Followers!

Thanks to you loyal few that keep sticking with me. Again, I have the best Lego build to share. This time, the post and pictures are an afterthought. I never thought to share pictures or write a post about this until I had shared some other more recent Lego builds. This Lego is a custom built Lego truck in the fashion of a modified, refrigerated box truck. The truck has a cut away view of the box and has a place for setting my business cards.

Most of these white Legos are over twenty years old as they were mine when I was kid. I told my boys I needed to borrow them for a while.

I have shared different angles to show the Lego truck wheels, chassis, cab with female Lego driver, doors, AC unit, lights, and more.

I was asked on twitter to share this with people, so I wanted to make sure to have an official post here.

Please, someone tell Lego they need Lego Business Card Holder kits for people.

Any feedback and comments welcome. Enjoy!

Thanks all for reading.

Thanks also again to the good people of #Lego @Lego www.lego.com

Weebly recently released access and support for e-commerce to their wisywig site editors. As some of you may have seen recently, I gave it a go and attempting to add some of my work to a storefront and enabled the store feature on my site. I was not happy with how www.etsy.com stores had gone in the past, so I thought this would be a good new alternative. However, there are a few points they don't mention outright on Weebly that makes it kind of awkward offering the e-commerce feature.

• The e-commerce feature can be enabled on all types of account plans on weebly.
• Weebly offers several package plans for your site and not all offer the same features.
• The FREE plan for weebly allows you to enable a store, but not set-up shipping options, taxes, or inventory tracking.
• The middle of the road plan offers some features, but not all the ones needed to have a nicely integrated e-commerce site - making the middle option nearly pointless.
• The plan that does offer features to make the e-commerce store work how it should is 19.99 / month, if you sign up for 2 years. This does not include the percentage the payment gateways will take with each purchase.
• You pay that price per month, regardless of selling amount.
  
• While I can see that not being a huge issue for a true full time online business, it does not suit the budget of a artist type trying to sell their goods online.
• It might be best to give the etsy site one more go.

So, I am writing this to let all my friends and family know that I gave it a try to offer a more integrated art browsing and shopping experience on my site, but I just don't think it will happen. I will be working on giving the etsy store one more go and have a new link / page to the store here on this site.


Thanks for reading and stay warm. It is reading 0º here in balmy Rochester, MN.

Random post: Several months ago, I answered a linked in message from someone looking to get information from someone who had gone through school to get a Bachelor's in Graphic Design and their experience in the field after school in the graphic design professional world. I took a long time to respond to this person as I did not know if it was legit, and when I did, I had no idea when or where it would be used, if at all. Well, as I sometimes do, thanks to the work I do, I recently googled myself, just for entertainment, and found a link that I saw my name associated with that  I did not recognize. Upon closer examination, I found out it was the website where the questions I answered were published as an article on the online degree website - click to read.

Hmph.

So this the first real project since moving. Alla Prima, meaning the work was done in one sitting, was the technique used with acrylics. It was first intended to be for a special project in a desert landscape, but is now slated for inclusion in my Space series. It is intended to convey a sense of strangeness, excitement and give a nod to the space craft used by cartoon makers of the likes of Tex Avery. However, at this point, it feels like it needs some fixing. I can't put my finger on it, but I think am leaning towards darkening the space rocket, adding some reflections and highlights on it and perhaps lightening the alien terrain behind it. As far as Alla Prima space paintings go, it turned out ok for my first time. If you are actually reading this, feel free to comment and leave your suggestions. Thanks, as always.

So yes, I had always thought that I might be good at writing and illustrating children's books. Not until the other day had I played around with anyone idea. Above, you can see the concept sketch for the main character and title of the book I thought about.

Since becoming a father of an amazing son, I have many times thought about the lessons of life he will learn and how many I might be able to help him understand. What better way than through a book?

Not sure yet what Loyd would do, but it might be about teaching kids to remain objective and not judge other by what society says about the type of person they are, look-like, or hang-out with.

At the very least, it was nice to do some fun sketching.

What do you think?