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| Several weeks ago I decided to place some ads for my custom portraits in a local newspaper. An added bonus was one week the ad ran in a Dogwood Arts Festival supplement to the paper. |
A simple business card. Simple? At one of our church events in Plano, TX, I was working on one of the women's events and learned hundreds of dollar had been spent the previous years on tickets, flyers, etc. One of the committee members the following year printed out the event tickets using the Avery brand she had bought at Walmart. She used the business card format for the tickets. I was so impressed with the tickets I decided I would try to print my own business cards. I have had professionally printed business cards in the past and plan on doing it again sometime. One drawback in the past of the self-printed Avery cards was the perforations on the cards' edges. Gone are the perforations.
I liked the freedom for design with the Avery brand but had problems saving my work projects on their site. Also, I had not been able to open PDF files for a long time and had a problem with my Adobe Reader. Finally I was able to uninstall the old version and install a new one. I tried out the online Vista Print version but did not have the same amount of design freedom as with the Avery brand.
Long story short, it took me five days of trial and error to come up with these cards. The good
news is I learned some things along the way, things that should help me in the future. The trial and
error method seems to be the best way to learn.
(I'll admit at the time it was very frustrating)
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| I had not planned on adding my own photo but Clint suggested I needed it for a personal connection to the prospective customer. I did not want it to appear my photo was a portrait I had drawn or painted. By turning my photo sideways and adding my name beside it, I thought somehow that would set me apart as giving the message I was not a portrait commission example. |
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| The back of the card. An example of pastels and pencil. I thought these two portraits displayed a good representation of my work. Got to get some pets drawn for examples, I have done some precious dog portraits in the past. |
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| Clinton, drawn with pencil. |
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| Emma, drawn with pastel pencils and pastels. |
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| A proof from the newspaper for my approval. There were changes made from my original business card design. The only change I requested was having a larger font for the words Custom Portraits. This is before the change. |
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