Ideas for Images to Use in Your Zazzle Store

Finding ideas for the hundreds of images you need to fill your store with enticing products is not easy.  I was very proud of my unusual cold-blooded pets, but there are only so many photographs you can get from 4 different species.  

I soon realised that if I was going to find enough pictures to make an impression amongst the millions of products already on the site, I would need to find different sources of images.  

I was lucky in that I already had Photoshop installed, a leftover from the days when I used it for work.  I quickly discovered another side to the program, which I had so far only used for editing photos.  By overlaying an image with a new layer, on which I daubed various digital paints, and testing out different functions in the layers menu, I could produce bizarrely coloured photographs. One of my first effects was my psychedelic frog. 

Unfortunately this was no more popular than the "normal" giant waxy monkey frog that I had previously uploaded.  What is it with people?  Either they are not interested in frogs at all, or all they want is the famous red eyed tree frog.  Ok I admit the RETF is very cute and iconic, but don't people want something different?  I've never kept it, precisely because it was so famous.  Do you know that my tree frog, Phyllomedusa bicolor produces psychoactive substances that are used in shamanic hunting rituals in its native Amazon forest?

I also discovered the "Hue" adjustment slider in the Photoshop menu.  This is very useful in altering the colours of various everyday objects.  A blue "flower" produced from the photograph of half a grapefruit, was my first Zazzle sale!

Incidentally, I've never used it, but I believe Gimp can do most of the things that photoshop does.  And it is free!

The various filters that come with Photoshop also provide many opportunities for creating interesting images.  I've never considered myself particularly artistic, but now I enjoy what I would call "digital doodling".  The "polar co-ordinates" filter is particularly fun, it is quite amazing what you can achieve with a few coloured circles.

One day while "doodling" I realised part of an image looked a bit like a cat's head.  I quickly found some other parts that would work as a body and a tail, a little bit of copying, pasting, and resizing, and I produced the "funny cats" picture on the left.  Some strange flying creatures moved in with the cats, I interpret these as an alien species of flying crabs.

In the meantime, I noticed these amazing images of animals, that seemed to be drawn out of glowing lines.  I think I first spotted them on pinterest.  A short investigation revealed that they were created with a filter called fractalius.  You actually have to buy this, assuming you are a law-abiding citizen.  The whole point of using Zazzle was to make money rather than spend it, but I just couldn't resist.

I have not yet sold any fractalius pictures on Zazzle, but recently somebody bought my flamingo on CafePress.  I got back 10% of my fractalius "investment" from that purchase.

I especially like using fractalius on public domain images from sites like pixabay.  Although these images are free to use, they are available to any seller on Zazzle.  Adding my own effects ensures that I don't end up with the same images as another store.

I quite got into making "abstract art" for my Zazzle store, even though I don't think it sells as well as other images.  However, different effects with Photoshop were somewhat restrictive after a while.  I'd always been fascinated by fractals, and I decided to investigate how they were made.  

It turns out that there are freeware fractal generators out there.  I keep working with Apophysis, with not quite satisfactory effects.  Either I am not patient enough moving those pesky little triangles, or there are still secrets to using the program that I haven't learned yet.

I do, however, love using Sterling2.  Again this is "digital doodling", try different combinations of formulas and renders, zoom in on the image, and see what happens.  The one negative of using the program, is that there doesn't seem to be many tutorials for it.  I've recently recorded how I use Sterling to generate fractals.