Raven Stitch Plush Toys Have a New Website!

I'm really excited to announce that my plush toys, the Plush Elements, have a new website! This is something l've wanted to do for a long time. It's finally time to focus my energy on my plush toy company, Raven Stitch.

This is the first of a bit of news I will be sharing this year, so stay tuned! But for now, make sure to grab some Plush during the site launch because I'm throwing a sale to get things going. By default the sale will be giving a $2 off each plush discount, but as an added bonus to anyone who wants to help test the new site and order process, I'm offering an additional $3 OFF per plush if you use the code FIRST5 during checkout! That's $5 off per plush (+ FREE SHIPPING over $60)! This code will only work for the first 5 customers.

Let me know if you run into any issues during checkout. Thanks for your continued support!

Splitting Like an Atom

Well, not really. After recent discussions with friends, followers and family, I came to the conclusion that my websites really should be split. My line of thinking when I first merged all my sites was that if I was to put everything I do together into one website, it would make my life easier. This was true, to some extent, but at the cost of confusing new people. For instance, if someone was to find my work via L.A.W.L.S., and they were to click around, most linked brought them to Corvink; a website with no obvious intentions. With poetry, random drawings, comics, commissions, personal blogs, news updates about some company, and so on, it was a huge mess. On a branding standpoint, people didn't particularly know who I was as a creator, rather, they'd find this confusing thing called Corvink that created things and does commissions? I'd like to very seriously pursue commissions in the near future, but I think this endeavor is best suited for a personal website. Also, on the flip side, I'd like Corvink to be a little less personal as the brand grows and I have more people helping me at conventions.  Being able to use the words "us" or "we" feels more logical when you discuss your business to people. It more clear to business contacts that you are in fact that, a business. When approaching potential investors or distributors, having a site that is clearly for art merch (even if it's the art of a particular artist), with a single understandable mission statement, makes it far easier to pitch it's value to them. Also, there is value in not confusing a random newcomer by not overloading them with too much information when first browsing a new store. This allows them to focus on what's important; the things I created and would like them to easilt connect with and hopefully buy.

DenisCaron.com & Corvink.Com Split with similar designs.

After deep consideration of the best way to implement all these ideas, I've decided that Corvink should be a store front, with the tagline "Occult Emporium," a verbal description of my over arching theme of all my current, and future projects. For those of you who don't know what occult is, it's not some creepy cultish thing, it's anything that involves the supernatural, mystical, or magical ideology, practices, or phenomena. I'll go more into this more in future posts, but for now, at least you can get an idea of where I'm going with all this.

Outside of Corvink, what you see here on this new site, is anything from poems, inklings,  as well as my exploration of art (including my occult themed drawings). L.A.W.L.S. (all 3 comics), again, are on their own but can now all be found on their own website! This is something I've wanted to do for years! This has made me really happy, and excited to get back to creating comics! Which, I will have announcements about as well soon.

One final note is the complete overhaul of design and my decisions on this. My websites used to all be dark and black to relay that sense of "goth culture." Taking on the term occult, you'd assume that I'd want to keep the black color scheme, but instead I went a completely new direction. I have two reasons for this:

1. White is clean, easy to view, and removes all connotations of my work being some sort of "dark satanic pit on the internet." I hate that goth is synonymous with satan and evil. Rather, this is now a place to focus on art and creations that explore occult ideas.

2. I didn't feel the need to have a cliche "black" is goth, website anymore. You can get that by exploring the work, without having to make something that visually weighs you down. After spending time on the internet and exploring occult, alchemy, magic related websites... almost all of them take themselves TOO seriously and go with that black theme to oversell the idea. I quickly found myself developing a distaste for that sort of look. 

Thank you all for your patience and support while I've gone through this strange creative journey in the past 2 years! Now go forth, explore the new site, check out the new Corvink store or reread some comics. Don't forget to check out DenisCaron.com and Corvink.com on your phones! They've gone completely mobile! Hopefully one day I can do this with L.A.W.L.S. too; just need to find the right plugin or developer to help me with this. Anyway, I'll talk more with you guys soon! Comment your thoughts, if you have any. :]

Corvink Has Achieved a Level Up!

• Strength +1

• Magic +5

• Dexterity +3 

• Intelligence +2

Now, you may be wondering what I'm going on about? Well, in these following ramblings I will explain... but if you don't want to read to much further I'll let you in on the big secret. Corvink got a new website and store! ::cough:: I guess the title of this blog gave that away didn't it? ::cough::

SO... WHAT'S NEW?

A NEW STORE

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The New Store!

Probably the one of the most exciting updates is that the store is now fully incorporated into the main site. When you click the store button now, you'll notice that the website itself doesn't look entirely different. This used to be because I had two different "backbones" installed for the main site and the store. Each of these installs used their own MySQL databases, coding, css, etc. Let me tell you, this was a really mess to keep maintained. Also, as a designer, this always really bugged me. It didn't feel aesthetically as pleasing for me. For you guys, I'm sure, it also it felt a little off putting and hard to find a way back to the original site from the store the way it was.

With the store fully integrated into the blog, another neat feature is the fact that if you add something to your cart a little white cart pop up will show up at the top right of your screen with any items you've added. This allows you to continue shopping or wander around the site with out being disturbed.

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The New Cart Button!

Another note has to do with items I like to consider "going extinct," AKA  ♥ GTFO. This section is basically for items that are on their final run, like the Cactus Green "Save The Environment, Kill Yourself" Shirts.  GTFO simply stands for "Get The Fuck Out" ...of the store and into your hands! I'm not really sure how often items will go here, but when the item has seen the end of it's days and is ready to go extinct I'll let you guys know and list it there. 

Finally, one the coolest new features is that Corvink now has an SSL certificate and is able to securely take credit cards directly with out you having to use Paypal!  I've been wanting to set something like this up for quite a long time but could not afford to do so until now!

Character Bios and Social Media

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New Characters Bio Page

The character's bio page is something I'm also excited about, especially since I've had to take so much time off of the comics lately. Even though I haven't had a chance to work on them (which by the way my tablet is broken at the moment), I do occasionally tweet as my characters. The reason for this is that it keeps me in their mindsets while being able to have them interact and continue to explore them as individuals via twitter.  This image shows some of the things I updated for this section (or you know, you can just click the link in the menu bar or whatever). What's new is the links to their social media accounts, a live twitter feed and links to their full character appearances at the individual comic sites.

Ok Great, What's Next? 

The new site is all fine and dandy, but when the hell am I gonna get back to doing some art? Well, I must apologize about my absence lately in that department, trust me, I feel extremely guilty about this. As I mentioned above, my tablet somehow stopped working just a few days before San Diego Comic-Con! Because of it's unfortunate timing, I wasn't able to fix it before I left and now that the convention has been over, I've been working full force trying to make Corvink a legit business. This means that I've had to do all kinds of behind the scenes projects that don't really output much visual candy for you guys. In the past few months I've been working to set up Quickbooks (for book keeping), come up with a SKU system for my merchandise, file for a tax ID and tons of other boring things that adults apparently have to do to have their own small businesses. I've also had to redo my office for better workflow and organization, find a new company that could handle my shirt printing, get said shirts printed, design other products I've wanted to make for some time (like the new shot glasses) and get ready for next years convention exhibits! It's crazy running a one man show like this... even though it's based on my art work, I can't ignore the business end of creating or else I can't find a way to financially continue this... catch 22 is that it's put me in a tough spot of not being able to work on art either. Sigh.

Anyway, now that this site is done, I have a few more behind the scenes things I need to get done (including fixing my tablet) then I'll be back on the art horse and riding it into the artistic battle once again!