and Winter Holidays revisited

I've started painting again. One of my favourite Corel Painter brushes is the Sponge brush, so I figured it's time I experiment with sponge painting in real life.

Sent off my book manuscript yesterday. I use Microsoft Word 2004 for the Mac and I've always hated it, but I think that part of the reason is because I've been too lazy to sit down and actually figure out how to properly use stylesheets. I once accidentally wrote an entire manuscript in superscript without realizing it. This time I actually did go through and make sure to use styles all the way through.

I still hate MS Word, but not quite as much.

Thanks to those who posted comments about my winter holidays/festivals card on Snarkface. I incorporated many of your suggestions and uploaded a new version of the card:

Seasons Greetings (whatever that season might be)

I took most of my original holidays from this Wikipedia entry but it looks as if the entry may not have been entirely accurate, so your comments were very useful. You can find a list of some fictional winter holidays and festivals here. Gary McGath also pointed out the Butter Lamp Festival in Tibet.

And the word/phrase that had nothing at all to do with winter? Poslfit, a word invented by some friends of mine.

I've also added some more cards to my Inkygirl Gifts For Writers page.

Snowman Writer's Gift

Winter holiday identification challenge

I've added a new card to Snarkface, figuring it would be fun to cover as many winter holidays and festivals in one greeting card as I could fit on the front. I did some research online and was surprised by just how many there were. Here's the card I came up with (click on the image for the option of examining bits of the text closer up):

Happy Hanukkah Samhain Kwanzaa Sadeh etc. etc.

Of all the holidays and festivals listed above, several are fictional (but are based on holidays mentioned in books, tv shows and other media). One has nothing at all to do with the winter holiday season.

My challenge to you: Without cheating by researching online, which of the fictional holidays do you recognize? Which one do you think has nothing to do with winter at all?

Snarkface: a collaboration between Amelia Snarkface and yours truly

So in my last post, I was going on about how great Greeting Card Universe is. I'm still going to post a ton of cards on GCU (I've already had a bunch of sales -- thanks to the people out there who bought my cards!), but these will mostly be blank inside. The reason: getting some types of cards past their approval process is MUCH more of a pain than I expected.

I couldn't get my Witchy Spore Addict approved because they didn't want me to mention a company name, so I had to change "Spore" to "computer games." Then I tried to turn the following image into a Valentine's card and then rejected it, saying it didn't have anything to do with Valentine's:



Fair enough, I thought, maybe it's a tad cynical. So I submitted it as an Anti-Valentine instead (yes, there was such a category). It was rejected again! In order to be approved, they said, I had to actually WRITE something on the inside that made it clear that it was an Anti-Valentine.

Grmble. Anyway, I've decided just to submit most of my GCU cards as generic blank cards from now on so they get approved right away.



That put me in a snarkish mood, however, which got me thinking about how much fun I'd have doing snarky cards. Clearly I wouldn't be able to post them at GCU, however, so I'm posting them in my new Snarkface card shop at Zazzle instead. To help further differentiate my Snarky cards from my regular cards, I'm even using a pen name for my Zazzle profile: Amelia Snarkface. You can read my bio if you click on "About" on my Snarkface page.

Anyone looking closely at the copyright notice on the back of the card will see it's really me, but I'm betting that most people probably won't bother.

Anyway, I uploaded a bunch of snarky Christmas cards last night. It was very therapeutic. :-)

So if you're tired of my cute and happy greeting cards, feel free to check out Amelia Snarkface's contributions at Snarkface. At $2.95, their full-size single cards are slightly more expensive than GCU but still cheaper than Cafepress.



I'm having fun doing these cards. One example is the card above, inspired by those Christmas cards you get which have more than one signature but you -know- was signed by just one person. And yeah, sometimes I do the same thing with Jeff but I'm going to try VERY hard not to do so from now on.

The fact is that whenever I get a card supposedly signed by two people but actually just in one person's handwriting, I always wonder if the other person even knew that his signature is on the card...but I -do- know that he (or she, to be fair) couldn't be bothered to take the time to sign his own name.

Ahem, but I digress. As you can tell, I have plenty of snark lurking inside my otherwise sweet and cheery exterior, waiting for expression. :-)

And to you Canucks out there, have a great Thanksgiving!