THE ZAZZLE REVIEW: TODAY’S FEATURE ZAZZLER IS AMY MARIE

Monday, May 2, 2011

TODAY’S FEATURE ZAZZLER IS AMY MARIE

Amy Marie currently lives in New Jersey, U.S.A. However, Amy loves to travel and has lived in New Jersey, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Africa and Germany … for lack of anywhere else to be!!! She is a very spontaneous person and if someone said to her tomorrow … ‘hey, wanna move to …’ they wouldn’t have to finish the sentence and Amy would already be packing, and wherever she goes, she takes her camera.

Graduation Cap & Diploma by GraduationStation

Travel is Amy’s life. She loves to travel anywhere and everywhere! She LOVES Germany, especially Heidelberg and she would move back there in an instant!

Pink Peace Now by PeacePeople

Amy has always been a doodler. Her mother is an art teacher and her grandfather was a professional artist. Amy’s Peace People shop is comprised 100% of these little guys she used to doodle on her notebooks from the time she was about 10-11 years old. These characters always held peace signs, as they do now, although now their message has evolved to reflect the broad spectrum of Amy’s liberal-hippie-tree-hugging persona.

Teal can't we get along by PeacePeople

Amy loves color. She hand draws and edits purchased clipart, always adding bright, vibrant colors. She also loves photography, especially bright vibrant flowers and architecture. When she lived in Germany her roommates made fun of her because 1/3 of the photos she took were photos of doors, windows, stairwells, awnings, chimneys, roof lines....and other things they would overlook. But Amy loved the artistic value in them and the shots came out great! Even they had to agree, after they saw some of her shots, that they never saw things the way she did, but that her shots were beautiful. Some of those friends even had copies of Amy’s photos of the old house they lived in as their screen-savers by the time Amy left.

Monkey Tree Hugger by shopaholicchick

Life is what inspires Amy... she is inspired by what she sees. She is also inspired by her customers. Amy lives by the mantra ‘I am not the shopper’. So she does a lot of work based on what the customers seem to want. Her Zazzle shops based on this mantra are the part of Amy’s business that make her the living and allow her the ability to work on the other shops with the art she loves. This includes her Peace People shop. She gets so much more excited when items from that shop sell than when a hockey design from Just Sports sells for example.

Toothless player by justsports

Amy took grade school art classes along with her classmates. In College she took a Ceramics class because she needed an art class. As a child, Amy went along to many of her mother’s college art classes and learned with her mom. Amy’s grandfather, a professional artist who drew the yellow pages (before computers), looked after her after school and she watched him drawing and stenciling letters into little boxes. He would give her some of the special papers and she used to color on them. For years after he retired she used sheets of that paper for her school notes and to doodle on. She still has a few pieces of her grandfather’s art, a painting and a sketch. Amy is completely self-taught on computers and graphic programs. She has learned a lot by trial and error. She says she makes a lot of errors, but some of them work out great.

Happy Mother's Day Bouquet by shopaholicchick

Amy Marie is a member of a small local art center near her home. She doesn’t actively participate in the gallery there, but she has given private lessons to members on how to set up a Zazzle store, setting up an eBay account and Paypal account. She will be teaching a class on beginners Photoshop this spring about how to do some basics of photo-editing in Photoshop.

Swan by BisforBirds

Lately Amy has been playing more with her Wacom tablet. She has had if for about two years and is still not very proficient with it. So she has been using it a lot lately trying to get better so she can expand more into freehand drawing.

Columbus Sailed by what_if

I asked what is coming from her easel in the near future. Amy said, ‘Ask me next week ;)’

9th Birthday Dragon by dragons_lair

Amy sells her art and designs online through Print on Demand sites. She currently has shops on Zazzle and Skreened. The Skreened shops are quite small right now because they require a different file type than Zazzle.