Making Calendars

Today I finished making the files for my calendar of Croome Court. I have been working on it for a while, but I got proofs last week and what I had made needed some tweaking.

I love smart, clean design and lord knows I have expensive taste and I think that has come across in the sleek design :)

I was thinking as I wrote this if someone had told me 3 years I would be approaching various printers for quotes and visiting them myself I would have told them nooo, that's scary. It feels good to be doing something while on the job hunt, and sure it's not a major retail venture yet, but it has the potential to go much larger in future years.

I can take samples of the calendar and show different shops who might be interested.

Working out profit margins has also been paramount and something I have enjoyed.

So yesterday I set about adding a bigger bleed area and also a crop mark for each corner where it will be cut to size. I hadn't known how to do this before, but I looked it up on YouTube and voila :) YouTube is everything to me! A way to share my work, inspire people (which I love doing), and it's a source of income.

I spent about an hour or two altering the files, and altering the day titles on the calendar too. So tomorrow I shall send them to the printer ready to be made up. Hopefully they will be ready by the beginning of next week.

I hope I will be able to sell them!

I am not one to think negatively, and I know how many I have to sell to cover my costs, and if don't sell that many I know this has taught me a lot on how to print :) I discovered DPI for printing this sort of thing should be above 300, I set it to 400 as that was what was recommended for text, and the photos look better too.

I will be proud when I have the final product in my hands :)

I had plenty of interest in them when I showed a similar one I had had made on the internet so I'm hopeful. This calendar is completely made by myself from scratch and is environmentally friendly printing double sided and using a very environmentally friendly printer whom I am very proud to use. Combining that with the quality of the photographs I think it will sell.

It gave me confidence in my photography too, as like with most things I do, I taught myself and it's my style.... I see things in different ways and am not about tourist shots, I like to get a different angle and to make the viewer appreciate things they might not have usually seen!

And to think I had never used photoshop either till 4 months ago!

Small steps :) Hopefully I'll get somewhere.

To view more photos of Croome Court go here: http://tkd-art.com/#/croome-court/4550044633