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ART PRINTS!
on September 18, 2017
In August of 2017 I started a daily drawing project/challenge in which I drew a musician each day from start to finish. It’s such a simple concept but I really fell in love with the project and people received it very well so I decided to offer them as art prints on my store. I quickly put together the digital mockups of each print to pretty up my storefront and started talking to my local print shop to get these things made. This is where things fell apart…
I just wrote, deleted, and rewrote the failure of trying to get these art prints made at this print shop, but I’ll spare you and summarize: their printers are pretty bad and leave lots of scan lines and imperfections, they were difficult to get ahold of, they wouldn’t followup on paper orders or correspondence until I nagged, and I wasted a lot of time trying to work this out with them.
I started researching how to do high quality art prints at home and found this guide and guess what? I made my own art prints at home!
Here’s how I did it:
First, I used photoshop magics to prepare my files. This included tweaking colors for print, adding guides for trimming, removing my digital signature, and making sure all the prints have the same URLs and stuff.
Time to give it a shot. The first print came out, well, you can see here.
As crazy saturated as those colors are, I was really pleased with the print and paper quality. Compared to the print shop samples, this was already a huge improvement.
I changed a few settings and tried again.
The second run was better but a big desaturated compared to the original art.
BAM! Perfect! I can’t tell you how excited I was to see this thing work its way out of my printer. It’s beautiful.
Since these are printed on 8.5×11″ paper and I needed them to be 8×10″, it was time to trim.
Ink doesn’t last forever so I hit this bad boy with some Preserve It! This protects the paper and inks from moisture and fading and a few other things I don’t care/know too much about. But rest assured that your custom musicomic art prints are acid free, archival safe, and will last longer than you or your kid(s) or your kid(s) dog(s)!
Unfortunately, Preserve It! is deadlier than I anticipated so I had to wait for the room to clear after spraying…
Lookin’ good though!
Time to crank out a few more.
With the art printed and trimmed it was time to get them ready for shipping.
My early adopters waited so patiently while I duked it out with the print shop so they are each getting a free comic print (available exclusively to patient early adopters).
Let’s take a look at the prints side by side before we send them off to their new homes!
Time to sign these puppies and wrap ’em up.
The finished print goes into the heavy duty flat cardboard mailer.
The flat mailer goes into a poly mailer.
The poly mailer gets a sticker and a stamp.
…not all stamps are created equal.
Now these prints are ready to go!
Thank you so much for reading. Now go get YOUR fancy shmancy art print(s) on the Musicomic Store!
Midwest 2016
on December 17, 2016
I just finished my first music convention appearance!
When I’m back at my computer I’ll share more!
The Musicomic Store
on September 19, 2016
THE MUSICOMIC STORE HAS OFFICIALLY LAUNCHED!
I redesigned three classic (if I may…) Musicomics as 18×24″ posters that are perfect for home, office, and classroom. At $10 a piece (including tax & U.S. shipping) they are like… $0.03 per laugh, and really, who can put a price on laughter?
If you’ve been enjoying Musicomics (for free) over the past few years and want to contribute, please buy something from the store! OR share the store link with others! OR OR buy something from the store AND share the link with others!!! Wow, you’d be SO cool if you did that…
Okay, that’s more than enough out of me. Now head over and check out MusicomicStore.com!
Another update!
on September 9, 2016
Even though you didn’t get a new comic or even any relevant humorous music related content to speak of, this has been a BIG week for me and musicomic.com!
-The revamped musicomic store is almost complete! I worked super hard the nuts & bolts of the site, domain registration, blah blah blah CHECK OUT THE NEW LOGO:
I have to say, Shan looks thoroughly unimpressed by you. DAT FONT THO… it’s from <em>Spongebob</em>. Yeah, you knew you recognized it.
Seriously, setting up the site took a lot of time and effort, but I DID IT… because I love you like a fan.
-I also FINALLY decided on a printer and locked in some great rates for each of my designs. I like this shop and its employee(s) a lot. They are local and I think I can use them for most of my future printing needs… as long as this first huge order looks good ::nervous emoji::
-I submitted 3 poster designs and a business card for printing and they should be done sometime next week. SPOILER ALERT: ALL MUSICOMICSTORE.COM ORDERS COME WITH A FREE BUSINESS CARD! WOAH!!! I know… only I am excited about that… it’s okay.
-I submitted my first exhibitor’s contract to The Midwest Clinic, which is going down December 14th-16th. As long as they aren’t already full (fingers crossed) I should get a spot and be able to hang out for three full days representing my shop in person for the first time. THAT’S HUGE! (I refuse to link to a Donald Trump “huge” meme… but I wanted you to know that I saw the opportunity and turned my back on it. Props to me.)
-I discovered Tigran Hamasyan’s album, “Fables” (thank you, Josh!) Please, just start listening to it now…
-I invented a new as of yet unrevelead Musicomic character that I think has the potential to become really big. Like, Sonic the Hedgehog big. I haven’t really settled on a name for him yet, but let’s just say his name is definitely Chip.
SO ORIGINAL.
BONUS: Check out my coworkers and my birthday present to Sonny Rollins; I’m an Old Cowhand!
Update!
on September 6, 2016
It’s been some time since the last update, so I think we’re long overdue.
As you may or may not know, this has been a rough year for me to say the least. I’m sure I’ll share more about that sometime, but that’s not what today’s post is about.
Today, I just wanted to let you know that I am hard at work on a TON of stuff for musicomic.com. Besides the weekly comic updates, I am working on a MUSICOMIC BOOTH to take to music conventions! So far, I am planning on exhibiting at the Midwest Clinic this Decemeber (Chicago), the JEN Conference next January (New Orleans), and TMEA next February (San Antonio)!
This also means I am hard at work designing and printing my own merchandise to sell at said conventions. I’m primarily working on poster designs as well as flyers, business cards, and booth signage. It takes a LOT of time and work, but I’m excited to finally be doing it.
I don’t want to spoil the poster designs before they are officially available for purchase so instead, as a preview, check out my sweet new business cards;
I’ll see you later this week for some more comics.
Dusty