How To Build a 10 Foot Long Shark On Your Front Yard

The skeleton

The Skin

Once again, for Halloween, I decided to put something interesting in the front yard. I wanted to do a giant snake wrapping itself around the house, but my wife said I should do a shark. "A shark?" I thought would be a lot harder than a snake but I accepted the challenge just because its important to challenge yourself sometimes and level up . As luck would have it for me (and not very lucky for a local hardware store), they were going out of business and everything was on sale. This was lucky because I was able to score some really cheap wood and screws for the armature. As with all of my Halloween decorations, I wanted to make sure it was made completely out of recyclable material, otherwise, I wouldn't easily be able to get rid of a toxic,10 foot long shark.
The armature was put together with one thing in mind; When I finish it, it has to be strong enough to carry the weight of the cardboard and be transported from the back yard to the front, without falling apart. The armature was the easy part, the hard part was building up a relatively recognizable shark shape out of the cardboard, using a staple gun, screws and duct tape. The rain gods were on my side and it never soaked my creation as it did the giant Japanese robot I made last year.

Feeding the shark

With less than a week to spare, I got it together and was able to spray paint it just in time for Halloween.  It held together, when we carried it to the front, with a brief scare as it snagged on a telephone wire. I wanted the shark to face the arriving trick-or-treaters, but my wife persuaded me to point it in the direction of the street. This worked out a lot better because anybody who happened to walk by, took lots of pictures of themselves posing with it. It got tons of compliments and put a smile on many faces, and thats why I like to do these projects, it makes our neighborhood a cooler place to live and lets them tell their FaceBook buddies: "Check this out, this is in MY neighborhood."

Say Ahhh!

Now on Etsy and Zibbet

I'm diversifying my business and opening up another site on Zibbet, a competitor to Etsy. I'm curious to see if the sells will be better or the same. The thing I like about them is that they promise not to have sellers who aren't really independent and make things in factories and they don't charge anything if you have under 50 items for listings. We'll see how long that last, after all, every dot com is nice until they're making money. I did get a lot more hits on Etsy when I used their paid ads and I even had a near sale from somebody in Ireland that back out at the very last minute. Pretty cool to get international attention like that tough. Here's the link to the Zibbet site: Rabbit Studios

Coming In December, I will be taking part in the Richmond Art Center's Holiday Arts fair.
This year Im going to be selling twice as many items than I did last year which creates more pressure to at least break even. After all, more items produced means more overhead. There are going to be a lot of things that haven't even made it on the Etsy site so I'm excited to get the reaction of the buying public. Another thing Im excited about is the fact that I can also accept credit cards this year. This means I won't have to hear the excuse: "I'd like to get it but I don't have any cash."

That's all for now, A

The Slow Push

Trying to get another "Big Push" going. It's tough following up on a successful year and trying to out do it. I missed the dead line for the film festival  (unless I want to pay to get in) so that may have to wait until next year.

The Etsy site now has almost all of the things I want to upload on it. My goal is 50 items and I'm almost at 40. Getting the most traffic are the kid aprons and the Mysterious Box of Mystery. People also seem to like the "Anne" series: Zombie Anne, Dracuanne and Ali Anne. I thought about making one that's psychotic called Stabarella.:

I  put an art piece in the Richmond Art Center. It's a palm leaf that I smoothed, polished and put some metal strings on it called "Harp". It will be hanging until August: Here is a like to their web site: Richmond Art Center

I'm trying to finish my movie by the end of the year but it's tough putting in the time to do the animation. Hopefully, with summer, I'll have a little more free time as kids go to camp and things. This is the first thing I've done on it in months:

That's All

A

Look Out! He's Got a Böm!

The BIG PUSH continues as I try to get more and more of my art out there. Last year was very successful as far as accomplishing 99% of my art career goals . The missing 1% would have been to quit my day job but, I'll let that one slide (for now). I have a lot of exiting products to sell on Etsy. One, a hat that's also a scarf called a Böm. I was going to call it a Bam or Boom but the fact that it covers up your face could make it the perfect accessory for terrorist and that's not the kind of advertising I need–This product is endorsed by Al Queeda! 

The other product I'm excited for is The Mysterious Box of Mystery. This is like something that I would buy if I had the money instead of needed the money. It's a strange box full of clues that are somehow linked to a story. It's your job to go through the box and figure them out. I made a commercial for it and I think it came out well: Here it is:

There are also a couple of other experiments coming to the Etsy site like a hat that looks like a frog called a Ribbhat:

…As well as lots of anmal style hats and aprons. 

My goal for this year s going to be of course to step up the Etsy game and try to at least be selling one or two items per month. 3 would be great but as I say prepare for greatness but be happy for what you can get.

Al