Day 350

Here is my Breaking Bad crayon which is my favorite carving I've done so far. I loved the show so I was looking forward to giving this a try. The gun behind the back was inspired by the pose Jesse has on the Breaking Bad wallpaper I have on my desktop. I think it's a nice extra touch and adds some asymmetry. My favorite part is probably the zipper. I'm not sure where I got the idea to carve in the individual teeth of the zipper, but I'm glad I did. I'm really happy with how the whole carving turned out and funny enough, it's not really that hard to make. For a lot of the other crayons I do, I have to be very precise about everything. But here, it's a guy in a baggy yellow jumpsuit so I can carve away without having to look at reference images. For this carving, I obviously had to add in a lot of other colors via melting which seems difficult. However it's mostly small areas of color so it wasn't that bad. I figured this would be a good example to explain some of the finer points of melting wax.

This carving used three melted wax application techniques. The first is adding a bulk amount of wax to the surface of the carving. This includes the hands, gun and pink filters. These structures did not exist on the initial carving. I added in the melted wax drop by drop until the bulk of wax was large enough and then I carved that to the desired result. This is in contrast to the shoes and the mound of blue meth. Both of these structures were initially carved into the yellow crayon. Here the melted wax was brushed onto the surface almost like paint. Instead of a bulk, a thin layer of wax is applied. This technique is useful for coloring a large area but it's much more prone to color bleeding which is when the melted wax ends up melting the solid wax it is being applied to. This bleeding isn't that noticeable when adding a bulk of wax because it ends up getting covered by more wax. It's harder to hide with a thin layer though. For the blue meth, I place a layer of white first and then a layer of blue on top of that to minimize the yellow bleeding into the blue to turn it green. The last technique is carving into the surface of the crayon and then filling that empty space with melted wax. This was used for the white and black of the gas mask. The black wasn't simply placed on top of the yellow. I carved in grooves and then filled those grooves with the melted black wax. Then I carved it smooth so it was flush with the yellow wax. The rules of bleeding wax still apply though which why the white has a yellow tinge to it. 

  

When I finished the crayon, I remembered that I had a small chemistry flask and thought I could use it to hold the crayon. But the flask ended up being too big. I was still enamored with this idea, so I went online and ordered smaller flasks. They were the smallest ones I could find and they still ended up being too big. My brother had a centerpiece from a wedding he recently attended. It was filled with slightly blue broken glass pieces. So I took those and put them in the flask to elevate the crayon above the rim. The glass isn't quite as blue as the meth on the show but I think it all works well together.

Day 349

I've mentioned before that even though I don't watch Doctor Who, I wanted to make crayons based on it since it has a rabid fan base. I made a Tardis a few days before my Tumblr started trending. It did not look that great. Difficult things for me to carve are straight lines and flat surfaces. The main tool I use has a curved edge which makes creating something perfectly flat challenging. Unfortunately, a Tardis is made pretty much completely of straight lines and flat surfaces. Since I wasn't happy with the end result and I now had thousands of new followers to judge me, I ended up not posting the first Tardis I made. The Tardis you see here is the second one I made. It's not perfect, but I think it's pretty good. The blue ended up bleeding into the white but that's something that's very hard to avoid. One of the dental tools I have has a square flat end which is just the right size to carve in the square shapes on the sides of the Tardis. Without that tool, I'm pretty sure I would have rage quit in the middle of making it. 

So why do I have a cat paired up with a Tardis? About two months ago, I joined an online Secret Santa on this geek centric website's forums. Based on the previous year's gifts, I was hoping some generous person would be my Santa and get me cool stuff off my wishlist. Sadly, I ended up with someone who bought me just one item that was below the minimum spending limit. Oh well. I looked over the wishlist of the person I had to get a gift for (I already knew when I joined I would give them crayons). I saw that they liked Doctor Who and cats. That gave me the reason to try making a Tardis again and then I carved the cat above. To be honest, I didn't spend a lot of time on the cat. The body was easy enough but I had trouble with the head. I wanted a more cartoony look for the face which clashed with the realistic head shape I carved. It could be better but she loved the gift anyway and that's all that really matters.  

Day 348

I got a request to make a C3P0 crayon. I made one while ago using a normal sized crayon. I didn't really like how that turned out though so I never put it up on Etsy. With this request, I had a chance to right that wrong. I used a large sized crayon this time. With the larger size, I could have a more detailed face along with adding in features of his torso. I liked all the details I was able to include on the body. However with the head having the same width of the body, he looks a little anorexic. For the head, it was mostly carved normally. I had to melt and apply wax for the eyebrow ridges and the entire halo around his head. I like how he turned out but he still looked a little off to me. I think maybe it's because I've never really looked closely at him and don't have a good mental image of him in my head.

I had another request for Chewbacca. I had planned on making him at some point so having some pay me was pretty good motivation. My original idea was different from what's here. I planned on having some shoulders and torso with his bandolier going across. I started carving inward around the head to create the shoulders. I quickly realized that I was losing space for the head and maybe I should stop since I wanted maximum space to work with. With no shoulders, there wasn't anything to indicate where the head actual ends except for the crayon wrapper so I had to be careful that I didn't tear too much off. Carving him was a little challenging. It didn't help that he seemed to look different in every picture of him online. A heavier texture for the hair probably would have been more accurate but I'm ok with the lighter lines here. The area around his mouth could be bulked out more. I'll do that the next time I make him. Overall, he isn't as good as he could be but he's better than I was expecting so that makes it a success.

Day 347

So I sold my Game of Thrones set to some guy in Australia awhile ago. Shiu Pei still had the crayons in her possession so she offered to ship them to him. Unfortunately when they arrived, most of them were broken. I'm guessing that Shiu Pei wrapped the whole framed set in bubblewrap. That protected the frame but I think the crayons just rattled around inside during shipment and broke. I was annoyed at first but I've sent off crayons myself that ended up breaking so I couldn't really blame Shiu Pei for something that I've done myself. In the end, it wasn't that big of a deal to make new ones. Instead of spending the weekend watching TV, I just watched TV while carving crayons. It was also a nice change of pace from the usual things I was making for my store. Interesting how what took me weeks to do before, I can now do in a weekend.

Some of the crayons ended up more or less the same, some were better and some were a little worse. Here are the crayons that I thought ended up better. Up top is the Stark direwolf which is I think very much improved. The first one's head was too long and narrow and dog looking in my opinion. This one is more robust. I liked it so much that I added it to my Etsy store by itself and have sold a few since.

Next is the Greyjoy kraken. The original's tentacles were kind of wavy and pointed downward. It was a little too messy for me and they were too short for the size of the squid. Here I made the tentacles curl together so they look neater and appear longer as well. 

Last is the Tully trout. The original didn't have a dorsal fin because there wasn't enough room. Back then, I also didn't want to use the melting technique because I felt like it was cheating. I don't mind that so much now so I added in the fin. I didn't make it as big as I would have liked since I didn't want it too look obvious that it extends out of the cylinder of the crayon. Then I drew in lines for the scales and fins. Below I have the new set that I sent out. I haven't heard anything from the guy so I assumed they arrived safely.

Day 346

It's been awhile since the last time I wrote here. It hasn't felt like a month has gone by but I guess it has. It's been even longer since the last time I posted some new crayons. I wrote about Tumblr and Etsy the last time I updated this blog so I'm going to just do new crayons for now and then hopefully some more posts in a few days to make up for lost time.

Back during the early days of my crayon endeavors, I was contacted by a graphic designer. Along with his usual design work, he also does speaking engagements for various events. He was doing one about creativity and came across my work and asked if he could include it in his talk. I said sure. Then he asked if I could carve The Dude and Walter from The Big Lebowski. Even now with so much crayon carving experience under my belt, I would hesitate trying to carve real people. I thought maybe I could do these two characters because they have very distinct features like their hair style and facial hair. I also thought I could include their sunglasses to cover the eyes to avoid having to carve those too. I told him I could give it a try since I wasn't that confident.

It's been years since I last saw The Big Lebowski. In my head, I envisioned Walter having blond hair while The Dude had more brown hair. So I decided Walter would be made with a yellow crayon and The Dude with a tan one. In reality though, they both have similar colored hair. I started with Walter since he seemed the easier of the two. I don't remember the process of making him too well except being pleasantly surprised with how he turned out. His face could be less flat but it's not too bad.

The Dude was a little harder. The main issue was his hair. In order to make space for his hair, I had to shrink the size of his head and face. I realized then his head size wouldn't match Walter's so I tried to keep the face as large as possible. The end result is that the proportions aren't quite right and he doesn't look as much like The Dude as he could have. He's usually pictured in his bathrobe but I liked the Southwest style sweater he also wears. It seemed more visually interesting than a plain bathrobe. Overall, I'm happy with the end result.

Day 343

Here's a screenshot of me crossing the 10,000 follower mark. It happened while I was sleeping so I didn't get the exact moment. It happened about a week after I started trending. During the first 12 hour period, I got 2000 new followers and during the next 12, I got a similar amount. Then it started to decrease from there. 

Here's a screen shot of my Tumblr email notifications, which came every 12 hours, in reverse order. The amount of followers steadily decreased as I went lower on the list of trending blogs on the Tumblr app. You can see that it suddenly drops from almost 200 to the teens near the top. I think this is when I stopped appearing on the app. 

During this time, I also received this email from Tumblr saying on the was on their Radar. This meant I would appear on the side bar whenever people looked at their Tumblr dashboard. You can see an example below on the right. What pops up there is random though and even after hitting refresh a lot, I never saw myself appear. Maybe Tumblr is encoded so I don't appear for myself. 

So I've trended on Tumblr and hopefully been on their radar. The next and highest step is to be on Tumblr's Spotlight where they recommend blogs to people looking for new things. It's the closest thing to a front page Tumblr has. While I could only see myself trending on the app, the Spotlight is easily accessible on their webpage. We'll see if I ever get on there.

Day 342

A few weeks ago, I woke up in the morning, went on my computer and looked my Tumblr stats like I usually do. I check to see if anything interesting happened over night (usually nothing does). Everything looked normal but then I noticed that it said I had 900 followers. I was pretty sure I had a little less than 700 the previous day. I thought maybe I had 6 and 9 mixed up in my head. Then I refreshed the stats and now it said I had over a thousand followers. I was a little dumbfounded considering I usually get maybe 10 new followers on a good day. So I knew something was up. I thought maybe a big website wrote about me but I couldn't find anything on Google. Or maybe some super popular person on Tumblr was sharing my stuff to their followers. I couldn't figure it out. Then I got this email from Tumblr:

Apparently I was trending. This happened a few days after I uploaded the group photo of my Adventure Time crayons. It was fairly popular and I think had a few thousand notes at that point. I'm still not sure if I was trending because that post was getting popular or if someone on Tumblr noticed me and decided to stamp me with the Trending label and then I actually began trending. Either way, my account was blowing up. Tumblr itself doesn't really have a front page so I couldn't see myself being promoted on their website. However, their mobile app does have a section for trending blogs and tags. So among the prestigious company of the New Yorker, PBS and Baby Animal Tongues, I found myself. I think I was about the fourth one down on the list. As days went on, I would get lower and lower on the list and get less and less attention.

But for the time being I was happy. Twelve hours after I started trending, I got this email update from Tumblr.

Crazy.

Day 341

Yup. So that finally happened. It was like a month ago but like I've said, I'm behind and also writing about things out of order. The funny thing is that trying to sell this set was the original motivation of my online presence. I opened an Etsy store to sell it. I created a Tumblr account so I could post it on the Game of Thrones Tumblr. Then things took off from there. A guy in Australia bought it. There were some complications but I'll write about it later.

A few weeks ago, I saw the Game of Thrones Facebook page post some of the fan art from their Tumblr page. I was happy to see they included mine. It ended up getting about 9000 likes, 1000 shares and 300 comments. A lot of those comments were dildo related.

Then a few days ago, I was googling myself again and found my Donnie Darko crayon was posted on the Donnie Darko Facebook page. There it got even more likes and shares than the Game of Thrones one. A handful of people commented on wanting to buy it (unfortunately it had no link to me or my Etsy store). I don't know how willing they would be if they realized the price. One guy said "Hoang Tran if you're reading this, message me". I'll probably message him eventually but I'm a little busy at the moment.

Donnie Darko and Game of Thrones have millions of fans on Facebook so it's kind of weird thinking that my crayons have been seen by potentially millions of people.

Day 340

I've been writing about things out of order so this happened quite awhile ago, back when I first started to get noticed. I was contacted by a woman from the UK about writing an article about me. She worked for Caters News Agency. They don't publish articles themselves though. Instead they write articles and collect photos and sell them to other websites or newspapers to publish. So there was an opportunity for me to make some money off of this. I had to answer a lengthy list of questions and since I wanted the article to be good, I provided lengthy answers. She also requested photos of myself with the crayons which I begrudgingly provided. She also asked if I had any videos of myself carving a crayon. I said no but would try to make one. That's why I made a video of myself carving Finn. I'll upload it at some point. A week or so went by and then the article appeared.

It was published on the website of the Daily Mail which I believe is the second largest newspaper in the UK. That was cool, however the website has so much content that I'm not sure how many people actually came across it. I knew Brits like puns for their headlines and they made one for the title of the article. Unfortunately, it doesn't make much sense. Coincidentally around the same time, Banksy was spending time in New York making street art. He called his residency there "All I Ever Wanted was a Shoulder to Crayon" (spoiler alert: I'm Banksy). Anyway, the article was a very condensed version of the answered I provided. It was almost like it was made of bullet points. I guess they wanted to keep it short so it'll be easier to sell. The only real inaccurate thing about the article was that it made it seem like I quit dental school to carve crayons when really I just stumbled onto it while pursuing other things.

Apparently, Maeby Funke is a reader of the Daily Mail. Anyway, a few weeks went by and I didn't hear anything from my UK contact. I figured they didn't sell the article anywhere. Then out of the blue, I got a invoice saying I made about $100 off of a sale to Hello Canada magazine and/or website. I couldn't find any article from them about me since so I don't now if they actually did anything. Nonetheless I was pretty happy considering it's practically free money. I think I'm also due another hundred from a sale next month but I don't know who bought it yet. The original agreement with Caters was for a three month association and I have another month left on that. I bring that up because oddly enough I was also contacted by another UK based news agency asking to write an article and perform similar functions as the first one. I might take them up on that to see where that goes. 

On a slightly related note (I don't remember if I've written about this), I was contacted via Tumblr by a guy from Disney Magazine in Malaysia. He asked if they could publish images of my work. I replied to the email address he gave but he never responded. Sad. Maybe I could have gotten the attention of the US side of Disney.

Day 339

I've mentioned before that different websites and blogs have written about my work. A few are original articles while a lot are just reposts from other sites. Every now and then I google myself to see what's been written. I don't look too hard. Maybe I should set up google alerts or something. Anyway, here are a few notable ones. After the initial flurry of articles, things kind of died down a bit. Then I noticed a lot of hits on my Etsy store one day and I traced it back to an article on Boing Boing. I have never heard of the site but I guess it's popular because it lead to other sites finding me. 

One of those was The Daily Dot, another site I wasn't familiar with. Someone there contacted me asking permission to post images along with some other basic questions about my work. I obliged and the end result is above.

More recently, I was contacted by Mashable. They wanted to post images and ask some questions as well. I have heard about this site before but don't frequent it. Both of the above sites contacted me through Etsy. I'm not sure if they found me on Etsy or through my Tumblr, but Tumblr's messaging system is terrible so I'm not surprised they used Etsy. I also added an email address (carvedcrayons@gmail) on my Etsy shop for people to contact me if they don't have an Etsy account which some people have used. I had to decide between carved crayons or crayon carvings. I wanted wax nostalgic but I that was already taken. Carved crayons is easy to remember though and it matched my Etsy shop name (which also wanted that to be Wax Nostalgic but that was taken too).

Day 336

In my Etsy shop, there is an option to request a custom order. I've had a handful of requests, though few have actually gone through. My first two were Doctor Who related. One guy wanted a Tardis and a girl wanted a Tadis and a Dalek. The guy was in Australia and I guess the shipping cost was too much for him so he never replied back. And I guess the cost for two crayons was too much for the girl. Next I spent awhile messaging a girl in Singapore. She wanted to buy Princess Bubblegum as a gift. Side note: I've noticed that quite of few of my orders are gifts for other people. My crayons aren't exactly cheap so I think it's too much for most people. However if it's a gift, then the price isn't too bad. People would rather splurge on others than themselves. Anyway, Singapore girl needed the crayon in a week for a birthday and I couldn't guarantee that it would arrive in time so that order fell through.

Someone asked for a French bulldog. I wanted to do this but the guy never responded either. What I like about these requests is that they ask for things I would never think of which is fun. One guy asked for an Elvira carving which got me excited because it would be a challenge. That would require applying white wax (for skin) onto a black crayon (for hair and her dress). I would have done it from the chest up so I could carve some nice cleavage. I was really curious if I could carve a pretty face. But the guy never replied. I hadn't even quoted him a price yet so I don't know why he didn't.

My latest request was for a Loki carving. This I also want to do and believe can turn out pretty cool. The lady agreed to the price so I'm just waiting for her to pay for it. Hopefully she does that soon. It's for decorating her two year old son's room who is named Loki.

So a fair amount of requests that haven't worked out. Well below is one that did work out and I think it's awesome.

It's Frank the Rabbit from the movie Donnie Darko. I like the film. I liked the idea. I was happy to do this. I even applied extra color free of charge. The base crayon is black and I applied grey for the eyes and teeth. I originally wanted the base crayon to be grey since I thought black would be too dark but he wanted black. The grey is already fairly dark so there isn't too much contrast with the black. Besides the fact that the ears should be more spread apart (which I couldn't do), I think it's a good likeness. What was nice was that I didn't have to be really precise about everything. For most carvings, I pore over reference images trying to get every detail right. But Frank's mask has an irregular shape and surface so I didn't need to worry about precision. Pretty much all my previous crayons have a smooth surface. Even my fox, which should be furry, was smooth. Here though I added in some texture. The head has a fur-like texture. For the mask, I ended up drawing countless overlapping fine lines. It gave the mask an almost metallic look because you can see tiny spots of shininess in the light. It's a little hard to see that in this picture though.

So I sent the crayon off feeling pretty good about myself. Then a few days later, I got a message from the guy saying the ears broke off during shipment. I was surprised by that. I ship the crayons in the test tubes I showed awhile back. The tubes are long and the crayon can slide up and down so I put in a ball of tissue paper first so the carved end of the crayon doesn't bang into the plastic. The crayon can also move side to side a bit. However the distance it can move laterally is less than a millimeter so I didn't think it could build up enough momentum in that distance to create enough force to break the crayon. I guess the package was rattling like crazy for the ears to break. So I ended up carving a new Frank the same day and sent it off the next day. The guy got it a few days later and was happy. On the bright side, I asked him to mail the broken one back to me so once I fix it, I can keep it for myself.

Pro-tip: I print my USPS shipping labels through Etsy's site but there wasn't an option to print a second label to the same person. So I went to the USPS website to print a label but found out they don't allow printing of First Class mail which is the cheapest option and the one I use. Luckily, I found out that Paypal let's you print First Class postage (probably because there are a lot of Ebay sellers using Paypal). So keep that in mind if you ever need to do that.

Day 335

In the past, I've written about how I carve late at night often. The light in my room isn't that bright so I don't see what I'm doing very well. Often it isn't until the next day when I have sunlight that I can clearly see what I did the previous night. I decided to fix this by finding my old lamp in our basement. It's a desk lamp so all the light is directed downward onto what I'm working on and not in my face which is nice.

The funny thing is that it's too much light and I see things too clearly now. When I take photos of my crayons, it gets blown up so big on my computer screen that I see all the faults and defects. It looks bad on the screen, but in real life it looks fine. Now with this lamp, I can see all the defects as if I was zoomed in with my camera. Now I spend too much time trying to perfect everything when it actually looks fine in normal lighting conditions. I'll keep using the lamp though because too much light is still better than too little.

Above is a picture of my work area. It's pretty fancy working on the floor (hurts my knees after awhile though). I took this picture at night with my normal room light off and just this lamp on. I thought it would look cool but unfortunately, my room isn't big so I couldn't back up enough to get the right shot. Now it just looks like a poorly lit photo. Anyway, on the top left, you can see my crayons and completed carvings sitting in test tubes. You can also see my tray of crayon tips which I save if I need to melt them to fix or add to something. On the right, is my laptop for looking at reference photos and watching TV shows (it can't be a show that's too distracting though). Top right in the dark are my magical crayon melting tools.

Day 334

Most of the latest and upcoming posts aren't necessarily about things that occurred in chronological order. I've kind of just lumped things together by topic which seems to make more sense to me. This one will be about my Etsy sales. To me, Etsy is more interesting because I'm actually interacting with people more. What was odd about my sales at first was that they occurred in waves. Not in terms of being sporadic but in people ordering the same thing at the same time. So if you didn't know, I made a listing for most of the crayons I made so far. I list that there are multiple available and I make them to order. Anyway, back to the waves. And by waves, I mean like 2 or 3 so these waves aren't too big. I had to make a few R2D2s, then Stormtroopers, then Darth Vaders and then Totoros.

I mentioned previously that I was kind of sad that I would send away what I made and didn't get to keep a copy for myself. I also found out when I had to make the R2s that having an existing carving speeds up the duplication process since I could directly compare the two. So before doing the Stormtroopers, I decided that I would start making a copy for myself. It'll take some extra time but at least I won't have to do it again in the future. Also for everyone new carving I make, I can keep the best of the two. 

Because of that, one day I ended up having to make four Darth Vaders. Two were for customers, one for Senthil and one for myself. I was reminded of how much I dislike carving him. The geometry of his face is weird and hard to reproduce. It doesn't help that his helmet is big so I have to make the face smaller to be correctly proportionate. Also, carving black crayons is a pain because it's hard to see what I'm doing. It makes me want to increase the price so less people buy it.

These orders have been keeping me busy lately. I haven't been able to carve stuff that I want though. I can see that Star Wars crayons get ordered a lot while Adventure Time does not (younger audience with no money probably). I think if I did a Tardis from Doctor Who, it would sell similarly to Star Wars. I currently have 236 followers on Etsy and I'm sad that they haven't seen anything new in awhile. I'm kind of in a lull right now so hopefully I can do some new stuff and/or get back to modelling.

Day 333

Now for a Tumblr update. I currently have 643 followers. However, not much activity has been going on these past few weeks. First of all, I've been busy carving stuff I've sold on Etsy so I haven't been making many new things. For long stretches of time, I've been getting just a few likes and shares an hour. No-Face was an exception and got over a thousand notes. There's supposed to be a lot of activity on weekends so I posted Finn on a Sunday hoping he'd get a lot of attention. He got very little which surprised me. So I deleted that post and uploaded it again on Monday for another try. I got pretty much the same result. That was disappointing. I think I've mentioned how fickle Tumblr is. It's all about timing and luck. I liken it to trying to start a campfire. I create some sparks hoping a flame will catch. Most sparks die out quickly. Sometimes the kindling catches fire but goes out. If I'm lucky, a flame will start but usually it won't survive the night. Then there's Princess Bubblegum which burns forever. I just posted the Adventure Time group shot a few days ago and that did well. It survived the night and has over 3000 notes as of right now.  Otherwise, nothing too interesting going on on the Tumblr front. I actually think I'm getting more views on Etsy now a days.

I did notice that one of the people who bought my crayon posted it on their own Tumblr. I wouldn't have seen this normally but his username and profile picture are the same on Tumblr and Etsy so I looked at his page. I'm glad he liked it. Even though I've made sales on Etsy, I've yet to receive a review from a customer. So it's nice to get some feedback.

Day 332

With my success of mixing crayon wax for No-Face, I decided to go back and add some color to BMO. Shiu Pei bought BMO so I wanted to make it extra special for her. BMO was carved with a normal sized crayon so everything is even smaller than usual. I pretty much just applied a drop of melted wax for each button and then carefully carved the right shape. The drops are just sitting on top of the base crayon and not melted deep into it. I wasn't sure if they would just pop right off when I tried to carve them. Luckily they stuck on. I was very surprised the direction pad turned out ok. 

I finally got around to carving Finn. In the time between adding color to BMO and making Finn, I carved many other crayons but I'll talk about that later. The reason I took awhile to carve Finn was that most of the other characters in Adventure Time are predominately one color. Meanwhile Finn is mainly blue but white is also important. I couldn't use a blue crayon or his face would have been blue too and that would have looked weird. I thought about chopping a white crayon in half, attaching a tube of blue crayon for the body and then the rest of the white on top of that for the head. But that would have been too much work so I just settled with all white. I'm very happy with how he turned out. I actually recorded a video of myself carving him. The reason why I did that is yet another story for another post.

With Finn done, I could take more group shots. I think I'm done with Adventure Time. I haven't seen any new episodes recently though so I might get inspired in the future.

Day 329

I've done a carving for My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke. I had one more character from a Studio Ghibli movie planned which was No-Face from Spirited Away. However to make him work, I had to mix colors. I tried it before with Shiu Pei's owl. It wasn't easy but hopefully I learned from that. It was simple to carve the body out a black crayon. I melted a white crayon using my special tools to apply the mask. I placed a base layer which sometimes melted the black causing black swirls in the white. Luckily, applying more white on top was fine since the black swirls were unlikely to melt again since there were so little of it. With the mask applied, I smoothed it out and then carved in the face and markings. Unfortunately, it was hard to make out those features. So I melted a purple crayon to apply the four markings. The eyes and mouth holes still looked faint though so I smeared some barely melted gray wax into the walls of the holes (not filling it though). It turned out well although after I was done, I brushed everything off and black crayon dust in the brush got stuck on the white mask making it not pure white anymore.  

Here's my trio to represent Studio Ghibli. Below is a picture of the characters if you're unfamiliar with them. I was too lazy to get three pictures and Photoshop them together so it's just someone's drawing that happened to included the three characters together.

Day 328

It's been awhile since I've written here. I knew I've been behind but not this much. Oh well. Onward. One of my first customers on Etsy ordered all my Star Wars crayons which were Boba Fett, Darth Vader, the Storm Trooper and R2D2. I had planned on doing C3PO eventually. I asked her if she wanted a carving of him too. She said no since the crayons were a gift and she wanted them sooner rather than later. She might order more for the holidays though. So I put C3PO on the back burner until now. I originally wanted to make him out of a metallic gold crayon I have. However the crayon was more bronze than brass so I just used this non-metallic dark yellow crayon instead. Overall, I don't think he turned out that well. I guess if you're not a huge fan of Star Wars, he looks ok. However, I spent a few hours staring at photos of him so he looks off to me. Something with his head shape and proportions. I didn't put him on Etsy since I don't like him that much. Here's a group shot below. Boba and C3PO were done using normal size crayons while the middle three were large crayons. That's all I have planned for Star Wars now. I could do an Ewok or Chewbacca but I'm not in a hurry to try. I also thought about making some of the iconic space ships out of white or grey crayons.

Day 327

I have a box of grey crayons so I thought about what things are grey that I could carve. I settled on Totoro pretty quickly. If you ignore what Totoro looks like in the movie, the carving looks pretty good. However it's not perfect. Totoro is a lot more chubby and that doesn't come across here. I would have had to shrunk down the head which I didn't really want to do. The other thing is that his ears are too big. One of them broke and it was a hassle putting it back on. So I didn't want to try to make them any smaller or risk another break.

I also have a bunch of white crayons so with Totoro done, I decided to do another Studio Ghibli inspired crayon. Here are the creepy forest spirits from Princess Mononoke. I found out they're called Kodama. I knew I wanted to do two within one crayon. They have a pretty simple design so I thought it would be easy. However doing two at once erased any easiness. They turned out alright though. I have one more Ghibli character to do which will complete the series. 

Day 326

So with all that attention, now what? Well I've gotten a lot more followers on Tumblr. In my last update, I had 139. Now I have 438. However with all those followers, there hasn't been a big increase in notes. Actually the activity has died down a fair amount. I think the Princess Bubblegum post may be on its last legs finally. It's been getting dead of the night numbers during the daylight hours now. I guess I need to carve a Finn crayon and pander to my audience. Once I do a Finn crayon, I can do some Adventure Time group shots and get easy likes that way.

One sad thing is that someone took the photos from one of the articles and posted it on Tumblr along with a link to the article. This article found my Etsy shop but not my Tumblr so there was nothing tracing back to me. That post on Tumblr now has over 100,000 notes. Sad. Those should be mine. Oh well. A problem with having all these articles about my crayons is that I've lost all control over the images. Any random person can write about it or post it on Facebook or Tumblr with or without source links. I don't mind too much. I think enough of it is getting back to me.

One funny thing is that when I created my Etsy store, I just wrote HQ Tran as my name not really thinking about it. I don't even think my name is on my Tumblr anywhere, except that the URL is hqtran.tumbr.com. So when these people wrote the articles, they used HQ Tran as my name. Some of them put it in quotes because they weren't sure it was a name or not. After noticing this, I changed my Etsy name to my real name so a few of the later articles use that instead.

There have been some other developments on the Etsy side of things. I have gone from 55 followers to 144. On Saturday morning during the rush of articles, someone bought all my Star Wars crayons. Then a few days ago someone ordered a R2D2 crayon. It's weird how R2 gets sold multiple times but not Vader or the Stormtrooper which I think look way cooler. No love for villians I guess. Besides that, not any other sales. I did get two requests though, both Dr Who related. I responded to them with price estimates but I haven't heard back from them yet. It would be pretty easy to make some Tardises though. I'll probably do it anyway since there's so many Dr Who fans out there.

I sent off all my Star Wars crayons yesterday. It's a little sad since I really liked them. I tell myself is that I can always make more. Ideally though, I would keep the originals and make new ones to order. Unfortunately, I don't have time for that. Maybe in the future. I had to make two new R2D2s and I found that having an existing version in my hand speeds up the duplicating process since I can directly compare them. So there's another downside of not having originals.

Anyway, there have also been two other developments but I'll write about them once I see how they turn out.

Day 325

Some interesting things have been going on on the crayon front. Last weekend, I was in the city for a wedding. On Friday night, I was informed via Shiu Pei's friend that the website Geekologie wrote about my crayons. It's not a site I visit, but it seems cool. Then after some searching, I saw that some other sites had written about the crayons as well. Most were geeky blogs or websites that I never heard of. Some wrote new articles while others just copied what others had written.

I kind of want to say that I expected this to happen. I know that geeky stuff like this gets popular so I knew there was potential. I thought about posting this stuff on Reddit before but I'm not a regular visitor to that site so I didn't want to sign up just to do that. But I knew if I made it somewhere with high visibility, something could happen. That's why I posted on the Game of Thrones Tumblr. First I had hoped some fan would want to buy the crayons. That didn't work out but the other goal was to have someone with some clout see it and spread it around. Last time I wrote here I mentioned that the book publisher Tor started following me on Tumblr. Turns out they might have been the one that started this whole thing. While articles began appearing on these other sites on Friday, I showed up on Tor's main website (not Tumblr) on Thursday so they might have been patient zero. 

So here are some more screenshots from websites that I actually have heard of like the Australian Gizmodo and io9. I think it's pretty cool I made it on io9. So I think I ended up appearing on a few dozen sites which is good but not insanely viral or anything. That includes sites that just link to other sites. It made a splash but not enough to keep growing. I blame it on occurring on the weekend.

I'll write a little bit more but this entry is getting long. I'll end it with someone's comment from io9.