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Hi! I hope everybody has been having a good day!

We're pleased to announce that our new art collection is live in our stores! Vintage botanical floral arrays in a circular wreath arrangement. As usual with us, the collection is a big set, with thousands of pieces for you to choose from. They come in a myriad of vivid ombre colors: ivory white, olive green, royal purple, wine red, teal blue and wrought iron black.

It was a challenge to put together this collection, and we're been hard at work to make it beautiful, and as always accessible to art lovers everywhere.

You can find these in our collections page in our stores (Shop link in bio)

Talk to you all soon!

Holy Rock Design
(IG | FB | Twitter | Tumblr | Threads :: @holyrockarts)
shop.holyrockarts.com

May the 4th be with you! Happy Star Wars Day!

*No. We do not have ANY Star Wars designs in ANY of our stores. That's protected IP. THIS IS THE WAY.

Shop links in our bio for non-Star Wars stuff.

#holyrockarts #independentartist #starwars #StarWarsDay #holyrockdesign #art #homedecor #wallart #interiordesign #designinspiration #geek

Hi! I hope everybody has been having a good day!

Happy New Year, everybody! I'm pleased to say that it's been a great holiday season and I'm eager to get back to work! I'm on 25,000 images here on this platform and I'm excited to upload the thousands more I have in queue.

Pantone has decided that we should all be bathed in a pinkish red they call "Viva Magenta" and I have fully embraced the color choice! I have three collections already up on my stores featuring the bright and happy hue!

I will be doing some highlights in pattern work and the fun ways geometry and math play in creating beauty and art! I have a client who's needing dozens of pieces for an office space and I told her to go look here. Yes, I am fully equipped for this exact art requirement scenario... and I have very large sets in most of my collections!

Talk to you all soon!

Holy Rock Design
(IG | FB | Twitter | Tumblr | Pinterest :: @holyrockarts)
www.holyrockarts.com

Hi! I hope everybody has been having a good day!

I've breached the arbitrary 10,000 image mark! Ten weeks in and I've gotten the routine down pat. There's four sets going up at the same time in rotation at the moment, with the steel gray botanicals in autumn hued watercolors being my favorite.

I don't know what's different with Fine Art America and Pixels.com but the bots at Google seem to scrape images from here faster than they do on other print platforms. Art and images I've uploaded here for sale have been showing up already on targeted keywords in Google search and Google Image search in geotargeted territories. On some platforms, it took months to see them pop up in the results. Surprisingly, they've also managed to populate slots in the upper 25% of first stack especially in image search for target keywords!

How do other people do their artwork marketing and how do they target specific niche segments, I wonder? I'd love to see other artists' marketing workflow. I have visibility in the broader audience that I'm marketing to, but I'd like to exert seasonal strategic efforts for very specific buyers. I guess this week will have to get time allocation for research again!

My current stack of marketing content is also due for a refresh this week so artist cap goes back on the hat rack and I'll be wearing a marketing fedora pretty snugly for the coming days.

If anybody's reading this, I'd really like it if you could visit my link: www.holyrockarts.com . It redirects to my linktree and I'd love to hear inputs on how I've set my landing page up! I think I got it to how "I" like it... but market and audience testing exists for a reason!

GEEZ!! I think the marketing hat will REALLY be fully glued to my head this coming week! FIGHT!


Talk to you all soon!

Holy Rock Design
(IG | FB | Twitter | Tumblr | Pinterest :: @holyrockarts)
www.holyrockarts.com

Hi! I hope everybody has been having a good day!

I finished uploading my veri peri mosaics collections. I missed blogging updates for number six last week as it was a pretty challenging couple of days and I've only just now seen a break in the clouds. Good news though, started uploading sets of the basic varieties and it's getting off to a great start.

I've been beaten down pretty badly last week, but I managed to keep to regular art ingress on FAA. I've also managed to start promoting my stores here in my regular marketing rotation.

I still haven't recovered so this'll be a short update. I'm eager to break the arbitrary 10k mark!

Talk to you all soon!

Holy Rock Design
(IG | FB | Twitter | Tumblr | Pinterest :: @holyrockarts)
www.holyrockarts.com

Hi! I hope everybody has been having a good day!

I just hit 5,000 pieces. I would like to credit my pc gamer self for retaining muscle memory skills since I upload without thinking, I don't even look at my keyboard (and sometimes even my screen while I type, only when I check before pressing submit). Whew! IPTC is really one's friend!

Currently, I've finished loading a set of botanicals on parchment and I have a set of black and gold botanicals on a gilded ring slated to go up next. It's a moody set and somewhere out there, is a previous client's office building filled with just these prints. I'll be concurrently on ingress for botanicals on black because a customer asked to see them on here... I hope they like the set and buy some.

I just found out that there's a new Resident Evil series on streaming and during downtime from other workloads, I binge watch this while uploading. It takes more or less an episode worth of uploading before I hit the limit, so I think I'm getting the routine down pat.

I've also started including my Fine Art America store in my marketing rotation. Starting with Pinterest, they'll be going up on my social media channels. I wonder what other people use for doing dynamic content?


Talk to you all soon!

Holy Rock Design
(IG | FB | Twitter | Tumblr | Pinterest :: @holyrockarts)
www.holyrockarts.com

Hi! I hope everybody has been having a good day!

Knowing full well that I'm sounding like a broken record, I've uploaded 4,000 pieces on Fine Art America! (Yey! and whew!)

The latest collection I've nearly finished uploading is the set, Gold Geometric Glyphs on Dark Teal Blue. Afterwards, I'm slated to ingress botanicals on parchment, which is a set of vintage plant illustrations which have been restored from high resolution scans of original engravings... and... extracted... and laid on a clean (well.. clean-er...) aged paper/ parchment background.. because leaving them on their original paper backing isn't really my jam.

I've also joined a contest! It's "Edit This 65", which is a contest where the organizer challenges participants to go manipulate a rustic vine-y brick cottage. I've done a fantasy themed gilded render. At the risk of sounding needy, please consider looking though the contest entries.. and maybe voting... for one you guys... like... maybe... vote... for... mine... maybe...

It's something fun that I haven't done in a... well never... I have never joined an art contest... like, ever. I am proud though of my render, especially if you go look at the preview at full resolution because I rendered it proofed for pre-press at a high resolution. Abbie (the organizer) said we could sell our entries here, so it's for sale in my Miscellaneous collection on my profile. Please go pixel peep and admire my OC-ness!

Marketing has been a challenge... not the actual marketing per-se, because I've already been doing that for my other platforms.. but more on finding time AND the timing. The ones I've uploaded isn't even 10% of what I have set for my store here and I've already scheduled promotions and posts on my social media channels for the next 7 weeks. (Content schedulers are your friend!)

Do I disrupt my current scheduled posts or do I just wait out the 7 weeks? Adding more posts on top of the one's already slated to run seems... spammy... and will probably piss off my audience (Which isn't big, but the visibility does drive traffic and sales). What to do?

Also is I wonder who's running the web crawler parsing and viewing my work. I don't think they're human...'cause I haven't started promoting yet! (♪♫ Dun.. ♪ dun.. ♪ duuuuuummmm! ♫♪)

...

Yes, I am aware I ramble when I blog... I type my thoughts chronologically as they come.

...


Talk to you all soon!

Holy Rock Design
(IG | FB | Twitter | Pinterest :: @holyrockarts)
www.holyrockarts.com

Hi! I hope everybody has been having a good day!

I'm almost at 3,000 pieces uploaded on Fine Art America. (Yay! And also whew!) Coming from other platforms, I have a very large catalog of work ready to upload, though staring too much at my screen is making my eyes blurry... Do you guys use monitor filters or anti-glare glasses when you're not doing precision and color work?

I'm getting through a lot of audiobooks while uploading. I'm currently listening to Stephenie Meyer's Midnight Sun... partly because the teenybopper I bury deep inside needs to take occasional walks... and partly because you need to pick something you don't have to concentrate too hard on to follow the story while keeping half of your brain on typing... AND man is it a LOT OF TYPING... IPTC is your friend. It's so good that I'd already processed my images to have proper metadata way before... It's a little OCD part of me that pops in and out sometimes!

Back to audiobooks, I made the mistake of listening to horror while uploading late at night...BIG MISTAKE! Not doing that again! The cat brushing up on my leg made me jump so high! HAHAHA!

Currently finishing uploading Shadowy Botanicals in Black and Gold. This collection was a request from a client who was doing an office reno and needed large sets of prints. They also asked me for a centerpiece with actual gold so I had to gild and bedazzle a canvas print with gold leaf and glitter. If you guys look through my collections, I make very large sets, because clients needed them to fill big multi-room spaces.

My timing of starting on Fine Art America came at an opportune time. I got some difficult news and was able to take some time off the usual grind... and uploading is a productive way to decompress when I need my brain to stop thinking too much.

So silver linings and all...


Talk to you all soon!

Holy Rock Design
(IG | FB | Twitter | Pinterest | Tiktok : @holyrockarts)
www.holyrockarts.com

Hi! I hope everybody has been having a good day!

The long road to uploading my work on Fine Art America continues! I'm on break today from my regularly scheduled programming so I have some time every six hours to do ingress work here for the next couple of days.

My account has gotten a couple of followers! (YAY!) It's nice to know there's visibility, even if there hasn't been any conversions yet. I think what surprised me the most about this platform is how active the community is. On other sites where I participate, it pretty much feels like I'm on my own. It's refreshing to see interactions between artists and members here. I was browsing through the artists here and some of their work, and I find it comforting to see some familiar names too!

I've gotten a good number of visitors (according to the site visitor counter thing), but then again, I'm almost at 1,500 pieces uploaded (I'm coming from other platforms so I already have a very large body of work ready to up) so that's like maybe a dozen views per piece... Is that how they count the thing? I don't know... I'll choose to be wide-eyed and optimistic! (..even though prior experience has me a bit jaded...)

On any platform I'm in, the first collection of mine that always go up is "100 Nebulae in Space", not because of how well it sells, but more of for good luck. I feel like it's my good luck collection, apropos of nothing. Do you guys have weird superstitions like that?

Random thoughts:
> Some people have custom images for their collection covers, how do they do it? Should I do it too?

> I JUST FOUND OUT that for some of the products for sale, the buyer can reposition the artwork to their liking before purchase! It's so different from what I'm used to! The control freak in me wants to OCD control everything about my work for sale... but looking on the bright side, a customer can't blame you for their own positioning choices!

> I also JUST FOUND OUT that Fine Art America provides image licensing via Pixels.com. I'm finding out so many things after the fact! (What is wrong with me?) It's a good thing most of them are nice options and not downers!

> Embedded images don't work for the blog here! Bummer!


Talk to you all soon!

Holy Rock Design
(IG | FB | Twitter | Pinterest | Tiktok : @holyrockarts)
www.holyrockarts.com

Hi! I hope everybody has been having a good day!

It's been exactly one week since I've officially gone live on my Fine Art America storefront. So far, uploading has been an interesting, if a somewhat tedious, process.

Here's some of the things I've learned so far:

> The premium membership is a necessary expense. I don't see how you'd be able to manage with just the 25 upload limit on the free membership. I'm glad I spent the $30 right off the bat when I finally got off my a** and finished setting up the store! It's an easy expense to swallow, as that comes to about 2-3 sales of prints and then you're golden.

> There are a lot of artists here on Fine Art America, but with the searches I am targetting, there doesn't seem to be as much competition in the niches I'm looking at as compared to other stores.

> I am interested to find out how big the platform is in terms of market share to other print on demand platforms out there. What I do know is, out of the marketplaces I sell at, Fine Art America has been at it the longest. This was one of the factors I considered when I opened my store here. With that limited information, I am guessing that FAA is about the same size in terms of customer base size as the other sites, but the additional barrier to entry for artists (the need for the premium membership) means that competitors in the niche spaces I participate in are smaller.

> Why is there a limit on daily uploads, even for premium members? Ok, I get why they put it, but if you're already established elsewhere, you already have a large portfolio to upload and the timings make it complicated. From what I've discerned (since the customer support person ignored my question)... The daily biggest one time limit is around 150 uploads. The limit cap resets every 4 hours form your last upload at least, and then you can upload at least around 40 before you hit the limit again.

> Why is there not a simple check box for if you want to enable or disable products? It took some doing to find the information I needed to do this! One has to leave the markup box for the product blank (not zero) for you to disable a product.

> The search algorithm on FAA is easier to work with than other sites. So far, I found that the search captures the title and the tags you input... but more importantly. the tags are cumulative AND transitive. It's nice to know.

> I wish Fine Art America had a more intuitive way of placement of the uploaded images on the products to sell like they have on other sites like Society6 and Redbubble. I've now decided that I just had to cull the products I make available for sale to focus on just straightforward prints. I was looking at the rundown of announcements for people who made sales (the one you see when you first log in...) and I find that most of the stuff sold are prints... so, "That's that!" I thought... Focus on prints here on this platform and make my life easier.

So that's what I've gleamed so far... It's always interesting and nerve-wracking to open a new store. You always question yourself if your work would be received as well on the new store versus your other storefronts in other platforms. FINGERS ARE CROSSED! FINGERS ARE CROSSED SOOOO HARD!

As always, after launching I have to get to marketing my new store so here's what I've done:

> Updated links on my social media (via linktree). Go see: It's www.holyrockarts.com (I do a redirect... It's easier to tell people and they get to my landing page faster)

That's it.

Pfft! Hahaha! I can't help but laugh... You see, I'm not finished promoting my other stores, and I'm still in progress uploading to FAA... so I don't have the time yet to go full HAM on FAA marketing. It'll take some doing to work FAA into my marketing rotation since I already have my hands full!

I'm interested to know what other artists' marketing workflow looks like. I think that'll be one of my future blog posts. Also, I realized that Society6 killed their blog feature... I instantly worried that maybe FAA would do the same, but since it looks like it's been so long and they've kept it, maybe it'll stay!

Whew! This has been a fun way to decompress!

Talk to you all soon!

Holy Rock Design
(IG | FB | Twitter | Pinterest | Tiktok : @holyrockarts)
www.holyrockarts.com