Added 1 new A* page:Here's something I do once or twice a week now so I thought I might as well get my money's worth by making it into a blog post: shipping A* original art! Yeah so when someone wins an auction for the actual ink-on-paper drawing behind the daily A* page (here's the auction of today's page on eBay, for instance), then it's time to box it up and ship it off to them! And although these pages are of course flat, I use boxes rather than envelopes because well you'd be surprised the ways shipping people can come up with to mutilate even sturdy priority shipping envelopes and stuff. So here we have a sample piece of original art (this was page 30, which I shipped off a few weeks ago), the still-folded-flat box it's going to go in, and some materials to fasten it in there securely:
Those are strips of hm I think it was about 150 lb illustration paper trimmed off from previous drawings--tough stuff, and I use it along with that spool of approved USPS packing tape to strap the page down to one inner side of the box:
At first I thought I'd need packing material to fill in the rest of the box, but that doesn't actually end up securing and isolating the artwork any better than this simple and lightweight approach!
From there all I have to do is to seal up the ends of the box
and march it down to the postage-printing robot at the local post-office--early in the morning the main office isn't even open, just the little side area with the PO boxes and the robot, so it's nice and quiet and generally no waiting :D :
Pop the label the robot prints out for me onto the box, scan its bar code into the eBay app on my phone to send its tracking data directly to the auction winner, pop it into the shipping bin, and we're done! And just a few days away from one more happy customer getting their A* artwork, huzzah!
I'm not sure if they still have it but at least a while back I know the postal service offered a kit you could get to print out your own postage labels at home, and I think maybe even have the packages picked up for you. If I keep up selling four or five pieces of A* art a week like I have been then I guess I'll have to check into that--although then I'd kind of miss my early-morning visits to the postage robot. :o
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