Category Archives: Artwork

Adventures in Merchandising

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So, last Saturday, I may have …built an online store to sell shirts!

I found Printful, a print-on-demand merchandise maker: shirts, mugs, towels, all the things to put my artwork on! They print to order and ship to the customer… and they have a plant in the Toronto area!

Unlike book printer and distributor IngramSpark, they don’t distribute a catalogue to existing retailers. They need the artist to build an online store and connect it to them.

There was a long list of premade stores they could connect to: Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, Wix, BigCartel, Square, Ecwid, GumRoad… want a minute! Square? Oh yes!

I signed up for a free account at Printful, to see whether this would actually work. I enabled the online store in my existing Square account and connected it to Printful. In Printful, I selected a shirt, uploaded my artwork, and chose variants.

Printful pushed my chosen shirt to Square Online, and shirts appeared! I had to choose various options–I didn’t want my books to appear in the online store, for example, because they are distributed in a different way, and I only want to use the Square account to sell them in person with my little payment terminal. On the other hand, the shirts will be sold online on-demand only.

There are endless details. Getting the payment going from Square Online to Printful Customizing packing slips etc. Choosing shipping options. Providing a way for Printful to get paid. Uploading a logo to Printful to be used on their labels and packing slips. Likewise, uploading a logo to Square Online for the online store. It wasn’t quite the “easy setup” described in their comparative review of store systems, but it wasn’t bad.

So then I tried to order a shirt.

It let me choose a size and colour and presented a price with shipping cost. I paid. The money went into my Square Card account, from where Printful debited it.

I got an email thinking me for the order.

Meanwhile, in my internal control panel, I could see the order. As days passed, it went from “awaiting fulfillment” to “being fulfilled” (printed) to “shipped”! Outside, I got another email with shipping info.

Now I’m waiting for my shirt, to see what the quality is like. Printful has all sorts of options for shirts that I haven’t seen before, like custom logos inside the collar!

Hopefully I can get all the bugs out and get this working smoothly. If so, The Lonely Little Fridge shirts (and towels, mugs, stickers, etc) here I come!

Crappy Drawing Tuesday!

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The first drawing is an attempt at working out how the fancy rabbit restaurant “Tastes of Human” might work. This is one of the few rabbit restaurants that has human servers. It’s a special treat for the rabbit rulers to see the subservience of humans.

I think I’m going to make another break with the canon of the old writing group and give the rabbits an upright bipedal gait, where they can carry things. It will make things so much easier. (This was handwaved past in the old group.)

The second drawing is a sketch of the moment where Darlene realizes the rabbits are Not Her Friends. She was rescued from a crappy life that included being leered as a waitress in a crappy donut shop, and now the rabbits want her to serve again?!!

A Tiny Computer!

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My friend gave me a Tiny Computer. Yes, that’s the whole computer in the first picture (it’s upside-down). It is running Ubuntu Studio, which includes audio, video, graphics, and publishing software. There is a very good chance this could replace my Adobe suite. I will have to experiment. The video is me scanning a drawing into The GIMP, a raster image editor.

The Tiny Computer!

And this post is being made from Linux! Getting images out of my Mac onto Linux required some setup… accessing my Dropbox account from both machines turned out to be easiest. (I kept wanting to cut and paste…)

This Linux distribution is Ubuntu Studio. It includes The Gimp (like Photoshop), Inkscape (like Illustrator), Blender (a 3-D animation app, like the control panel of a 747), Scribus (maybe like InDesign, but we’ll see), Calibre (for ebooks, but annoying because it wants to manage your files), and lots more. There are audio and video editing apps; I’ll have to see what corresponds to After Effects for editing limited animation. Alas, Scrivener is not available on Linux. If I can make and publish a book on this platform…

The trickiest part so far was configuring my scanner. The Epson scanner requires a driver, which Epson provides, but that driver requires further software. I had to go into the command line to install it (fortunately this is the kind of thing I used to do at my old job). And I had the help of my friend Mike, who is a born troubleshooter.

Diane Visits Algonquin Main

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The Bunnies decide to let a few carefully-selected Humans visit their home.

This is a segment that may or may not make it into the final version of “The Rabbit Trap”. It’s really part of the backstory, explaining how the conditions arose that let Red and his family live in Algonquin Main.


It was happening! Diane was excited. Caramel had bounced up to her during the weekly closed-doors Rabbit Meeting and announced the news. She, Diane, had been selected to visit the rabbit city of Algonquin Main!

It wasn’t going to be a long visit. Caramel had said that the warrens were thinking of expanding their contacts with human society — carefully-selected parts of human society, anyway — and this visit was a trial run.

Continue reading →

Holidays. And Writing…

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I’m working on some things for The Rabbit Trap suggested by Akosua. One of them is rewriting a tentative first scene to be from the viewpoint of character Darlene rather than character Red. This turns out to be surprisingly tricky, given that the main actions in the scene are performed by Red. This is something I have tried for the first time.

Another request is rewriting the story outline to follow the internal emotional events of my protagonist rather than the external events. Again: tricky, and new to me. But it makes sense given that everything my protagonist (or any other character) does has to make sense to them at the moment. It has to be the option that appears to move them toward what they want with the least effort. Appears to them, that is. To the rest of us, it could appear completely crazy.

So I will have to dive into the emotional arc behind my character…

In other news, Happy New Year! I made a commemorative drawing for the New Year with many of my characters!

“The Ornament” sees the light of day…

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A couple of years ago, I drew a short story called “The Ornament”, to be included in a wintry holiday compilation. That compilation did not appear then, but it has just been published now!

The compilation is called “Snowflakes, Secrets, and Other Winter Reflections”.

It is available now from Kipekee Press as an ebook. Print books coming soon.

But that’s not all! There’s an advent calendar: https://hi.switchy.io/WinterTales2024

…and a contest!
https://kingsumo.com/g/1ggoez1/winter-tale-advent-calendar-and-book-launch

A Need for Giveaways

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So there I was. I had just wandered into a convenience store while wearing my new shirt that I had made with the logo of The Rabbit Trap. The cashier was asking me about it, what did it mean, and I was describing the book. He asked, did I have any info on it that he could give out, and I had to admit I did not yet. Creating something to give away was literally the next major thing I was doing.

To that end, I have now created and ordered bookmarks for The Rabbit Trap. Hopefully they will be here this week.

Versions of the First Book Trailer

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The book trailer for The Rabbit Trap went through a lot of evolution.

It’s technically an ‘animatic’, a kind of draft animation that can be quickly produced and adjusted as ideas change. A fully-animated work would follow on from it.

I started out by drawing a few rough sketches on paper and putting them in order.

Then I decided to try Boords, the online storyboarding service.

Continue reading →

Welcome to SRD Books!

Featured

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If you’re looking for information about The Rabbit Trap, The Lonely Little Fridge, or the compilations that contain my other works, this is the place!

The Lonely Little Fridge is distributed through Ingram Content Group and is available on Amazon and other retailers. The compilations are available through Kipekee Press and Amazon.

My Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/author/komiksulo

The Rabbit Trap

A family escapes a totalitarian nightmare, but what happens when one of them wants to go back?

This full-length novel is a sequel to the story “The Rabbit Hole” published in a compilation by Kipekee Press.

The Lonely Little Fridge

A fridge is thrown out. Will it find a new and better home?

This children’s book is available in multiple languages. Find out more.