Day 318

Here's an update on Tumblr related stuff. My Princess Bubblegum post is still getting liked and reblogged. It now has 55,000 notes and counting. It gets a few dozen notes an hour. It dips pretty low in the middle of the night down to just a handful but it always come back to life the next day. Occasionally there are spikes of a few hundred an hour. A few days ago there was spike of a few thousand for some reason. My other crayons haven't been quite as successful. Most of the other Adventure Time crayons have about 200 notes each. All the rest have much less.

I haven't made any new crayons but I still wanted to post stuff on my Tumblr (for my fans of course). During my research of Princess Bubblegum, I found out that a lot of people ship her with Marceline. Shipping is when fans desire two usual fictional characters to be in a relationship with each other. An example would be like people wanting Harry Potter and Hermione to hook up. So Princess Bubblegum and Marceline have a couple name which is Bubbline. People think that they're just cute together. One is a Goth rocker loner and the other is a brainy prim and proper princess. They're opposites so they complement each other. The fact that they're both girls is irrelevant. Anyway because of this, I decided to post a picture of both of them together and tagged it "Bubbline" along with the usual tags. The first day it did well and got hundreds of notes. Then it died off but not completely. Every now and then it'd get a note, maybe one or two an hour and this went on for a week. Recently though it's taken off and is more active than the Bubblegum solo post at times. It's sitting at 4,000 notes right now.

I finally got around to submitting my Game of Thrones crayons to the official Game of Thrones Tumblr account which was my original goal awhile ago. It took about week before it was cleared and eventually posted on the site. Most posts there get a few hundred notes. It's been just a few days and mine has over three thousand. I wasn't surprised just because the crayons are different than what's usually on there. It's mainly paintings (digital and analog) and drawings usually of the main characters so even though some of them are really awesome, it's kind of repetitive. Unfortunately, none of the notes appear on my account so it's harder to keep track. I did add in a link back to my Tumblr and Etsy shop. I've gotten more new followers recently so I think it was due to this (and maybe some from the Bubbline post). I currently have 139 followers. Unfortunately, I don't have any crayons to post to entertain them. One of the new followers is the Tumblr account for Tor Books. It's a big (maybe biggest?) publisher of fantasy and sci-fi books so I thought that was cool. 

Day 317

I haven't talked much about my Etsy shop mainly because there really wasn't much to say. For the longest time, I didn't sell anything. But finally a few days ago, I made my first sale. Someone bought my R2D2 crayon which is funny cuz it's probably my least favorite one. I'm kind of nervous about what they say when/if they write a review. I hope they like it. R2 wasn't perfect which is why I'm not a fan of it but hopefully the customer isn't as picky as I am.

While I've just had one sale so far, it seems like people like what they see. They're just not willing to pay for it. I've priced most of my crayons at $25. Some more complex ones are $30, some simpler ones are $20. If I were a customer, I think $30 is a little high. $20 sounds reasonable if I really liked the crayon. $25 might be a stretch. I know if I lower the price, more would sell. However, each crayon takes two hours or longer to do so I would like to get at least $10 an hour for my work. If I lower the price, I'd be hitting minimum wage territory. Then there's the fact that the well known crayon carving artist charges $250 for one crayon so my ego can't allow myself to go down any lower. 

Each item in my shop has been viewed about 100 to 200 times. My items have been favorited 120 times which means the item is noted in a person's profile so they can see it later or share it with other people. Fifty-five people have favorited my shop which means they get updated whenever I post a new item. So the ratio of views to followers is pretty good especially compared to Tumblr. My most popular item is the Game of Thrones set which has over 1000 views and 40 favorites. Unfortunately, it's also the most expensive so I don't know if it'll ever get sold. 

I've also been hit with a copyright infringement warning for my Futurama crayons and those listings had to be taken down. I don't disagree with the infringement but I was surprised that it happened since copyright infringement is all over Etsy. Apparently some companies care more than others. A search for Futurama stuff on Etsy comes up with 200 items compared to 4000 for the Simpsons so I guess some Futurama person patrols the site every now and then and tells Etsy to shut things down. I understand but I am disappointed. Hopefully it doesn't happen again or Etsy might shut down my whole shop for being a repeat offender. Though it's not like I'm making big bucks or anything.

Day 313

I carved all the crayons I had planned to do, but then I saw the "What does the fox say?" video and got inspired to make a fox. It didn't turn out quite like how I envisioned. I was aiming for a more realistic version. I wanted the head to be big so you could more easily see it. This lead to the head being too big for the body. I didn't want to shrink down the head so I left it as is so then a more cartoony look seemed more appropriate for the big headed fox.

I'll be moving back to modeling now. I think I'll still carve a crayon every now and then when I need a break from modeling. Or when I'm watching TV which I do a lot. I've mainly been using large crayons so I still have lots and lots of untouched normal sized crayons. I'll switch to those so a smaller crayon should mean I'll finish each carving more quickly. I don't think I'll be trying to copy as many pop culture characters though. I'll just do random things like the fox and other animals or whatever the color inspires me to do. Before that though, I would like to do C3P0 in a gold crayon and Totoro in gray. I keep getting ideas and then forgetting them. If only I had something to help me remember...

Day 312

Out of my pack of 150 crayons, I had only one single white crayon. I felt that I needed more than that so I ordered a box of large white crayons. That's what I used for the R2D2s and Stormtrooper. I was thinking of what else I could do with white crayons and after seeing a bunch of wedding posts on Facebook, I thought I could carve a bride. I also thought that people getting married would potentially want to buy wedding related crayons especially if they're made to look like them. So I carved a generic bride above. I decided not to carve a face so the customer would more easily imagine their own face on there. Nah, I was just lazy. The bouquet looks good from the front but obviously flat from the side.

Next was to make the groom. I didn't want to use a black crayon because it would be harder to see the details so I used a gray crayon instead. It was tougher than I thought it would be. All the humanoid characters I've done before had dresses or something to obscure the legs. Here I had to show the whole body, arms and legs, so getting the right proportions within the crayon was challenging. It turned out ok. He looks a little stiff though. I also couldn't do much of a neck because I didn't want it to break there.

Day 311

Here's Flame Princess. She's one of my favorite crayons I've done so far. I like how it doesn't look like I was constrained by the dimensions of the crayon. Probably has the cleanest lines I've done. The bangs are a little too big and the face could be rounder. However since she's a relatively new character to Adventure Time, her image isn't burned into my mind yet so I don't notice the flaws too much.

Marceline changes her outfit on the show a lot but I settled with her basic tank top and jeans look. That outfit isn't very visually interesting though so I decided to add in her ax guitar. The guitar made it more difficult since I had to carve everything else around it. I made her legs bend to give the idea that she's floating which she does a lot on the show. Didn't quite work though since you can't see her feet.  

Day 310

One last Star Wars crayon. I used a normal sized crayon since I needed to get the right shade of green for Boba Fett. Compared to the Stormtrooper and Vader, Boba Fett was easier to carve even with using the smaller crayon. The antenna/targetting thing was harder. With Bender, it was easy to stick the wire straight down the center. Because Boba's is on the side, I had to bend the wire first and then insert it in at an angle which was a little destructive to the adjacent wax. So that's it for Star Wars. In the future, I might make a C3PO out of a metallic gold crayon I have. I also want to do an Ewok but I don't have the right shade large crayon.

Next is Jake the Dog from Adventure Time. I held off on doing him because I wanted to carve him with a large crayon but didn't have the right shade. He's slightly more orange but I settled with this yellow. He turned out alright. He doesn't have the exact right look to me. Since he has thin legs, I made him sitting down or else it'd be really narrow in that area. 

Day 306

I wanted to carve R2D2 and I thought I could make it without the legs and just focus on the body since that's already crayon shaped. The result is above. I'm not happy with it. There was a lot of engraving which I said before I don't like to do. There are a lot of slanted lines which should be straight. Most of the time I work really late after midnight. The lamp in my room isn't very bright so sometimes it's hard to see what I'm doing. So often I go to bed tired and not sure what I actually carved. Then I wake up in the morning crossing my fingers and hoping it's better than what I remembered. Most of the time, it is; this time it wasn't. 

So I decided to do an R2 with legs because even if I did the body perfectly, I still didn't like how it looked. This R2D2 turned out better. It still had a fair amount of engraving and I had to figure out how to simplify what details should appear or not. I'm not super enthused with the end result. I think if I add in some blue, it would really pop more. It's kind of boring right now. Here's a side by side comparison below. You can see how much smaller he ends up being by just adding in legs. I posted the second R2 on my Tumblr yesterday. It only got 2 notes. Sad.