Earlier I described how I built my personal web site and used it as a guinea pig for both site design and search engine optimization – then left it alone for a few years without realizing just how successful it’d become.

But in 2002, when I did notice how much traffic I was getting, I started to wonder if any of those visitors would like to own a piece of my work.

Now in those days I was a pixel-pushing laborer in the Computer Game Mines. Okay, nominally I was a manager, but you get the idea. The game business is notorious for requiring long hours from its serfs and for that reason I wasn’t doing as much of my own work as I’d have liked; but I was doing some, and I was especially interested in large, ambitious pieces in resolutions that were suitable for print – and at the heart of that, what I really wanted to do was to offer archival quality prints for sale.

That’s because, when it comes down to it, digital artwork doesn’t exist – it’s just a ghost on your monitor. Unlike a traditional painting, there is no object when you’re done making it. And twenty or thirty years from now, the odds are that no one will even be able to read your digital file – so it’ll end up just as the ghost of a ghost, I guess. And while I don’t fool myself that this will matter much to anyone else, it does matter to me. I’d like to think that some of my work, which is already more interesting than I am, will last longer than I do. And since my work is entirely digital these days the only way I can encourage that to happen is to see that there are high quality prints of the work out there in the world. Hence, selling archival prints of my poster-resolution work was a big deal to me.

Now, Celtic design had been one of my favorite styles to work in since the early 80’s – so much so that I had deliberately stopped doing it for awhile, because people thought of me only as the Celtic art guy. And on the other hand, more and more I’d been exploring what I call “The Future That Never Was“, the sort of retro-future vision that flourished in the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s. So when I looked at my body of work, what I saw was schizophrenic – part Celtic and Celtic Revival, part Buck Rogers (no, the real one) and Flash Gordon. It was, to be kind, an eclectic mix that might not make sense to other people.

As I looked around at what I might be able to do on the web to serve my two purposes (turning my site’s visitors into customers, and selling archival prints of my work), I took what turned out to be a second look at Cafepress, the successful print-on-demand site. They’ve got a pretty interesting business model - not any longer unique to them - and in 2002 they were still a relatively new service that mainly printed T-Shirts and coffee mugs. This hadn’t excited me – but they then added posters to their line-up.

And that, though it still wasn’t archival, was close enough to what I wanted that I sat up and took notice.

So I started a Cafepress store where I designed and sold posters, T-Shirts, coffee mugs, and other items decorated with my work. In the beginning, since it was the poster work I was most interested in, most everything else derived from that. My shop was hosted on the Cafepress server, but I was able to customize it to some degree, and it started to look like a place of my own.

I started placing links to the shop in my personal site, especially in those very popular clip art pages that had started the ball rolling; I looked for more quality inbound links, and in fact tried just about anything to get traffic to the shop (even fliers at local bookstores, coffee houses, and bars – I was living in Los Angeles, and there were plenty of them).

Within a few months I saw that in order to do better in my search engine traffic, I really needed to have more control over my pages, and host them myself on my own domain, instead of at the Cafepress site. So I purchased an excellent CGI program called CPShop, which allowed me to do those things. I tried it out on my second Cafepress venture, the Retrovert, and saw that it was working very well for me. So I used it on the Celtic/Retro shop as well. And that’s when Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design really began to come into its own.

I’ve redesigned the shop several times over the past years. I’ve added loads of new products and designs, and over time I’ve learned to design products based on their nature, rather than trying to repurpose my poster images for use on merchandise. Eventually, through my Deviant Art account, I’ve even been able to sell the archival prints that I wanted to offer in the first place.

And it’s also fun. I’ve had visits from people I admire, like Michael Willam Kaluta and Dean Motter; I’ve sold fifteen “There’s an Art to Rocket Science” mugs to someone at NASA who apparently drinks even more coffee than I do; I’ve been contacted by people I never knew existed, but find I’m glad that they do, like Jeff Brewer of Cool Rockets; and, you know, I’ve made some money - because it turns out that people do like my work, once they find it.

So while Long Playing Computer Graphics was my first site, and taught me loads about design and search engine optimization, Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design was the first site in which I learned how to offer my own merchandise and make some money from my art by making it available to the public, on my own, through the use of a fulfillment service. I’ve done more since then, but it’s still my most popular and successful venture – as weird a combination of art as it may be.

“It sounds like an anchovy and jelly sandwich, doesn’t it?”

Technorati Tags: celtic art, retropolis, science fiction, retro-futuristic, print on demand, web design, art, artist

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