A quick idea in the tradition of the Mr Muscle style puny strongman, I did some massive shorts research by watching Stan Laurel pretending to box. 'Gym Rat' is a term for a gym fanatic in the USA, hard to resist the illiteration (so I didn't), but I've tried a few other angles too. All text is editable after clicking through to Zazzle.
Everything available featuring this drawing:
Dear reader, cast your mind back to mid October and you may recall a minor story about the medicinal qualities of the milk of Australia's largest carnivorous marsupial, the Tasmanian devil:
BBC - Tasmanian Devil Milk Fights Superbugs
Yes, apparently for their young to thrive in a dirty environment, devils may have adapted to fight infections that would poleaxe your average mollycoddled human. Inspired by this miracle of nature, I decided to immortalise the devil on a selection of random merchandise.
I wanted a secondary theme and was considering 'handsome devil', a Tasmanian devil in smoking jacket and cravat, with pencil moustache and elegant cigarette holder; but 'lucky devil' conjured slightly more dynamic and less lung-damaging images to mind, and Zazzle sells poker chips and playing cards.
In tenuously related news, I recently created a profile on product sharing website Wanelo (Wa-ne-lo, a sort of contraction of Want Need Love), a Pinterest type site but for keen shoppers. There are no referral fees for items sold through Wanelo, but it's another platform for a Zazzle designer to introduce the world to their products, essential if you want to earn from your efforts.
I may be having some beginner's problems though, in that Wanelo hasn't associated this blog with my Wanelo profile, which is necessary to create a Wanelo store. This may be because this blog is a uk domain featuring products from Zazzle's uk domain, whereas I've shared products on Wanelo from the Zazzle '.com' domain to cater for American buyers.
The upshot is that I'm going to try posting some new 'Lucky Devil' products below but from the '.com' domain, Hopefully that will indicate to Wanelo that I am who I say I am, while visitors clicking the links will be redirected to their local domain. With fingers crossed, goodbye!
I'm usually a bit last minute when it comes to Christmas, so doing Christmas designs in October is a new experience. I've also had a bit of artist's block, but here's Christmas drawing number one at last. I picked an animal which I thought would be least likely to enjoy pulling a cracker.
I now have an unexpected problem; Zazzle doesn't like the word 'cracker' due to the alternative redneck meaning, so I have to list products featuring this harmless bushbaby as a PG, and submit it for review to reduce the age rating, which could take a while. So do I submit it now, or after Christmas, or does it even matter?
On top of this, I also have a bauble design from last year, but can't add tags relating to tree decorations, because Zazzle sells tree decorations and thinks I'm including a product type unnecessarily, which it then removes. Will anyone find any of my Christmas products? We shall see.
Bridesmaids was on TV again the other day, round about the time I was mulling over doing some celebration related cartoons for my Zazzle store; something a bit more marketable than sloths in pants and patriotic birds riding groundhogs. There's a scene where a cake left on a doorstep as a 'making up' present is eaten by raccoons, and this became the inspiration for cartoon no 1 (above) of that week.
