When we exhibited the museum installation “Ancient Faces” at the JAL — Jewels of Ancient Lands — show in Rancho Cordova, it took over the better part of half an acre of commercial space, and drew a crowd in the thousands, but where did they all end up? You’re right, the gift shop, and in the gift shop, this is what they’d see and buy.
Famous Faces Fascinate Folks Ferociously. Not just local fame, like Elvis and the Beatles, but everlasting fame, as in Goddess faces. The Goddess Solaria is the Mother Goddess of Mother Goddesses.
She can be any God, Goddess, Buddha or Ascended Master you care to name her. The face above has, literally, billions upon billions of variations, most of them slight, most variations would not readily be discernible by the unpracticed eye.
The face of Solaria could be identified as the Amidha Buddha, Maitreya, any and all of the Mayan Gods, most of the Lunar Goddesses of Western Europe, and any or all of the female Graeco-Roman deities, and some of the beardless male Gods as well, such as Apollo.
The Solaria Face can be ALL faces. Look at the images of Gods and Goddesses around the world and elsewhere, and you’ll see what I mean. This is the Face Behind the Face.
Every one of these ORIGINAL HAND-CRAFTED little puppies that you SUCCESSFULLY emboss and inscribe on the metal tokens will trigger off an incredibly tiny catastrophic quantum event in nanospace/time, that creates a new “fork in the road”, a new reality, and sometimes more than just one — some image carving is just Heisenberg enough to rip a new seam in the fabric of space, although you won’t see it, because it’s not a local phenomenon.
Heisenberging occurs when you put a special kind of High Attention on something. The observation definitely and profoundly changes the thing observed, and this is NOT limited to photons and electrons.
Follow the advice given in Morgan Freeman’s “Through the Wormhole” — it’s easy to grasp the fundamental physics of the universe, just as long as you can hold onto the realization that there’s really nothing here, nothing at all — it’s pure illusion, and I can prove it, and so can you, with a little 5-minutes-a-day “Daily Practice”, all OR PART of which can be added to your daily routine and organized into a daily spiritual practice to fit your time-budget.
Yes, Time-Budget. Your life can be measured in minutes and, although the number might seem large, it really works out to precious little time to get your work done and prepare for your next Work-Placement.
You can carry an entire shop-full of these dollar-sized embossed metal tokens, and sell them for whatever you like, taking into account that they cost you LESS than a dollar to make and present in their flips.
If someone comes along who just has to have the thing in solid gold, you can make a deal to create a custom solid 24k piece in a bezel. The cost at today’s gold prices for a solid gold medallion in a solid 14k gold real rope bezel would be around $3500 retail, to allow for a wholesale price to a retailer.
The lowest I’d be able to go on a dollar-sized piece in solid gold would be around $2250, and that would be for a friend or for a reseller to try to market.
Remember that the customer is buying your artwork for almost nothing, compared to the cost of the metal, and you might just want to suggest the craft metal and gold-filled locket, which allows you at least SOME profit margin, albeit mighty small.
The big bucks can only be made when your art reputation exceeds the price of gold, and if you’re over 50 years of age, you might not be able to acquire the art following you need in the time you have left on Earth, but you can try, through online marketing, to bypass the stage of marketing where you’re just selling to your closest friends and family.
The Professional Foil, shown in the photo above, is solid brass, thus both sides are golden-yellow, the precise color of 14k gold, which is what brass of this type is formulated to look like — that IS the point, and by God, it does.
You’ll have to be extra-careful to spell out that it’s brass, not gold, that they’re buying. It LOOKS like gold, PRESENTS like gold, and ATTRACTS a CROWD like gold, but it isn’t gold, and it isn’t priced like gold. It’s priced like brass, which is relatively cheap, although not entirely so.
Your cost in the above piece if YOU made it would be around ten bucks, maybe $11.55 at the worst, at today’s silver prices. The reason it would be so cheap is that THERE ARE NO QUARTZ-GLASS CRYSTALS in the piece, no crystals at all, thus cutting the cost by about half!
Why is this possible?
You can mount the .36 gauge PRO BRASS TOKENS or PRO COPPER TOKENS in the RAW, in tight-fitting sterling silver or gold-filled coin-edged or rope-edged bezels without the need for protective holding crystals, because these tokens are much thicker, and far stiffer, than the medium-thickness GOLD-COLORED .38 gauge ALUMINUM DESIGNER’S FOIL that you will use for your larger pieces, such as dollar-sized.
In short, you save a bundle and don’t have the misery of trying to match crystals with bezels, which means you don’t have to ship the bezels back and forth to the factory, just to get them to fit right, which we have to do all the time, for each and every bezel order we make, because with them, EVERY order is a custom order.
Almost impossible to make, the 8.6 mm “Solaria” is a feat of inhuman engineering. You can cut the heavy PRO TOKEN solid brass and copper foils fairly easily, with some damage to the cutter.
I figure that I’ll get about 50 tokens out of a cutter before I have to toss it away, which adds junk to the big pile of junk accumulating on Earth — although of course it goes into the scrap recovery pile — and about $20 on top of the cost of those 50 tokens, about a half a buck of tool degradation per cut.
The cutters are meant for paper, not metal foil. The actual cutting is rather nightmarish, but I can burn up several hours just doing that one thing, and I don’t mind at all and in fact, on nights when my hands don’t work very well, I appreciate the opportunity to do a little work with very low physical requirements.
In-store sales are super-easy — outdoor and street sales are a LOT harder, because you have to draw into your booth people who are THERE to be distracted, and they are, but not by you, unless you have something in the booth in PLAIN EASY SIGHT that looks valuable and/or totally weird and different.
People like to be scared, so don’t be afraid to put something out there that’s a little strange. Remember that creating metal embossed tokens and mounting them in acrylic capsules and silver and gold bezels is one really great and fun way to CONVERT your art into CASH.
Acrylic Capsules are cheap. Your total product cost comes to well under a dollar. They look great and carry well and make terrific pocket charms and talismans. Best of all, they are really, really cheap. Bottom line is, they don’t cost much.
Okay, that point’s been made several times, but let’s look at WHY I made that point so strongly, why I want to make it clear that it’s important.
Even if you’re just selling online, on eBay or Etsy or Amazon or Google or Facebook or any of the many tens of thousands of selling sites on the internet, you’ll be only too aware of the fact that you don’t get around much, anymore.
You can’t sell much if you never see anyone, aren’t in contact with anyone and don’t ever meet or encounter anyone, and you’d not be alone in that. The way this world works, you’ll do better to be a loner, what used to be called “A SOLITARY” in the witch-biz.
Oh, relax. Wiccans are nothing like what the Catholic Church has made up about them. They’re just a competitor religion that got the short end of the Medieval Stick, Inquisitionally speaking.
We used to rent small ten foot by ten foot spaces at a variety of Thieves’ Markets and similar vendor spaces, such as you’ll find along the highway, labeled as “Swap Meets” and such.
Swap Meet and Co-Op Shops tend to be cheap, anywhere from $15 for the day to $1000 for a weekend experience at Martha’s Vineyard or Pier 39, where you’ll have thousands of people browsing your booth, but under ordinary circumstances, you can’t expect too much more than just the vendors showing up at any event these days, because people are SO scared, and rightly so, to go out in public and to assemble in super-vulnerable crowds.
So smaller events are better in that regard, less likely to attract the attention of crazies, but at the same time, you’ll have a smaller crowd, maybe fifty customers a day if that, at the smaller fairs and festivals.
In those cases, it’s all about placement, and the longer you work a fair, the higher on the list you can go, until you are “grandfathered” with your very own choice location and booth size.
If you’re an occasional vendor, you won’t get any preferential treatement, and you’ll think that all fairs suck, which they don’t, just some do — the ones that don’t have ANY public attendees because they were badly promoted or not promoted at all, which can happen even under the best of circumstances and with the best promoters in the business.
Bad hair days can happen, and when it’s a fair or street event, it can seriously impair your attitude about fairs, and in this economy, you’d be right.
So where can you find a ready market?
Street fairs are better than park fairs, unless there’s a guaranteed attendance, like a state or county fair, or a well-established Celtic fair or RenFair.
Swap Meets are sometimes occasional or sporadic, and some of them are permanent, with permanent locking storage-type sales buildings for vendors, the works, along with a solid crowd that comes swarming in at dawn every day looking for steals and bargains.
These crowds are your meat, so to speak, but you have to know the TECHNIQUES for turning your art into cash, right?
“Okay, so how DO I turn my art into cash today???” I hear you ask, wondering when, if ever, I’ll get to the point, but I already have. I told you way back there how to do it, but I’ll put it down clear and bold, so there’s no doubt what I mean:
Take your most-often used, most iconic, personal art images and make them into simple designs that can be expressed in metal foil with embossing techniques.
Let me impress this fact upon you: you may NEVER sell one of your prints or paintings, yet you can sell hundreds or thousands of embossed metal designs as a variety of useful objects of daily use, anything from a special hair-comb to a belt-buckle or pendant.
Sure, it’s not wall art, but wall art isn’t moving right now, and jewelry is.
This opens up a LOT of possibilities, because both the DESIGNER and PRO foils can take a LOT of detail, and I mean a LOT, if you’ve got the skill to put the lines and dots in there.
Yes, lines and dots. That’s all it is, a bunch of dots and dashes, some straight, some curved…get it??? DOTS & DASHES…zeros and ones, see?
Consider Samuel F.B. Morse. He created “Morse Code”, named after him, of course, which is composed of dots and dashes — two things only — which, when combined in various ways, yields an alphabet which, in turn, can be assembled into words, phrases, sentences and entire volumes of information.
Dots and dashes make up the ham radio “Q-Code”, based on Morse Code encrypted in pre-arranged meaningful significances, such as –.- … . .. — .. -.- , which translates in ordinary alphabet to: “QSA IMI K”, meaning “How’s My Signal Strength?”.
All that stuff can be found in the CW — Continuous Wave — transmissions, which as a ham operator, is what I’m mostly interested in for my DX Ham Operator Card Collection and no, I don’t give out my Call Sign to anyone — it’s strictly for DXing, otherwise use a cell phone or email me, don’t use an antiquated communication system for ordinary conversation.
The theory behind CONTINUOUS WAVE key-code messages is that the spark-generated waves will get through almost any garly electronic binding, while the modulation of a human voice, even with a carrier wave to support it, may be garbled or distorted by drift and other wave interferences, so for emergency applications, Continuous Wave radio on the AM bands is best, although the ham bands exist in a different band of frequencies than AM commercial radio, the stuff you’re used to hearing, maybe.
AM radio is used in space, and don’t let them tell you it isn’t. During launch, there is no other way.
Yes, Dots and Dashes. Two distinct things that, taken together and organized properly, can yield a language, such as so-called “Binary”, which is nothing more than a mathematical version of Morse Code.
Don’t let the “educators” and “university minds” fool you into thinking it’s any more complicated than that, because it isn’t.
Guitar is easy, simple and can be mastered quickly with five minutes practice a day, if you don’t include the impossible and near-impossible chords and hand manipulations.
So how DO you turn your art into cash?
Take ONE DESIGN and work it to death, ie; make a pageful of 20 dollar-sized artisan-signed embossed metal tokens, and mount them into dollar-sized flips, then name them and sign the flips and mount the flips in the plastic coin-catalog page, and sell them right out of the page.
A plastic catalog page holds twenty examples, twenty coins or twenty of your fabulous embossed metal designs that you’re going to take out there and sell.
Just joking about the worn-down head. Huey Falk and I had obtained permission from the curator to touch it, just for the one photo, taken in New York City, November of 1955. This and other faces like it have fascinated people down through the ages.
You can try all kinds of art images in embossed metal, but in the end, if you really want to sell a LOT of them, you’ll do faces, faces, faces.
Is it a sellout? Sure it is, but who’s trying to NOT sell out, when it comes to merchandising and marketing? Be real. You want your product to appeal to people, or do you want design awards for excellence?
You can do both. Have a couple of trays or catalog pages full of faces, and ALSO have your other artwork displayed, including some paintings, drawings and sculptures.
Speaking of sculptures, I’ll soon show you how to create weightless, easy to mount and display metal sculptures for almost nothing, meaning less than a dollar apiece.
These are made in both heavy-gauge wire and foil, creating two very different effects. We’ll explore this more in the next few days.
In addition to these ideas, we’ll be exploring some of the ideas that our gold miners have come up with to make money from NOTHING!
Phredd & Wilmur, working on the Prosperity Mine Claim, found something that’s worth MORE than gold, if you can believe it, and it’s all up there in the river, waiting to be discovered, picked up, prepared for market, and SOLD for big money!!!
They’ll be bringing some home to show us today, hopefully. We’ll ask them to show & tell what they discovered and what they found, and how they plan to turn that stuff into CASH.
You can turn something like a rock into a pet, from which you could retire and send a few kids to college. My friend Gary Dahl who lived in Los Gatos, right next to Donner and Eve’s home in Saratoga, California — that’s Silicon Valley, to you — whom some will remember from Cosmo Street meetings back in the day, was a copy-writer at the time, although he was perennially out of work and broker than a 78 record that’s been dropped from an airplane.
He invented the Pet Rock as a joke, during a personal crisis, and made a fortune from it, and the thing is still with us, still selling and now part of our language — “Pet Rock” can mean a variety of things from “good” to “bad”. Overnight, the Pet Rock sold 1.5 million at $3.95 apiece, and that was back in 1975!!!
With a little ingenuity and inspiration, YOU could come up with the next Pet Rock! Would you know it if you saw it? With a little off-worlder help, you could develop the vision!
See You At The Top!!!
gorby