color Archives - Ellen Vesters Illustrator

Dutch Dwellings: Etsy tips and the selling of Dutch houses

oktober 18, 2012/0 Reacties/in art, business, etsy, illustration, inspiration, marker, photography, shop /door Ellen

During my trip to the US, I met the loveliest fellow Etsy’ers. Amongst them were Elles Lanfer and Saskia de Winter. Both Dutchies, living abroad in California.
(sigh… California!)

Saskia had just delivered a baby (three weeks old!) when I met her. And still she took the time to see me and share her advice on being successful on Etsy!

From all the inspiring conversations I had, I gathered the following Etsy tips:

Say goodbye to the fear of being commercial. Try to identify with Etsy buyers, investigate what they are looking for and adjust your listings to this knowledge
People tend to look for gifts when cruising Etsy. Make products, not only prints!
Popular products are products that tell a story, for instance about your city or country
Work on your photography skills, good product photography makes all the difference (still working on this one…)
Get over your wedding allergies (thankfully this intimate wedding did the job)! Weddings pay the bills!
Make sure your shop looks full, have a large array of products ready for people to choose from, but still retain a simple (visually quiet) and cohesive look overall
Be open to customizing, and tell your crowd about this option!
And then for a good-old-sneaky-commercial-thinking-bastard-trick: use Statsy Clockbot for regular relisting to get more views

All this resulted in me deleting all my old stuff from my shop and putting in new prints, but also my first product: Dutch Dwellings, or “Hollandse Huisjes”. You can now buy five varieties of little Dutch houses, each representing another Dutch city (Leiden, Amsterdam, Utrecht, Volendam and Lutjebroek). More versions to come!

And guess what… they have been blogged about already! I am so proud.
As well as very happy that there are people out there that are doing a much better job at product photography than I am…!

(the Dutch Dwellings, or Hollandse Huisjes, are for sale at my Etsy shop: ellenvesters.etsy.com).

Oh Marie:

Enter my Attic:

Mintstudio Creations:

Zilverblauw:

Logo design

augustus 11, 2011/0 Reacties/in digital media, graphic design, illustration, logo design, mixed media /door Ellen

Choose your niche!

In all marketing blogs this is called THE step to building a successful business.

Unfortunately, the word choice is not to be found in my dictionary. The more I learn, the more I expand my activities, and always with pleasure!

Like last week, when I learned myself to make a wordpress website in one week (due to the eternal “No problem, I’ll just do that too”-mentality). After one week, and much hard work there now webis a new site for the project for which I am selected, “Voor de kunstenaar”. After all these nightly hours, I thought “never again…” But it would be sad to not put to use all that I’ve learned. So, I made a resolution to have rebuilt my own website before fall arrives.

Another new challenge I got my teeth into for the past few months, was designing logos.

The art of omission. Balance between image and typography.

I’m discovering it all and I’m having great fun with it!

Three great businesses, two of which are still in development, have approached me.

The first was Good Match. A matchmaker between small businesses and charities. They asked for a logo that reflected their sustainable ideals as well as coloring that would correspond with that. I chose soft colors that can be found in many logos of other sustainable organizations. This immediately evokes the right feeling to the viewer. The shape of the M was clear: the officelife as a symbol for small business. The G costed us more time. Eventually we decided that less is more.

The second company was Optimaal Ondernemerschap (optimal entrepreneurship). A business around coaching. The coaches asked for a logo in their favorite color: taupe. We chose for a meeting of entrepreneurs in a relaxed atmosphere to depict the spearhead of their organization…

Finally, at a meeting of the organization Don’t-do-it-yourself I was approached by the inspiring Isabelle Zumbrink, the founder of Het Huis van de Vlinders (The House of the Butterflies). The House designs, manufactures and sells trendy and contemporary fashion and home accessories from residual textile, handmade by young women from Utrecht, that experience a distance to the labor market: “by working in The House of the Butterflies girls and women can grow from a small caterpillar to a colourful and beautiful butterfly”. The House wanted a logo that was feminine, trendy, colourful and included a smile. Here’s the result, in the colours of their identity:

A recent blog post on MamaMarketing about the lack of online designers gave me the idea to offer the creation of logos in my online shop. Short, clear assignments as these speak to me.

7 Days of Inspiration

mei 14, 2011/4 Reacties/in digital media, humor, illustration, inspiration, mixed media, painting, pen and ink /door Ellen

Let me tell you about a beautiful dutch initiative. In 2009 Martijn Aslander felt inspired by the clean up project in Estland and decided to found the 7 Days of Inspiration. His idea: to give the Netherlands an upgrade by spreading inspiration on social goodwill, culminating in 7 Days of Inspiration.

7 Days of inspiration has grown to be a week full of positivity.

This year the 7 Days took place in the first week of march. 14 Dutch cities were involved! All kinds of people came together to start all kinds of inspirational sustainable initiatives.

I contributed to the magazine that was launched that week. The magazine found it’s inspiration in a dutch part of the twitter community called “dare to ask”. You can use the hashtag #daretoask if you have some burning question, and with which you can make an appeal to other tweeps to help you out. The magazine thought this was characteristic of social goodwill.

41 Professionals collaborated in this magazine. Illustrators and photographers were asked to use a tweet as inspiration for their art. The one I used said: who wants to make a dance of joy with me?

My illustration:

Very happy when I opened the magazine (and the paper smelled sooo good!):

Here’s a link to the complete magazine, I am on page 31:

http://www.7dimag.nl/

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