CrowPickle TTC Family Lvl 3!
Resin Toy Maker
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Another on my growing list of grails is “The Passage” by Coarse. This piece is intriguing from every angle!
I’m a spreadsheet junkie for organizing anything. I love to just set up fields for progress and have them color-coded i.e. red for “not started”, yellow for “in progress”, green for “shipped”
Answering my own question for posterity: (This is all for US shipping info)
1. Packaging: Bubble Mailers ended up working pretty well, and I ended up bubble wrapping my kits and then placing them in the bubble mailer for extra bubble protection. However, for added sturdiness I purchased small boxes on the cheap. I asked at the Post Office if these 5″x5″ boxes might be too small, but I was told that they should be fine and that I could go even smaller.
2. Cheap Rates: USPS First Class Parcel is the cheapest rate that I’ve found, although I wasn’t able to print and ship labels directly through USPS (I’m not sure why they removed that option). However, I was still able to print First Class USPS labels through Paypal here: http://www.paypal.com/shipnow
3. Other tips: Make a spreadsheet for order tracking! I made the mistake of offering Venmo as an alternative payment method for my kits (instead of purchasing through the website), and now I need to keep track of all my sales through various channels! In the future I’ll plan to sell my art explicitly through one avenue, but having a spreadsheet to keep track of which orders are in progress, which have shipped, and their tracking numbers has been a helpful tool.
Here’s my two cents (pardon the deluge of French but), FUCK THE BOTS! It’s one thing that they already invade concert ticket sales to every show in existence, but when they also jump onto the toy/sneakerhead/whatever scene, it’s just absolutely deplorable. Kaws is a prolific and talented artist, and for him to call out the bots is fucking awesome! I’ve also noticed Martian and Tenacious calling out these flippers and I applaud every effort they make to mitigate and catch these sneaky fuckers for gaming the system. This is an incredibly niche community already, and to “make it” as a designer toy artist is incredibly rare. Their art sells for a high price already (deservedly so), but for these bottom-feeder flippers to take advantage of the people who really love and admire the art is just criminal! I’m really glad that they are on our side in this fight and trying to catch these parasites.
A cool trick I learned from Derrick LaugLaug (@dllcustoms on instagram) is to create a dump mold for your leftover resin. This way you are getting as much resin as possible out of the mixing cups which makes them last longer, and you get another item to add to your stock! I sculpted my little logo and glued it to a jar lid for my dump mold. Works great so far!
One of my Grails would have to be any of the toys from the 3A Tomorrow Kings collection, but specifically the Seven Bones Kyoku. I’ve been a fan of Ashley Wood ever since I started reading the Spawn comics as a kid. His art is gritty and messy and went against everything I knew that a comic book “should” be, but it has this fantastic allure to it that was a perfect match for the antihero qualities of Spawn.
The Tomorrow Kings toys are a beautiful interpretation of Ashley’s concepts, building them at 1/6 scale with realistic clothing, and they have this future-apocalyptic-urban-samurai vibe that just looks badass. Plus with 30 points of articulation, you could literally make a stop motion movie with one of these characters. Looking at eBay, it’s not entirely out of reach for me, but it’s still a bit higher than my current budget. Also, now that 3A Toys is done, I expect the value of their work to increase over time.
Everything from Coarse is just so perfectly executed! I absolutely love the fur outfit on the False Friends piece. Even the fur on the fabric looks scaled down to match the size of the figure.
Yeah Nick, that’s actually one of the reasons I made this post. Soft vinyl coming to the USA?! AND it’s in Denver! I emailed the guy (Paul) to confirm that he’s actually located in Denver since there’s almost no information on the website. He replied and seems very nice.
I might try to make a trip over to his studio some day soon. If I do, I’ll make sure to take lots of pics and blab about it on here.
All of those shows I mentioned were independent of KidRobot (I think). I haven’t really seen any KR promoted stuff ever since they shut the doors on their storefront 5 years ago, but I haven’t been paying close attention until recently.