Setting Up Shop: Sell Fantastic Prints
Amarilys Henderson · Watercolor Illustrator, Design Thinker
A likable, honest 35-minute Etsy print-shop walkthrough with real scanning and packaging steps, but shallow on the marketing math that actually drives sales.
Setting Up Shop: Sell Fantastic Prints is a 35-minute tour through the mechanics of running an online print shop, taught by watercolor illustrator Amarilys Henderson. The class is structured as a checklist rather than a deep dive: nine short lessons move from defining a brand, through production and photography, to listing, shipping, and long-term maintenance. That structure is the course's biggest strength and its biggest limitation at once. It never lingers long enough to feel padded, but it also never goes far enough into any one skill to make a student meaningfully better at it.
What it actually teaches
The most useful stretch of the course is the production lesson, where Henderson walks through her actual scanning and cleanup workflow. She scans at 600 DPI in TIFF rather than JPEG to avoid compression loss, then uses Photoshop's levels tool with the white eyedropper, a flattened duplicate layer (Command+Shift+E), and the magic wand to isolate and clean up a leaf illustration, erasing stray marks and rebuilding edges with the rubber stamp tool. This is specific and demonstrable, the kind of technique a beginner can replicate step by step. The photography lesson builds on the same logic in a smart way: instead of photographing finished prints directly, she photographs a blank sheet of paper for consistent lighting and color, then composites the artwork on top in Photoshop using a multiply blend mode, which solves a real problem (inconsistent color between shop photos) with a workaround anyone with basic Photoshop skills can copy.
The branding and "define" sections are much softer. They amount to encouragement to look at your own creative habits and notice patterns, borrow a "recipe" concept from another Etsy coach for pricing tiers, and use Canva for banner sizing. None of this is wrong, but none of it is taught in a way that produces a concrete deliverable beyond vague self-reflection prompts. A student finishing these lessons has been asked good questions but not given much of a method for answering them.
Practical operations get the most airtime
The back half of the course, covering fulfillment and long-term shop maintenance, is where the class earns its "insights from hard-earned experience" framing. The homemade flat mailer, built from a single sheet of poster board folded into thirds and taped into a padded envelope, is a genuinely useful, cheap alternative to buying rigid mailers in bulk. The advice to raise prices gradually, sometimes paired with a loyalty discount code for existing buyers, is sound small-business practice. The example of relisting a pumpkin print across autumn, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and then kitchen decor to keep one listing's search history alive while reaching new buyers is a clever, transferable idea.
Where it falls short
The keyword research section names three tools, Etsy Rank, Marmalead, and SEOBook, but only describes them at a surface level rather than demonstrating a full keyword strategy in action. Students who already have a shop and want to improve conversion or traffic will likely find this section thin. The course also leans heavily on secondhand quotes from other shop owners rather than building out its own frameworks, which reinforces the feel of a collection of tips rather than a taught skill.
Overall, this is a friendly, beginner-appropriate primer that delivers real value in production and shipping, and much less in marketing and branding. Anyone starting a print shop from scratch will leave with a usable starting checklist. Anyone looking to grow an existing shop's sales will need to look elsewhere for the harder analytical work.
The standout
The homemade flat-mailer technique, folding a single sheet of poster board into a padded envelope sized to the print, is a concrete, repeatable cost-saver most competing classes skip entirely.
What you will learn
- How to scan and clean up a watercolor painting in Photoshop using levels, layer masks, and the magic wand to prep it for printing
- How to choose a printer and paper (inkjet with rich black, cotton rag paper) for print quality
- How to research keywords for listing titles using Etsy Rank, Marmalead, and SEOBook
- How to build a simple color-corrected product photo by compositing art onto a photographed blank paper background
- How to package and ship prints cheaply using a homemade poster-board flat mailer
- How to reprice and re-season old listings to keep a shop's best sellers relevant
Best for: A beginner who paints or illustrates and wants a plain-English checklist for opening or tidying up an Etsy print shop.
Skip it if: Anyone who already sells prints and needs advanced SEO, paid ads, or scaling strategy, since the tips here stay at a beginner, common-sense level.