February Sales Updates:

From photo to watercolour art -Cala Carbo in Majorca

A strong month in February with a surprise at the top and a new direction in my images as I started uploading some "illustrations".

Straight to first place (again)were FineArtAmerica with three sales. A large framed canvas print and two separate T shirt sales. It's starting to look that after my long drought there sales are starting to come in again.

Relegated to second place were Shutterstock with a strong performance in subscription sales with one or more buyers buying a large batch of Greek island images. On Demand and Single sales played a smaller part this month.

Redbubble were in third place with four product sales ranging from stickers to a photographic print.

Fourth place saw Istock with just 28 downloads. Far from their best here.

Fifth place went to a slightly perked up Dreamstime with 7 downloads. Far from the glory days but better than some recent months. A credit sale of footballer George Best helped push up the income here.

In sixth place Alamy disappointed with just one sale (another of my archive politician images). A low

Crusader Knights castle on Halki island, Greece

two figure sale which became my first one at the new reduced 40% commission rate bringing my cut to single figures. That said, that was still higher than most microstock sales produce.

Bigstock took seventh place with 13 downloads. These were mainly all sub sales so dropped them down the income rankings.

Bringing up the rear in eighth place were Adobe Stock (formerly listed here as Fotolia) with 2 downloads. With the Fotolia site now closed to new uploads I have had to transition to Adobe. A few issues initially as I got used to it but I think I now have the grasp of it. The main issue was their auto keyword suggestion which I thought I had eliminated but managed to end up with Greek island images tagged as Jordan and Turkey! Thankfully you can edit images after acceptance so I was able to remove those. I now remember to click Remove Keywords to take out the auto suggestions.

Beach launched fishing boats at Dungeness, Kent

As for those illustrations, a post in Steve Heap's excellent blog Backyard Silver put me on to the Jixipix Watercolour Studio software. This worked out at about £28 (UK price) and is an application that allows you to import a photo and render it in the style of a watercolour painting. There are a number of templates to choose from and various sliders for fine tuning the results. I was mainly thinking of art sites as the market for these but have had some success (as in getting accepted) uploading them to micro sites under the illustrations category. Uploading as photographs just got rejections for overfiltered etc. Whether or not any of these will sell I have no idea but for a fairly low investment I thought it worth trying! I will report back on that in the future. One thing to say about the software is it either works with an image or it doesn't. Some attempts just looked awful and were abandoned. The skill (such as there is) seems to be choosing the right images to convert.

Other recent uploads included the fishing boats on Dungeness beach in Kent. Like my home town of Hastings there is no harbour at Dungeness and the boats are launched from the beach. Another set were images of the medieval Crusader Knights castle on the Greek island of Halki. I've photographed this a number of times over the years but can never resist capturing this slice of history.
Now to see what March will bring. Kind regards, David.