The drawings I did for the b3ta book of sick jokes have both been selected for inclusion in the finished project! Woohoo!
For those of you who can’t remember what they were you can see them (WARNING! do not click if you’re easily offended!) here and here.
The book is already available on Amazon for preorder and is released on the 20th October.
I have some concerns that the… unsavory nature of the book and my illustrations could hurt my intended reputation as an occasionally slightly risque family illustrator (see
deviANT and Bearded Clam for examples) but I’m sure that I’m worrying over nothing. Possibly.
Although the drawings are unpleasant they’re not racist or religious, the subjects that people find most offensive when joked about.

My search for a quality ‘made-to-order’ merchandise supplier has led me to settle with the market leader, CafePress.

I initially tried a small fledgling UK company called SP!CE but because their way of adding new products is not online but is arranged by emailing their design team who then add the new products manually to their site it took ages for any changes to appear. In addition to this they could not supply black tee-shirts of a decent quality and their mug printing method results in mugs that are not dishwasher safe.
I like to support the little guy, but I’m afraid SP!CE didn’t cut the mustard.

I then tried Spreadshirt, a US outfit that initially seemed quite good but to sell world wide I had to set up two entirely seperate accounts, one for America and one for Europe. There was no automation for adding multiple products and no way to duplicate the store from one account to the other. I had to do everything twice.
They also don’t do black tees at all unless the image is a vector so I abandoned that company too.

That left me with CafePress whose quality is top notch, they do very good ‘direct print’ black tees, dishwater safe mugs and a huge range of different products. They deliver world wide, their shipping prices aren’t too bad and they’re pretty fast too.

So I’ve re-vamped the Biro-Art.com store added some new designs and added lots of new products. Have a look and see what you think. Show me the money!

VISIT THE BIRO-ART STORE

I’m really not happy with the Gallery thumbnails being a single low quality image-map.
Apart from the quality issue, it makes it very tedious to add a new image to the thumbs, I’d have to re-do the entire image map from scratch each time somethning new is added. A huge pain in the arse.
So I’ve put it back to individual images and hosted them on the free web space that I get from my ISP, Ntlworld. There’s only 55MB of space but it appears to be unlimited bandwith judging from previous experiance when I hosted From Heaven to Hell there in June 2004. That was an 1mb image getting 30,000 hits a week without any problems.

Gah!
There have been so many requests to the Servage server where my images are stored that it couldn’t cope and died. Servage have disabled the account!
The culprit is again the Gallery page with its large amount of small images.

To combat this I’ve made all the gallery thumbnails into a single image and created an image map for the individual links to each drawing. It’s not ideal because to get such a complex image down to a sensible file size I’ve had to optimise it severely which has compromised the image quality quite a bit. How I hate JPG artefacts!
The benefit of doing like this is that the page now contains six images instead of a hundred.
Once things calm down I shall put it back to normal but for now people will have to put up with low quality thumbnails.

In an effort to reduce bandwidth bills most of the images have been moved to another, cheaper host (Servage.com) where they can clock up as much bandwith as they like. The site itself remains at Clook with all of Clook’s fantastic customer service advantages.
The hits are still coming in at stupid levels, around 50,000 a day with somewhere around 400,000 requests.
This high level of requests seems to be due to my Gallery page which contains over on hundred seperate images each counting as a request every time someone new comes to the page.
As Metafilter, Digg and all the other new linkers spawned from them are all linking directly to the gallery page this is nearly every visitor!