Shelley just phoned to say four Blond Cards finally sold today at her Maddarings shop at Camden Market. At last. They've been on sale there for over two weeks and are half the online price. £5 each, original acrylic paintings, ready to hang on the wall with no need for further attachments or a frame.
Making over 700 of these over the last few weeks feels more sensible now. My rooms at home filling up with them has been starting to feel like a bottle-neck. They're all individually painted and hand drawn from scratch despite looking like prints from a short distance. There's no tracing or template, and it's been on my mind how to make this obvious to people who might otherwise dismiss them as mass produced or printed from a computer. I've written on the back of each one that they're original paintings, but it needs to be much more obvious. If it's ok with Shelley, I'll make and put up an information poster near them. If she doesn't want it, I'll do one anyway for The Camden Market Free Art Man display. There's also a Blond Cards catalogue in development that will be cheap enough to produce to hand out for free. We were talking about something related to this yesterday on The Black Ivory Podcast. Ron Throop 
Initially, the man in Camden only bought one but came back later for another three. Strong evidence that the free promotional booklet with every purchase is a good idea. I'll go there tomorrow with some more. Tomorrow's Saturday, the main day for Camden Market, so if more sell tomorrow, I'll speak to Shelley about possibly upgrading the display. At the moment, they're virtually on the floor where only toddlers can see them properly. I'll take a few of Amy (Winehouse), a new character I think's especially suited to Maddarings as it's only a few meters from the life-sized statue of her. One of the one's sold today was Cyberdog, named after the legenday rave shop also very near Maddarings, about 20 meters away. Here's Cyberdog:
If sales start picking up, so we're selling at least five a week, I'll take a walk around some of the other shops at Camden Market and see if they'll take them on sale-or-return. I'm often at Camden Market doing The Camden Market Free Art Man and see people lose interest when they find out they have to do a video interview to get a free artwork. Now the camera shy have an option. I'm not sure I'm legally allowed to advertise this option to them, but even without telling them, they're likely to see my work for sale if they wander around Camden Market afterwards.
