I want to write regular updates, so I'm starting with this one in hopes that I'll write another one next week. I'm not really sure what people want to hear about, so I'm just going to write what comes to mind and assume that I'll find my voice as we go. Fix on fail, that kind of stuff.
It's been a hard transition, moving from Etsy to Shopify. About 80% of my traffic came from passive Etsy views, people searching tags that happened to include things I used to make. Everything works just a little bit differently on Shopify, which is really a back-end service and not a unified marketplace. It'll take time, but my hope is that if I make things that people like, the traffic will follow.
That leads me to my next thoughts:
TowerFall. I can't possibly say enough good things about TowerFall. The game is amazing. The team is wonderful. I'm flattered and grateful that not only do I have complete permission to make crafted TowerFall goods, but the team seems to love my stencil work. It's been a great experience doing all of that stuff.
That said, there's an expansion coming up: The Dark World. There are at least two new archers on their way, so I'm going to have new stencils to share soon, including the Red Archer, the Vainglorious Ghoul, and an as-yet-unnamed skeleton archer. I'm excited for the opportunity and I'm looking forward to sharing the results as they come along.
You can find my existing TowerFall work here. I'm still learning how to display Collections naturally, as opposed to via direct link. More growing pains from moving to Shopify, yeah?
Outside of TowerFall and any other indies I get to work with, I'm largely dropping fan art as a thing that I do. Having built my store on it for two and a half years, that's a hard thing to do.
Right now I'm looking to replace it with collaborations, working with other people to produce things they might not have considered making.
My first direct collaborator is an artist named Ben Hatke. I saw one of his Inktober 2014 tweets of a strange wizard and thought, "This is fantastic! I have to make things with this guy!"
So I did.
I laser-cut a wooden coaster, worked some magic on the image posted to his Tumblr, and laser-burned the image into the wood. I came up with this.
I'm proud to announce that Ben was gracious enough to give me complete permission to turn his Wizards series of ink work into a wooden coaster series. Right now there are 12 wizards of varying eccentricities, but Ben is working on a few more as the month comes to a close. Expect them in the store soon as I experiment with wood types and finishes.
Thanks for reading!