There are skulls everywhere, and skull novelty items and decorative devices abound in abundance, as it were. It’s not just skulls, of course. There are also full and partial skeletons, and very life-like plastic reproductions of incredibly grisly body parts and even full alien and human bodies.
It seems that on every block, there’s a body shop that specializes in skulls. Well, whom are weem to disagreem???
I thought and thought about a name for the thing, and “Cult of the Skull” seemed the most mainstream, the least offensive and the most likely to agree with current events and popular prejudices.
In short, I may have made a slight tactical error by choosing “Cult of the Skull” as a typical Earthian/Human mainstream marketing concept you might find anywhere on eBay, Amazon or G-G-Google and his goo-goo googly eyes.
You might not be anywhere near old enough for that to be funny.
So I was blasting about on my workbench, looking to find a way to get GOLD to you and to help you get started working in gold.
First of all, there’s a LOT of expensive equipment needed, if you’re going to melt metal, beat and temper and forge it into slugs, and then hold it in a horribly expensive pin-vise in order to gouge out a design.
So all that led me to thinking; I used to do this all the time, with rolled-out gold in thin circular wafers that allow easy working with a simple pointed tool.
Okay, then I thought, “How are they gonna PRACTICE working on gold, without the expense of actually working on gold???”
It does get expensive. Every trim you make takes gold off the main body. Every bang you hit on it reduces its thickness and increases its radius on only one side, so it’s a fight to get it equal, and you go through the same struggle every time.
Then, in the end, if you’ve made a nice thick coin-like heavy thing that really FEELS like gold, you’ve got time, money, some waste and a LOT of expensive tools and equipment to achieve this result.
Now you’ve got about $100 worth of materials into the piece, and at this point, you put it into a fancy 14k solid gold bezel that costs you about $200, actually twice more money than the gold that’s going inside it, because you’re paying for fancy jeweler time — that’s not industrial, it’s art, and it costs plenty for a decent locket and always has.
Frames more expensive than the art is the rule, not the exception, even with the greatest and finest art, it can happen that the frame value exceeds the value of the piece inside it.
So you’ve managed to scratch out a design on a gold slug, and managed to make it fit somehow into a 14k solid gold fancy bezel, which is a feat of magic unto itself, because those fancy bezels don’t give, don’t budge and don’t accommodate. You have to be right on the money, or suffer the consequences, which means filing down your gold token.
Okay, so how about the easier way? Merely roll the gold out thin enough that it takes the design easily, and hey! Guess what???
The PRACTICE CRAFT METAL that I’m going to send you is just the right FEEL to learn how to work solid 14k gold — in fact, the craft metal looks almost exactly like real solid 24k gold — but it isn’t — it’s very heavy aluminum foil, and it’s gold colored only on one side, to prevent anyone from peddling it as gold — the backside is aluminum.
You can make a two-sided pendant that shows gold color on both sides. By the weight alone, it’s easy to determine that it isn’t gold, and because it isn’t gold, it’s super-cheap, and you can waste all you want in practice, but I think I have an even better idea:
Suppose you tried to make and sell some designs in the CRAFT METAL rather than expensive gold.
Remember that the sale doesn’t begin until you eliminate the cost of the gold, which operates as a cash rebate would — direct value easily converted to common currency is a good definition of “money”, wouldn’t you say? And at many points in history, paper money was and still is worthless. There is nothing anywhere in the world to back up the U.S. Dollar, but so long as you can use it to buy stuff, you probably don’t care.
There will be a time when paper and plastic are utterly worthless, and that’s when you’ll be glad to have a LITTLE silver and a LITTLE gold, enough to get you out of immediate trouble and to wherever you plan to end up in a crunchy time.
I have a request from several sellers to “Just, just… Take It Easy”, meaning keep the retail price at a maximum of $50. What they really mean is, $49.95, or the equivalent “magic retail number” in Euros, unless you’re in the U.K., in which case it could be Pounds today and Pesos next week, if King Philippe has his way about it.
So what if the total cost per finished piece came to about fifty cents? And what if the customer could choose any of several varieties and prices of bezels? You would merely mount the CRAFT METAL piece into the bezel — back to back, if they want gold showing both sides, and they go off with a finished product at less than fifty bucks.
Change ONE element of that formula I’ve worked up, and the piece will cost you upwards of $100 and possibly as much as $300 to accomplish in a combination of 14k bezel and 24k interior, and if you hit or melt the metal wrong — and if you work in gold, you WILL have to learn to melt metal, to handle your scraps — it could cost even more.
The LEAST I can make any gold item to retail for would be around $450, no less, and that allows nothing for wholesaling — there’s just no room there for profit on any side except that of the customer, who gets almost a full-value rebate, less whatever you dare to charge for your labor.
In the case of the CRAFT METAL products, you get ONLY your labor back, more or less, so you have to be brave, courageous and, frankly, good enough, to be able to charge what your labor is really worth, and with the CRAFT METAL product, you don’t have to charge for the value of the gold, which only makes the price higher, but produces no profit, unless you’re selling the gold for meltdown because the price is so much higher than when you bought it.
Ho, ho, that’s rich.
Of course there is NO profit in gold at a higher price. You merely pay more for what you get, and you’ll be lucky to keep up with inflation at that rate.
If you happen to run a bed & breakfast place, you might sell the kits and have a short class in sgraffito-style etching, repousse and graffiti techniques of the early bronze age.
So, for a lousy U.S. $35 bucks, I can provide you with a STARTER SET which contains the following necessary items:
- 21 count GOLD-COLORED ONE SIDE aluminum CRAFT METAL practice disks.
- 21 Quarter-Sized High-Grade Coin Flips.
- 1 ETCHING BOARD on which to make your designs.
- 1 PALEO SCRIBING TOOL with which to inscribe your designs into the CRAFT METAL.
You can send for additional supplies — I make the disks up by hand, perfectly flat and ready to inscribe with your design.
- 21 COUNT GOLD-COLORED CRAFT-METAL DISKS are only $10 a pack, which includes my labor, or you can get the equipment and supplies and make them yourself, it’s all the same to me — this is not about money.
I supply a plethora of designs for you to use. You will find them posted — all you need do is ask, and you will be directed to the appropriate urls.
What this means to you is:
- NO NEED FOR A TORCH — you don’t need to use a torch of any kind with CRAFT metal.
- NO NEED FOR AN EXPENSIVE PIN-VISE.
- NO NEED FOR EXPENSIVE ENGRAVING TOOLS.
- NO NEED FOR EXPENSIVE GOLD. The CRAFT METAL will sell at the right price!
- NO NEED FOR EXPENSIVE “WELDING” PROTECTIVE GEAR.
- NO NEED FOR EXPENSIVE POLISHING MACHINES & POLISHING WHEELS.
- NO NEED FOR WELDING OR CASTING TOOLS.
- NO NEED FOR A ROLLING MILL AND HAMMERING GEAR.
Not only does it save THOUSANDS of dollars of investment in tools and machines, it also means a LOT safer experience than you’d experience with a polisher — many horrible accidents can happen when using a high-speed polishing device of any kind, and with a torch, all kinds of things can go wrong — I’ll leave the details to your vivid imagination.
If you do decide to work on pure heavyweight gold tokens, and to house the results in 14k solid gold custom bezels, you’ll need the equipment I just outlined above.
The use of PURE 24k GOLD TOKENS and 14k SOLID GOLD BEZELS should, I think be restricted to Devotional and Invocational uses, not personal decoration, but I’m always ready to say to a customer, “this is available in pure sold 24k gold with a 14k bezel at an additional $***, if you’re interested.
Most folks will pretend they never heard you.
Selling takes place at whatever financial level that you yourself live within. You can’t go outside your social/economic bubble, and get very far.
Not everyone will want real gold, but enough will that you’ll find a market for that, too, but remember — the gold you sell is a REBATE, not a sale. You’ll never be able to get a decent price for the gold above today’s market price, but on the other hand, only gold will do, when it comes to Higher Planes and Realms of Pure Lands.
Okay, back to work I go…I’m making LOTS of CHEAP CRAFT METAL SKULLS just for you!!! They can be sold for a lousy $50 a pop, plus the bezel. Bezels can be priced anywhere from an extra $20 for a small sterling silver coin-edged bezel, all the way to an extra $3,500 or even more, for something a little more extravagantly high-karat and overweight.
Some of the skulls I’m making with the scribing tool remind me of some of the earlier Cubist pieces of Braque — the actual inventor of Cubism — and his copyist, Picasso, in relation to the so-called “African Masks” paintings, about 1905-1912-ish.
You might find my miniature Dutch Landscapes interesting and useful in jewelry as well. What you’d want to do is acquire a complete set of mountings, meaning bezels, so you can sell what you make and what you buy from others if you’ve a mind to.
So here’s the list for the JEWELER’S STUDIO:
- SET OF MINIATURE JEWELER’S SCREWDRIVERS to open and set the bezels. You can get a set of screwdrivers at most builder’s or hardware stores.
- QUARTER-SIZED GERMAN WATCH CRYSTALS to hold the CRAFT METAL. You need TWO crystals for every bezel, and the cheapest crystals run about $10 a pop. Shipping these handmade crystals from Germany takes about 2-6 weeks, to get them through customs. I won’t use any other kind. This is NOT where you save money, invocationally speaking.
- QUARTER-SIZED BEZELS in .925 sterling silver, with heavy bail loop. In the coin-edged bezel, these will run you about $25 apiece at today’s silver price, if you order in some quantity, like 24 at a time. You’ll also have to pay the shipping and insurance.
I can get these cheaper, but not better, and I prefer to pay the extra price to get what I want — they’ll accommodate any taste and budget, but the design and manufacture of the “frame” for my artwork falls well within the realm of “reasonable expenditure” no matter how much they cost — it’s always worth the extra few bucks.
You’ll have to provide your own packaging for your finished product.
If you buy and resell my products, be advised that I use a color-printed marketing card inside a 3″x3″ plastic ziplock bag.
You can find your own way to package your products, just as well as anyone — if you need help, you have only to ask.
Keeping the retail price to something below $50 is a safe way to start marketing anything. I heartily approve, and am doing everything I can to make this happen the way you want it.
If you have an agreement with a shop, or have rented a showcase in a group shop, you’ll be happy with the CRAFT METAL pieces, because you CAN’T LOSE MUCH if something does happen, and for beginners, it usually does.
Be prepared to lose an entire case full of stuff you made, and it’s not just theft, it’s happenstance. I lost dozens of jewelry pieces when a shop that had them on consignment closed suddenly, overnight, without warning, and it wasn’t their fault — the place had flooded during a rare Los Angeles rainstorm, back in 1966.
Things can happen, so it’s best not to have thousands of dollars stashed in a showcase that you hardly ever see, and over which you have no control.
Keep in mind that the coin market is regulated and strict, and that a coin’s condition will determine its market value, not how much you like the coin. With art, it’s exactly the other way around — you can price art wherever you can find a market, meaning a buyer.
In art, the market makes itself, and the art sells itself or it doesn’t. It either appeals and is the right price, or it doesn’t appeal, or it isn’t the right price. This remains to be determined by actual testing, meaning, get out there and try to sell this thing at a hundred bucks, then come down ten bucks at a time until you find a customer — that’s your automatic market.
Then try to sell it for slightly more, and see what happens. Keep going up and down in your prices as you feel you can, to see if the market will tolerate a slightly higher price, but be ready to settle for far less than you had hoped for, which is the fate of all new sellers.
Experienced sellers know that the market price is whatever you say it is, and that the desire for the product is deep within the subconscious of the buyer, ready to be unlocked and unleashed by the appearance of the aforementioned product.
If the product is from your own hands, you have two distinct disadvantages, the first of which is that you WILL get backed down off any price you quote at first, just because the customer has that psychological edge of confronting the “boss”, not a flunky who can’t help what the price might be.
Secondly, you’re at a disadvantage because you are the artist, and everything you produce is crap, you just know it is. You can’t be any good, and your stuff is basically worthless. An artist should never sell his or her own work, not ever, because it’s almost impossible to fight that sense of low self-esteem, low self-worth, combined with the urge to take “selfies” at major archaeological sites and famous modern buildings.
So, let’s see how the CRAFT METAL fares in the street, how it “markets”, and don’t forget, they can always order solid gold — in fact, you might wear something in solid gold just to show how it looks, but remember, if you’re on the street, this makes you very vulnerable, so you don’t want to reveal the gold you’re wearing until you feel comfortable about that, and on the street, I’d restrain myself to just showing the CRAFT METAL pieces and be sure to say immediately that although they look just like real gold, they’re not.
The problem there is that no matter what you say, people will tend to not believe you, and will assume that you really meant the opposite. Think this is fiction? Try it on the street and see what you get.
“This isn’t real gold.”
“Uh, huh, right.”
Most people find it easy to lie, and many don’t know they’re lying about everything pretty much all of the time, including to themselves, so naturally, they’ll assume that everything you say is a lie, too.
What I’m trying to say is, talking makes marketing doubly difficult.
So to sum up, what I’m advising is, “Just, just take it easy” and “all things in moderation”. Let’s try selling a $50 SKULL pendant and see how far we get, okay?
I would also carry some altered U.S., ancient and medieval coins, but again, only prepared in bezels, not sold as coins or in flips — however, invocational medallions mounted in acrylic capsules are my idea of a good time, and you might find them saleable, too.
Back to work I go…
See You At The Top!!!
gorby