Projects

Selling things on ETSY

Art, Projects

I finally got around to actually selling something on ETSY. I’ve been meaning to do it ever since I made my first skull door knocker in 2008. But I never got around to it. It’s one of those things that once you do it you think, what took me so long to do this? It’s really easy, they take care of everything but shipping.

I got the posters printed on winkflash.com. I’ve used them for a bunch of other printing projects and I’m happy with them like always. If you get on their mailing list they have great coupons for products.

I’m going to finally get around to putting some skull door knockers on there too. Hopefully I can kick the procrastination in 2012

-Mark

Mark5four0’s Etsy Shop

Box Office Contest

Projects, websites

I’ve been in a ‘Box Office Prediction’ contest at work for several years and I’ve always found it interesting that there’s not really a site out there that will run this kind of thing for you. So I hooked up a combination of php pages with a mysql database and a php script that will pull the daily results from boxofficemojo. It’s clearly a rickety system and I haven’t worked out all the kinks, some movies don’t show up on the daily results, but those ones probably wont make the top 10 anyway.

http://www.boxoffice.swalrus.org/

Project Progress : Rad Poster, Will I ever finish this thing?

Art, Projects

I’m trying really hard to stay motivated on this project. I love the movie, but I’m running low on free time and all the new house stuff is taking up a lot of my time. I’ve pretty much got all the major moments of the film in some degree of completion in the poster. I’m struggling with a few layout issues, it’s harder than I thought to include all the major and some of the minor characters in a poster and still make the image flow and look coherent. I have a lot of respect for all poster artists now. It’s been about 2 months since the last update, so I have a couple more characters than usual, as always these aren’t the final versions. I’m still getting all the skintones and color palate correct. This is clearly going to be the biggest Illustrator project that I’ve ever attempted.

Like always it’s a challenge for me to keep scale in mind when it comes to detail for the project. Example, even if I print this out at 44×61 those two girls are probably going to be about 3 inches tall… they have way too much detail, but I got carried away.

Please forgive the crudity of this model, I didn’t have time to build it to scale.

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Either I have too many projects or too little attention

Art, Projects



Somehow I’ve convinced myself that all my projects are easy. That I can just run to Home Depot at 8:45 and somehow have them completed by the morning.  It’s coming down to crunch time for wedding projects, so I really need to start working on them instead of all the other projects that keep popping up in my head! I’m still keen on the idea of having a photo booth at the wedding.  I slacked off some when I tested the software and camera setup and got everything working about 2 months ago.  I just needed to find a printer that would work, I freecycled an epson 840 which should be able to print on the 4×6 photo paper. I’m at the step now where I can pretty much see it completed, which is usually the point where I lose motivation.

I need to keep moving so I can get these things done!

Here is a list of projects that I have going on right now. They are in various stages of completion.

  • Skull door knockers
  • Paper Lantern style Photo Booth
  • Fantasy Football Trophy
  • FJM website and logo
  • Box office Contest website
  • Hannah and Opie Wedding art gift
  • Micah and Renee wedding art gift
  • Bachelor Party/Draft this weekend

There’s probably more… but I’ve forgotten about them.

Cru Jones Rad Hoodie

Projects, Stuff and Things

Gentlemen, behold!

Look what I have created!

It’s a hooded sweatshirt version of Cru Jones’ Rad Racing jersey from Rad. I know this movie came out in 1986 and it isn’t even popular enough to be released on DVD yet. But I just wanted one. I wanted it bad. I think it’s the right time for something like this. I don’t know what you call this genre of clothing. Adult costumes you can wear everyday? Costume Hoodies? I’m starting to see them out there more and more. Marc Ecko has a Star Wars line that is really awesome (I own the storm trooper hoodie)  A few years ago I thought it would be a cool idea to print out my own version of the “Rad Racing” shirt from the movie. But then I found that someone else had beat me to it. If you do a search for that now you’ll find a lot of different versions of it.  The colors of this aren’t “movie prop accurate” but I thought bright red and blue would be too much to actually wear on a regular basis, which is what I made this for.  I can’t wait for the first time somebody gets the reference and asks me where I got it.

When I was designing this I had all these grand plans to sell them on Etsy.com. I even thought of two company names, High Art Hoodies or Cult Status.  I thought that if I could sell them for about $75 it would make it worth the effort. Everything was going great until I hit the last step, sewing. It turns out that sewing is hard. I did eventually finish but the quality is on par with Old Navy not Marc Ecko. Luckily I was going for the comfortable soft felt vibe. If I do get some response on this I’ll probably have to find some ways to make the process easier. Like having someone else do the sewing! I do have all the templates for the stars and letters ready, so that will save some time. I’m thinking I could get them laser cut from a fabrication shop and then find out how much a dry cleaners or alteration shop would charge me to sew them on. With this being a limited edition product with a small but dedicated I would imagine that someone would be interested in it.

Get your taste of the thunder after the break… and more pictures.

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