Steampuk, Nature pictures The Greatest Minds and Red Bubble

Good Morning!

Welcome to the first post on here in a very long time.

Since my last entry on here, a great deal has happened- and there is quite a bit of content that did not get posted when it was created. I will either fill that in hereafter when there is a minute spare, or back-fill to close the gap with all the material that should have been entered in the past few months.
Any preferences?

As regular readers may recall (hi Mum), I am Editor over at TheGreatestMinds.co.uk, where we have been beavering away on a lot of content. Initially this meant magazines- articles, artwork and all the behind-the-scenes paperwork that goes into a magazine launch (USPs, target audiences, potential advertisers etc) but never gets seen by anyone other than potential publishers. But, as time has gone by, I have been dragged into other enterprises- selling translation rights for some old, unpublished and shelved articles and various forays into the world of public speaking, Now that the "great 2020 plague" has descended upon us, of course, the latter tends to mean "zoom meetings for money with a variable number of participants" or similar, depending upon the audience size.

There are a lot of very interesting projects at various stage of development, but as always, too many ideas, too few hands and brain-spoons in any given day. Anyway, one long-neglected project was a plan to have the distinctive artwork from The Greatest Minds site on sale to support the site and to allow readers to take something physical away with them. I looked at a great number of printing options from pay-on-demand printing to local and national printing firms, but, in the end, working with a fulfilment house seemed a no-brainer. We supply the artwork and the IP and they deal with all the printing, production, shipping and returns.

So far, so good. One of the first obstacles was that a lot of the artwork was originally created in relatively small format and there is a limit how large you can make something that was only A5 sized or less to start with. Some of the artwork will therefore only ever be little tiles or web-only graphics. Other pictures were big enough (just) to work for various types of merchandise. Some pieces were created entirely from scratch. Basically, The Greatest Minds artwork almost all starts with a hand-drawn sketch- usually in black ink in a white(ish) notebook.

For example, this is a scan of one of the sketches used as background for certain images-


From that point, there is extensive digital editing, colouring etc and the white-ish paper is changed to actually properly (hexadecimally FFFFFF) white. That gives a nice background, onto which layer after layer of edited graphics and text can be added.

Image used to produce one of Greatest Minds Ltd.'s corporate images-
a version of this (with many, layered images compiled above it) features on our business cards and website.


The layers assembled on top of this background tend to be a mixture of black and white images taken specially for the occasion with re-cylced/upcycled out-of-copyright images. Usually this imagery is balanced with specially "composed" text written in an appropriate font- the latter can be  anything from Copperplate Gothic and "Komorebi Gothic"to various renditions of extinct languages.

There are certain themes that recur deliberately- some are more obvious than others.


One pleasant surprise was JUST HOW MANY pictures there were. (One of the many reasons I need a new laptop, or at least a bigger harddrive).  So far, only a a small selection of The Greatest Minds pictures are online in the shop. There is a lot more to follow, but we will be releasing the other things very, very gradually (poco a poco) for a whole load of reasons too tedious to relate here.

Anyway, the end result- like it or loathe it- is now available for purchase on Red Bubble the link is-
https://www.redbubble.com/people/GreatestMinds/explore?page=1&sortOrder=recent



The actual shop set up was not hugely complex, but still took a little while. The large amount of ready-to-go graphics The Greatest Minds has amassed at this point was a huge help. All in all, I think I am rather proud of the site and I hope you will like it, too.


There are quite a lot of merchandising options, including (thanks to "The Great 2020 Plague") face masks- naturally. Really, the original plan was just to find somewhere that does notebooks, possibly mugs, stickers and T-shirts. But actually- because of the huge range on offer, we ended up listing a much broader range of products than initially intended. Some objects just do not work with some images (for example, jigsaw puzzles work a lot better with certain types of pictures than with others). Similarly, things like bath mats are not really The Greatest Minds's wheelhouse and most of our images do not work in that format.( I will spare you the mock ups of those). Nonetheless, I think our images do work quite nicely in a number of formats I would not personally have considered- here are some examples of the products available- these for a Victoriana/Steampunk image of a woman science, a gentleman and a flying machine that is called "Steampunk and Maker-Culture"-







Anyway, worldwide shipping is available for all our glorious and not-too-commericalised items, so if you do like the shop, you can now buy stuff from it, wherever you are.
So,.... buy for your friends, your enemies and your dubious acquaintances- you can even tell random strangers all about it. Feel free to spread the word.
Thanks for reading.

Comments

  1. Welcome back! Shop looks very cool, definitely want in on some face mask action.

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