This bug-eyed monster is the easiest thing in the world to produce. I drive over to the garden supply place and load up on bags of rocks — I run into NOBODY in the rock dump, and I pay $1 a bag, and I’m home-free.
So now I dig out my glue gun and glue this guy together, then paint the black lines and then the white filler, sign the back with a black Posca pen, and I’m done.
If wanted, a small stand can be included — just glue him or her onto the piece of wood you’ve selected as a base.
I’ve done a number of workshops on this, and there are videos, or you can join one of my ZOOM two-way workshops and I’ll help you develop a style and a group of rock paintings that will SELL.
The real secret is learning how to sell something online, so back to ZOOM and learn some more, sell some more, practice selling, selling, selling, and also practice delivering a good productive workshop, which will in the end bring in more than the selling.
How about this for cute? It’s a little stone ram, like the ones you’d find on an archaeological dig somewhere in Afghanistan or Mesopotamian areas like Babylon and Ur.
I have ancient sculptures that look almost exactly like this, but they cost ‘way more than these little guys, who retail at just $9.95 apiece.
They come on a wooden base, but I can’t always get the same birch rounds, so the base and style of base will vary.
Of course, there’s nothing preventing you from slicing your own birch branches up into little sculpture bases, is there???
And if you owned the gold claim, you could just gather all the rocks you wanted, and save a dollar a bag.
Shop space is useful to keep track of things, but actually everything is mail-order, so think of your shop space as a kind of warehouse — as a matter of fact, if I were doing something a little different, I’d organize shelves and make it into just another warehouse, but I also LIVE in the space, so I’ve designed it to be a pleasant place to hang out, and if anyone ever comes by the house again, it will do for the moment as a gallery space.
Of course, photo opportunities abound when you have a blank wall somewhere handy. I haven’t seen a blank interior wall in decades, and hanging a painting on an outside wall is always rather dicey.
Nobody comes to the house anymore — nobody. Still, we’re at risk just because we have to eat, and food comes from OUTSIDE.
We clean and wash and rinse and protect as much as possible, but there is a limit, so you can just hope to avoid the virus for as long as possible, and hopefully they’ll have hospitals available again sometime soon, in spite of Trump’s blockages.
He’s made the dangerous calculation that it’s only Democrats who will fall, so he’s totally indifferent to the fate of millions — of course, he was equally indifferent before all this happened, but now you can SEE it and HEAR it directly from Trump.
The Turtle retails for $9.95 also, and it’s really fun to make and harder than you think to come up with perfectly shaped body parts for this guy.
I sort through many thousands of stones to get what I want, and I divide them into different bins — heads, tails, noses, fins, bodies, feet, arms, legs, all sorts of body parts, and then assemble each one and with my glue-gun, I make them whole, put them on a base, sign the bottom of the base, and then do another one, and another one, and another one… turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down, like it says in the book.
If I did nothing but make turtles for a living, I’d be content and happy.
While you’re making these stone sculptures, the world tends to melt away, yielding itself to a creative web, an ocean of higher consciousness, because creativity and consciousness are connected.
I have organized and separated and examined many tens of thousands of stones, and I have a good supply out of which I can send you “kits” comprised of the necessary parts for each character.
You get a head, eyeballs, ears, arms, legs, hands, feet and tails, as appropriate for the kind of character you’re building.
You then take the aforementioned body parts and with your trusty glue-gun, you glue them together in a sturdy character that will withstand even the heaviest handling of a youngster.
Okay, forget about the heaviest handling. It will survive being lifted out of the box and put on a shelf or trinket space in your home, office, den or other place of habitation.
Now, where are you gonna get a signed sculpture outta my studio for a crummy $9.95 retail?
And hey, that means that the wholesale is only $4.99, and that means I gotta find a way to make it pay, and the only way to make it pay is to sell THOUSANDS of them.
Thousands a DAY.
Now, how am I ever going to sell thousands of anything a day? The clear answer is, I’m not. So what do I have to do to remedy this so I can put some food on the table and pay my mortgage?
I have to sell something more expensive to someone who has no job, no money and no hope of ever getting back on their feet again.
What am I doing taking this person’s money?
I can’t ethically do that, so I have to be sure to give something of equal value in return, and what would that be???
It’s simple. Give the buyer a reason to buy, and the best reason to buy under these conditions would be a way to buy AND SELL them, and that’s exactly what you do — recruit the buyer into your SELLER program.
Yes, that is the solution, especially if you’re bad at selling.
Organize others to sell, and keep the whole thing running, but look — this means you have to be good at SOMETHING, even if you’re lousy at selling.
That means you need to learn to be a MOTIVATOR.
Motivation means getting others excited enough about taking action that they continue to take action without further provocation, but keep in mind that most folks need a carrot in front and a fork behind just to stay motivation and in action.
That’s not a whole lot to look forward to, but it IS the job.
Motivation includes getting them interested in the first place, and there are only two MOTIVATORS in human consciousness — FEAR and GREED, and you’re not going to like either one, but that’s what we have to work with.
If you see a stock or a market go UP, it’s a result of GREED — someone thinks that they can make money by buying that thing at the current market price.
If the stock or the market goes DOWN, it’s a result of FEAR.
The same thing obtains when dealing with anything, including the possible starvation of you and your family unless you get motivated in a real hurry, and that issue is still very much in doubt.
The bud vase is made with glassware that dates back to my 1967 shop in Hollywood, California, where I sold incenses, oils, candles and smudge sticks long before that sort of thing was popular.
The base is a birch slice, the stones come from my back stream as a matter of fact, and the hot glue comes from the furthest reaches of Ben Franklin’s glue-craft area, which can now be shopped online — don’t go into the store, there’s no one in there, and IF the shop ever re-opens, the same people won’t be there.
They can’t afford to wait around with zero income.
That’s to whom I’m speaking right now. Those who lost their jobs and won’t ever get them back, not ever.
You need to reinvent yourself and if you haven’t practiced on ZOOM with a friend for at least four hours over a period of at least one week, I’ll sit right here and wait until you do.
Hey, these little jobbies sell real well at a fair, but go find a fair right now or in the foreseeable future.
No way will these ever be seen in a fair booth, not in this century — so how to sell them, and to whom, and why would they want one?
These are all questions you CAN solve, if you just take a moment to sit down and figure it out, after you throw out the certainty that you can’t solve it.
That’s the big blockage to all communication, the assumption that you can’t understand, therefore you don’t listen.
Self-fulfilling Prophecies about when things are bleak. Remember this — it’s always darkest just after it goes pitch-black.
Isn’t that comforting? Hey, you don’t want to confront more stress, you want comfort, right? So what could be more comforting than gluing a bunch of worthless and meaningless rocks together into a worthy and meaningful thing?
That’s called “Creativity” and it’s as close to feeling how God feels when Creating as you’re going to get at this level.
Again, that means a lousy $4.99 wholesale for me, with $3 of that in materials — you will use far more glue than you ever thought existed, just to make one little thing like this, but boy, is it worth it.
You will LOSE all sense of the surrounding world, and be transported into a safe and happy place, I absolutely PROMISE this will happen.
It is SO amazingly absorbing, and you will find a great degree of relaxation and nerve calming from this simple and REWARDING activity.
It’s easy to keep yourself motivated to work on these pieces when you realize that you could make as much as five bucks from the labor, although that’s not net, of course.
You can make up to $4 a day NET by doing this, so how can you say no to that?
Wow, can you imagine a more fun way to earn your living while the world is in chaos?
If the world ever stops being in chaos, you’ve got a good chance to climb aboard when it gets going again, and the skills learned and connections made will do you some definite good.
Again, the base is a birch round, but this one is about 5″ – 6″ in diameter — it takes some girth to get around that votive candle in a glass votive jar, and then there’s all the careful balancing it takes to get the topstones exactly right.
You don’t want these things to fall apart on your customer.
For one thing, you don’t want to get the package back. For another, you should have done it right the first time.
Gosh, if you’re that busy and that rushed that you have to hurry when you make a stone sculpture, you don’t need this stuff at all — you’ve already GOT a paying job!
If on the other hand, it’s just a matter of personal laziness, you’ve got another problem, one I probably can’t solve or help you solve.
When it comes to prodding yourself off the couch, you’re on your own. I can only help once you’ve gotten into motion and in the flow.
One thing you could try is the “Shutdown Victims” approach — beg for food and supplies, but you’d better look like these guys if you want some sympathy, because EVERYBODY is a victim, nobody will escape this doom.
Well, perhaps a few wealthy Washington senators who recently sold their stocks just days before the crash — nothing like insider trading to make war profits really pay off.
There’s a price to pay for war profiteer unless, of course, they’re an elected official on the committee that decides what happens with those stocks.
Gosh, I didn’t want to get off subject, so let’s dive back into it, shall we?
Don’t worry, the candle won’t melt down — it’s one of those amazingly lifelike LED candles that looks like real wax.
Some of them actually ARE wax, and although I don’t prefer them for painting, I will make a set for you out of wax if you wish, but they’re still LED electrics, no flame, just flickering light.
I sign them and Jewel packs and ships them. Everyone does their part here, and I hope it’s the same with you.
We’re all in this together, and we have been in that condition since the Big Bang, when we were all crammed into a tiny sesame seed sized thing.
Gosh, that was exhilarating, at least those first 850,000 years were — mighty exhilarating, but now that things have settled down a bit, cooled down enough to allow gases to collect and create stars that blow up so pretty, we can have a little fun, even with a deadly virus coming our direction.
I knew I had a photo somewhere of a wax version of my angel candle, and here it is — they both sell for the same amount, and I forget now what that is, but it’s nowhere near what I wish I could get for the work I do, but that’s Trump Virus Times.
The paint does NOT necessarily peel or chip off, but on wax, I wouldn’t take bets that it will last a long time, however, many years ago I was shown a wax hand sculpted by Michelangelo, and that’s a long time for a wax hand to not melt.
Velvet box. That was the secret — it was kept in a padded velvet box in a vault, and that’s why it survived 400 years to end up in a collection in the 20th century.
My wax hands are all cast up into bronze, and ALL of my bronze sculptures are for sale except my dancer and one copy of Blau Reiter.
Bronzes run in the thousands to have cast these days, and as a matter of fact, you can’t do it now, because the foundry is closed and in this case, I’m betting it will never reopen.
The same will happen with some food chains and shoe stores, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some supermarkets and package stores go down.
The candle above is priced at $350. It is an original work of art, a painted on wax candle, and it deserves to be treated as an art object, not a craft item.
That having been said, nobody will really pay that much for this candle, so I’ll probably have to let it go at the usual price, whatever that it, along with the base and such.
It’s all very dynamic, changes daily and even hourly, and you have to be resilient enough to support the waxing and waning of energies under high-energy high-stress conditions like a worldwide pandemic or an outage of toilet paper and hand wipes at the local supermarket.
Classes in candle painting is one way I expect to make a living in this Brave New World of no-contact, stay at home, duck and cover.
In this case, I’m on a broadcast, but in a workshop, I’ll be on ZOOM and I’ll be able to see exactly how you screw it up and from that, I can help you fix it.
Being able to SEE YOU is one way to solve most of our teaching and meeting issues.
I expect that the field will improve as usage goes past present limits, meaning that I figure that ZOOM and other contact providers will instantly begin to improve their services.
That’s what I hope will happen.
Here’s a dramatic shot of my ring of stones votive candle holder. I just wanted you to see it from this angle so you could get an idea of how interesting these little objects can be.
The birdhouse costs me money, retail money — I have no wholesale supplier for these and couldn’t afford the minimum order if I did.
Boy, are these a challenge — you have to fit the rocks in just right, and if you don’t, it doesn’t work.
This is a dollhouse scale dollhouse in the form of a commercial shop. It is rare, and it is a total bitch to make this thing from scratch, which I do.
The price is an unaffordable $450, and worth every damn penny of it, too. I won’t bother to hunt one up and work on it for less.
By the way, there are window panes in the windows, and the door really works. The top is closed for display or open for play.
I have the wood blocks to do this, and sometimes I can get the birch rounds for bases. The kit sells for $10 wholesale and consists of two packets of cubes plus the base.
You supply the glue sticks and the patience to make them. As usual, it’s all about balance.
I get $20 a pop retail for these block sculptures, and should under normal conditions get a good deal more, like $50, but what is normality, anyway???
IF we ever see normality again, these ought to sell well. If not, they make excellent pastry and flour mixers.
This canister is a very easy project, although the curve is hard to figure out when you’re just beginning.
Fitting the stones is not all that easy, it’s kind of like Tetris, except you can burn yourself if you get some of the hot glue on your fingertip, which happens to me a LOT when I make one of these. Other stuff is not quite so demanding.
You think just because it’s rocks, it can’t be made to look like anything? Well, you’re wrong. It’s very easy to first separate your rocks into body parts, then assemble and glue them together to make a very human-like sculpture.
These sell for $20 retail.
The Cuteness Factor figures very highly in this rock business, so watch out for instant success stories like this little bug-eyed critter.
Here’s a field-full of completed bird sculptures and, as you can easily see in the photo, they are all quite different, quite unique and quite personal, even though they were built on a sort of production line.
Sorting the stones into body parts is at least half of the time and effort you’ll put into this project, but it’s totally worth it, I promise.
Ah, here’s that photo of the base for the candle. This setup also includes a space to put your amulet, under the candle, to charge things up real good.
This works even with an LED candle, which is what I’m using right now at the right-hand side of my Galaxy desk.
It’s called that because it was the desk hand-crafted in 1956 by Al Fiering for the Galaxy Magazine Editorial Offices — it accommodates two editors working side by side.
It may well be that we can no longer obtain silver bezels or even raw silver or silver wire — we just don’t know how or for how long the jewelry market will be interrupted.
It may never come back.
If that’s the case, I have alternatives planned so we can continue to make amulets, even if the silver components are no longer around.
In the meantime, I have several dozen I can ship out, and I’m making more right after I finish my three blogs.
I’ve committed to doing three chapters a night — it’s a race between getting the information out to you and the closure of ways to communicate, which will be happening real soon.
Don’t forget, the military will be hitting the streets soon, under the command of their Great Leader, ex-PFC Cadet, Donald John Trump — what a maroon!
Don’t forget to turn the page to the next chapter!
See You At The Top!!!
gorby