I’ve hinted in previous posts about revealing some ways that you can make some cash from public domain images. If you’ve clicked thru on any of my ‘see more’ links on my posts you may have already seen that there are opportunities to earn money on eBay with public domain products which you can easily produce yourself. I’ve been doing this for a number of years and I can seriously say that:

1. it is one of the best discoveries I ever made
2. you can make a lot of money
3. profit margins are extremely high

Of late, the main focus of my eBay business has been vintage book collections on CD but as I’ve been discussing images I’m going to give you some ideas about using PD images for commercial projects

• PICTURE CD’S  the most obvious one – which I have personally tried with success. Compile a collection of quality images onto a disc and sell that disc on eBay. I promise you this DOES work! The beauty of this is the images cost you nothing! Your only expense is the cost of the CD on which to burn the images.
• PRINTS you can find some amazing and beautiful images (book illustrations & photos). Print them out and sell the prints – or sell them in a set. Last time I checked, you can have 6×9 inch prints professionally done at supermarket photolabs for 25p (about 37c). Set of 4 stunning prints = £1 sell them for £6-£10 even more! I can personally testify again that THIS WORKS!
• MERCHANDISE anything that can be printed onto (t shirts, mugs, mouse mats) can be sold – you can come up with some amazing looking products using PD images.
• CAFE PRESS do exactly what I mentioned above based on your designs / images. They feature your stuff on their site, if something sells they produce the merch, ship it and pay you a commission. You can actually get you own featured Cafe Press store for something like $6 p/month which is great value. Check it out at http://www.cafepress.com/

Finally today, I was looking at some illustrations by Arthur Rackham which made me realise just how exceptional his work was. 90 years later there have been some magnificent artists in the realm of  ’fantasy art’ and today there are many great ‘digital’ artists working in that genre but I honestly think that Rackhams work easily stands up against any of them.

These are taken from the book Irish Fairy Tales by J Stevens:

To see more Fairy Tale illustrations by Rackham and others click here