Raven Stitch Plush Elements on Kickstarter

Corvink Elements Plush Toys [ First Editions ]

After months and months of planning this project, I'm excited to finally announce what I've been working on. For the most part I've been sort of quiet about it (w/ a teaser here and there on instagram of course) because I wanted to make sure I found the right company who could not only produce the quality of items I want to make but are also able to understand my vision. That being said, that time was time well spent! The prototypes you see in the photo above are the pre-production samples and I've gotta say they exceeded my expectations! I really hope you all get a chance to hold these magical little guys in your hands, because they are pretty fantastic quality. In my upcoming blogs I'll talk about the process of prototyping these and the story behind Them. For now, however, let's talk about getting these little guys made!

YOU'RE DOING A KICKSTARTER?

The Fire Element reborn

That's right, I'm doing my second Kickstarter! It's been a little over 3 years since I launched the L.A.W.L.S. Volume 1 campaign, and I'm still blown away by the support of my readers for helping make that happen! I am forever grateful to all of you and to Kickstarter for making that dream possible. Now, looking towards the future, I plan to put together more books (L.A.W.L.S. Vol 2, ALT., etc), but also I'd like to be able to create these companions along side of them (spoiler alert: there's a bigger picture here I'm working towards in my stories, and magic has a huge part in that). I wish I had all the money in to world to make it all happen at once, but being that I work entirely alone on all this, I had to come to the realization that Kickstarter is how pretty much the only way I can do this. So, as I took time away from comics I came up with a plan, and that plan starts with this little guy! My oldest of fans (in span of time, not age) may recognize this inkling from back in 2009, but the rest of you probably recognize his reincarnation from last year:

WHAT SORT OF REWARDS ARE YOU OFFERING?

In order to keep this project simple, I decided that Fire will be the first goal and the first reward. After Fire is funded, each other element will be "unlocked" and made available (I'll explain more about this below). L.A.W.L.S. Volume 1 will also be paired with the plush in a pack. The first rewards are a single Fire Plush or a Fire Plush + L.A.W.L.S. Volume 1. Also, I added a special tier for those who want commissions that is $50. Hopefully if we unlock more elements, the future rewards will be 2 Plush (Fire + Water, or two of the same) + L.A.W.L.S. Volume 1, and so on. Here's a visual example:

HOW DO I GET ALL 4 ELEMENTS?

If you're wondering why I'm only asking for $2000 to fund only Fire when I have these other 3 other concepts on the line here, the answer is pretty simple. The main reason for this unconventional structuring of a campaign is because I didn't feel completely comfortable asking for $8000 up front. I don't know if it's just fear that I can't reach that goal, or what, but $2000 is a more reasonable and obtainable number. Especially, considering I'm not too sure how interested the public are in these just yet. I figure too, by showing that I have a full vision for this from the get go that people will understand that I have a plan and I'm not just coming up with rewards for the sake of asking for more money (which I've seen on Kickstarter many times). If we're able to fund the first $2000 goal to make Fire, the next goal immediately moving forward is $4000 to make Fire and Water, $6000 to add Air to the mix and $8000 to make all 4 of them! If we get there, I'll be at a loss of words. This is just the beginning of the concepts I have for toy designs, and if people are that into it, this will be a huge way to help me to finacinally get to a place where I can finish writing/creating L.A.W.L.S. and make more ALT Comics!

Thank you in advance to any of you willing to help expand my universe and make these cute little guys real! CLICK HERE TO JUMP TO KICKSTARTER!

EDIT: Changed titled to Raven Stitch Plush Elements, after rebranding them.

Monsters & Dames 2015 Art Book!

"Necrowmancer" for Emerald City Comicon's 2015 Monsters & Dames book.

I'm excited to announce that my piece was selected for Emerald City Comicon's charity book Monsters and Dames, and will be available this year at ECCC merch booth at the convention itself on March 27-29th. I've considered submitting something for the past 3 years, but this year I finally made the time and had a strong enough concept that I couldn't wait to illustrate this and lend a hand for a good cause such as this. The proceeds for the book go to Seattle Children's Hospital, a premier child health care & pediatric center, recognized as one of the leading hospitals for children. Being that I work with kids and adults with special needs, being a part of this is pretty close to my heart. This, along with many other things, is exactly why I so strongly support Emerald City Comicon.

So what is my piece about? I decided to call this piece "Necrowmancer," a play on words mixing the words necromacer (one who raises the dead) and crow (an animal that symbolizes death and intelligence). Most of my work as of late has had occult themes (witches, magic, cryptic symbolism), so I wanted to make sure that I was able to put a bit of myself into this piece. But, based on the nature of the charity, I didn't want to make it too dark or morbid, so I played more on one of the most common and more important themes in my work; female empowerment. That being said, I also worked to make sure that she wasn't overly sexualized. It's too easy for male artists to fall into that pit of "a dame's got to be well endowed, revealing and posed in a fashion that even a child can see how inappropriately posed she is." I find that men often confuse the idea of women empowerment with strong women showing off "their goods," when what they are doing is actually perpetuating the whole over-sexualization of women. I could go in deeper into this, maybe another time, but for now let's just say this girl's powerful, can fight just as well as any man, and likes to wear cute things while doing it! As for the monster in this piece, it is an embodiment of nature's deceased animals. 

Part of the reason I went for this darker theme (other than me just being into it) is that I like the idea of not hiding from the darkness of the world. We should not fear that which plagues humanity. Illness and death are inevitable, but if we walk along side it, try to understand it and do our best to help those affected by it, we can start to see the beauty in our lives reflected off of that darkness. It's important not to forget to celebrate and experience our lives while we still can. 

Along with my artwork some close friends and other amazing artists will also be featured in this years issue. The book includes artists such as Cody Vrosh, Dane Ault, Daniel Davis, Jeff Schuetze, Skottie Young, Aaron Alexovich, Camilla d'Errico and many more. 

Corvink on Storenvy & Etsy

Make sure to hit the "Favorite Shop" and "Favorite" Product buttons. 

You read that right, I've opened up two new stores; one on Etsy and one on Storenvy. My hopes being that with the upcoming holiday season that people will be favoriting my stuff for gift ideas and hopefully spreading the word a bit. That's one really nice thing about having your store on a community, rather than just on your own e-commerce website. There's a catch though. New buyers need to feel comfortable buying from a stranger; they need confidence that my store is legit and worth their attention. Considering my stores are new, I'm having a tough time getting them rolling. This is why I'm writing this blog. Hopeful you guys to can help!

I know that money is tight these days, so I'm not asking for you guys to buy anything... I mean unless you want to... but if you have a few moments, there's a few ways you can help in a big way! For instance, if you have an Etsy account, please go favorite my shop and any of my listing that you like! The more favs an item has, the higher they ranked in search feeds. It may seem silly, but it's really that simple! 

Click the "Envy This" button when you hover over a product image.

For Storenvy, its even more simple. All you need to do is click that "Envy This" button when you hover over the item, that or the little heart below it. I'm not really sure what "Collect" does though. If you're into that sort of thing, feel free to do that too. Actually, if you know what it is, let me know! Maybe there's more to it and you can learn me a thing or two. :P haha 

Thanks for your support, and if you have any ideas on how to get the store moving more, please, by all means, clue me in! Also, the Storenvy store has more of my merch than Etsy so if you are looking to buy something in particular I recommend that store.

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. :]

Poetry Writing

"Like, what's with these recent poetry posts out of no where, Denis? I thought you drew funny things! I don't see jokes in these poems!" I know right? I'm sure these recent posts have seemed completely out of character for me. Especially when you consider I haven't explicitly expressed any interest in any sort of poetry writing in the past 5 or so years I've been making comics. Or have I?

por·tend \por-TEND\

verb

To indicate (events, misfortunes, etc.) as in future; to foreshadow; to bode.

I certainly have a love for words, not only in learning new ones, but figuring out how to use them in creative or even humorous ways. Words of interest, for example, was a bit of an exploration in this idea for me. I wanted to expand my vocabulary but at the same time, hopefully, be able to expand other people's as well. You don't know how much it's made my day when people have come up to me at shows and told me they've started using a word from the comic in their daily language and/or jokes! But, before I go on some nonsense tangent about humorous verbal lols, let's stay on point and talk about writing, shall we?

Before any of this all started I used to write, not only poems, but lyrics to songs that I would sing along to while I played piano or guitar. In high school, my dream was to become a professional musician who was able to travel around the country to be able share music anywhere I could. This was before social media was as big as it now, by the way. I think back then the best site available to me for promotion was Myspace... you know, that site where the only thing anyone cared about was who showed up in their "top 5" on their profiles. Anyway, I made it a practice to write poetry every night before bed or even while I was supposed to be learning how to cram numbers together in Science class (I obviously learned quite a bit about how to Math those days). Every so often, the poems that didn't sound like verbal fecal matter became songs and chicken scribbles that didn't make the cut were thrown into a poem pile where lesser poems just went to die. 

Anyway, when I started drawing L.A.W.L.S. it was something that began to consume my life completely. So much so, that I had to make a creative decision. Which thing was most important to me and which seemed to be the most feasible of jobs? At the time, the answer was comics. I needed to focus on one creative project, not 100... because I feared that I would never perfect how to draw comics if I was splitting my attentions between both things. Sound enough logic, but the only fault in it was that I was beginning to let a creative part of myself begin to die. I certainly enjoy making people laugh, but I wasn't writing things that moved me anymore. As I've more recently come this realization, I've come to the conclusion that I should be creating things that not only inspire other people, but myself as well.

Conception and Production of "Death" Hand Fans

While you wait for your little taste of death arrive in your hands here's a little backstory to the development and production of how I got these things hand fans made!

Making a Thing...

My friend Sarah and I were sitting at my booth last year at Anime Expo, one of the more sweaty convention I've exhibited at (due to extremely hot California sun), when we noticed how many people were fanning themselves with AX Program Guide Books. I'm not sure if Sarah was joking when she said it, but when she suggested I make fans for people to cool themselves, I took her absolutely serious. 

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"Death" Hand Fan Design Mock-Up in Adobe Illustrator [ 17.4" x 8.7 ]

It took me months of searching for a company to produce these for me. With the quality that I insist on having to sell anything at my store, this was a little harder than I had ever expected to encounter. With a few minor set backs, botched prototypes and misunderstandings, I did however finally find a great company who was willing to work with my anal retentive artistic eye. 

Since this was all new to me I had to re-explore design concepts. My initial idea was stupid. I was just going to put Death front and center with no consideration of how a fan is held or what it would look like on this medium. I'm glad I came to my senses. After researching what other more artsy fans looked like I came to a conclusion that I should try to make her maximize the space as much as possible, without sacrificing the darkness that having a lot of black ink surrounding her.  Once I was happy with the design, I sent it to my production company and received the most disappointing prototype photo ever.

Learning Experiences

Now here is a great learning experience I really want to share with every one because I could have saved quite a bit of money, time and frustration if I would have understood this better. Never make assumptions that a company you are working with understand your vision. When starting the conversation with this company, I told them I would like to print on Silk and use dyed black bamboo for the base. When I came to them saying exactly what I wanted, they assumed I knew what that entailed as far as printing goes. I did not. Below is a photo of their printing sheet on silk after they ran their printers for production. I was dumbfounded by how off the colors were from what I had sent them above!

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Attempt to print on silk with high color density.

When I saw this I asked if they had played with the colors in photoshop or something and only then told me "When printing on silk, the colors need to be soft because silk does not take ink well." Well thanks! This would have been great information to know ahead of time. To add to the frustrations they also had already printed the entire order and were only checking in with me at this point to see if I was happy with the printing. Really? UGH! After a bit of arguing back and forth (only a few emails, thankfully) we worked out a deal for them to fix the issue and print on sturdy paper. I had to repay for setting the printer and a new sample, but everything else was taken care of, they were actually rather accommodating (after I raised some hell with them of course). I wish I could say that this was a fluke, that companies never do stuff like this, but the unfortunate truth about producing things (especially in mass quantities) is that for a lot of companies its cheaper for them to run their printers once and blame it on you if their are mistakes than for them to start their printers a few times to get it perfect. I had similar issues with my book, and have heard from many other artist friends that encountered the same. Suffice it to say, once all the issues were worked out with this company I was extremely happy with the final production. 

Packaging

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I really wanted this to be something special, so instead of just printing fans and having them only packaged in the standard little polybags they came with, I looked into getting custom red velvet pouches with my logo on them. With that I also wanted to include a certificate card that I have now hand signed and numbered as proof that anyone who bought one received a limited edition from my first run of fans ever. When preparing packaging I learned 2 things really fast. 1) get quotes for everything you need before you start any sort of production and 2) try to use one company for everything; hand assembling and producing from multiple vendors is like having one of those vomit-migraine you get after drinking too much alcohol and dropping dinosaur acid. Because of how small I needed the cards, the company I use to print told me it was a custom shape and would need to charge me nearly 5x what it ended up costing me to just print standard business cards and cut them in half! Which is what I did. The pouches, much like the hand fans, had a similar issue of production where they screen printed everything before I gave approval. They misconstrued a line in one of my emails and assumed what it was I was green lighting was the entire production, not just my size requirements. Fortunately, in this case, there weren't any major issues and and the bags they produced came out wonderful.

[ See more production photos on my Flickr. ]

Anyway, that's what it took to produce these amazing little pretties. Hopefully are enjoying my massively long Development Blogs and at least find the information I ramble about useful in your endeavors!

Unconscious Ink Returns!

For a lot of you I’m sure you don’t even know what Unconscious Ink [ui] is or even what sort of significance it had towards the development Corvink. Well, don’t feel bad about that, because I barely understand it myself! Haha. No, really though… Unconscious ink is/was an exploration of my artistic abilities as well as a way for me to free flow ideas that don’t really have a purpose other than the fact that I want to draw something fun and/or challenge myself with new techniques. It was one of the first internet projects I ever did; before L.A.W.L.S. but after Reeder Rabbit. Which was significant because of the time between those two projects I was able to grow a lot artistically; not to mention figure out how to even really get into a more professional flow of how to post on the internet and use social media. 

Recently I’ve had conversations with a few other artists about artistic growth and figuring out your voice amongst the thousands of artists out there in the world. What was interesting to me is that I would keep coming back to my first projects as a refection of where I came. In having these discussions it dawned on me that maybe it would be a good idea to post these online again to give people a reference point of my growth to show people how much I’ve changed artistically, what things I tried and the subtle development of my own voice as a result of this project. So, I spent this last weekend putting filtering through my horribly organized photoshop files and compiled this new series on the site called “Unconscious Ink Inklings” or just “Inklings” on the menubar. 

The current collection dates back to 2007 and runs until 2009 with a few random drawings I did of Pokemon in 2011. I hope to expand upon this project in the next year or so as I feel like I’m in another sort of creative moratorium, in which I know I still want to do and create comics but as Corvink grows, I want to grow artistically as well. I’ve started to develop a few plans for this, but for now, let’s leave it at that, explore some of my strange creations and I’ll catch up with you later with more news soon!

L.A.W.L.S. Universe's New Home

It's 2014 and I must say I'm excited about the things to come. I've had my hands in so many projects in the last year that it will be nice to finally announce them and begin to let them unfold. To make sure that I'm able to make time for everything though, I had to make a major choice about one of the most important things to me, the future of my comics. That choice had to do with one simple yet complex problem; where I should host them? I had opened this point of discussion on my blog about "The Women of Interest," and on the Corvink Facebook to get input from my readers and to my surprise, people were very supportive of moving the comics here. The decision came down to time management and work consolidation. Basically, my ability to be able to manage 4 domains, each with their own Wordpress install, while being able to provide quality posts, without compromising my sanity or health, became too much to manage in the past. Thus, the all three of my comics (and any future comics) will all be posted here at Corvink!

To answer the inevitable question: Is there anything different about reading any of the L.A.W.L.S. Universe comics (L.A.W.L.S., ALT., or Words of Interest) now that they are on this site? No, not really. Each comic basically has their own themed blog (that looks a lot like they used to on their own domains) which can be found by adding /alt, /lawls, or /wordsofinterest to the end of the corvink.co URL. You can also still use their old domains, which re-direct to their new locations, to access them quickly. The nice thing about them now basically having a centralized hub, however, is that you can also just come to the main site and see the which comic was recently posted, on the side bar. Not only that, you are now able to access any of the comics from the menu bar drop down that says "read comics" at any place at the Corvink website! This is all made possible because of my switch in CMS (Content Management System).

"Duck Faced Selfie" from ALT.

Much like most webcomic artists, I was using Wordpress w/ Comicpress, but I was inclined to agree with the opinion of Scott Kurtz, the creator of PvP, about Comicpress in his blog called "Comic Unimpressed." Don't get me wrong, for what it is, it's a much better choice than other free alternatives like SmackJeeves, but it really feels more like a means to an end.  For me, I now look at Wordpress/Comicpress as a great way to trial run your concept. Before you invest money in paying for a CMS, which I am now doing, you should post strips for a few month or even a year to see if 1) you're able to gain a readership and more importantly 2) that you find out that this is really something you want to do or not. The Webcomic industry is NOT an easy business and if you aren't passionate about it, your work not only ends up falling short, but you can start to become jaded about webcomic creator cliques, internet trolls, lack of traffic in comparison to other creators, etc. If you're not passionate about creating for creating sake, the death of you comic may come long before it even has a chance to thrive. If you're able to push through all that, still love doing what you're doing, and hopefully are seeing some sort of monetization, at some point, I personally now feel it's best to pay for a service like Express Engine.

Paid services have more stable backends that can protect you from malicious virus' because of the fact that they are not open source (anyone, regardless of level of skill, can modify code or create plugins). Also, out of the box, Wordpress/Comicpress is does not do any comic justice in the design department, which means you have to either pay someone to design it for you or spend months to years learning CSS yourself. Taking the DYI approach, which I did for years, means you can look forward to spending hours upon hours finding plugins for various crap you really don't need. I mean, unless you enjoy installing a plethora of server hogging and vulnerable plug-ins just for kicks. Some people enjoy the sweat taste of pain and suffering, I think they call that Masochism? Who am I to judge.  All the same, I am not one of those people, and I began to tire of having to spend all my free time making my site perfect, to only have destroyed because of occasional updates and frivolous "upgrades" to Comicpress.  I have nothing bad to say about the programmer behind Comicpress, he means well and really is a nice guy, but his constantly toying with the code, and gradually forcing of a migration to installing even more plug-ins (Comic Easel for instance) has on more than one occasion rendered a lot of very meticulously thought out CSS edits useless. What does that mean? BROKEN WEBSITE + HOURS OF RECODING/STYLING ALL THE THINGS. This, in my opinion, is not a professional way to deal with the presentation of your comic, and if you are serious about making a career in webcomics (or anything creative for that matter), you can not be investing your time in places outside of the most essential part of your art form, creating it. This was one of the largest deciding factors behind my move to this centralized site.

"Poniard" from Words of Interest

All that being said, because of how involved I am in the development at Decobot with Destined Legends Series 2 and a few future projects, I’m not 100% sure if I’ll be able to maintain any sort of solid schedule. Having the comics here at Corivnk will help readers quickly see if any new comics have been posted since the last time they checked. Doing it this way, I can post the comics when I have a chance (hopefully once a week for the time being), but still keep everyone updated with all the things I'm doing. I can't promise a schedule, but I can promise that I am very avidly working to get comics out regularly in the next year in hopes that I can at least make an ALT. Volume 1 book sometime in 2015... and hopefully also a Words of Interest Volume 1 as well! I'd really like to get both of these books out before I move into production of L.A.W.L.S. Volume 2. The reason for this is comes down to the basic nature of how people shop at conventions; the place I make most of my money in creating. My readers love L.A.W.L.S. how it is, but there is a HUGE barrier of entry to getting new people to want to buy or even get interested in a book as odd as L.A.W.L.S. is at a convention. I hate that this has to be something that I need to consider as far as what comic I need to be working on right now, but if I'm to be able to continue making comics, I need to be able to also sell books! I'm very confident with how often people buy the ALT. and WOI comic prints at conventions, that their books would sell easier than the L.A.W.L.S. book to strangers... and what I hope will happen is that they will be a portal back into finding out more about the characters and expand interest back into L.A.W.L.S. The great thing about this plan is that I'm getting better at writing and drawing every time I make another ALT. and by the time I get back to Volume 2 of L.A.W.L.S. I will be producing the best quality comic I can possibly make! That is extremely exciting for me.

"YOLO" From ALT.

Well, that's my rant about my comics, sorry it's was so long but I really needed to get all that off my chest. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank any one who's been reading and linking to my comics thus far, your support is amazing! I'd also like to ask if you do link to me, if you wouldn't mind changing the url to the new domain (example: corvink.co/alt) i'd greatly appreciate it! It will help with reduce any confusion for people, not to mention increase the SEO results for the comics. Anyway, with Corvink’s horizon expanding, I hope that you all continue you to follow me on this journey of creation! There’s much more I have in the works I can’t wait to talk about in future blogs. 2014, LET'S DO THIS!

Destined Legends: The Fulfillment

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The Decobot Office is literally Ali's apartment living room.

Now that we've discussed my involvement in the birth, the development, and the art of the game we can finally we talk about one of the most stressful and time consuming sections of the launch of Destined Legends. I feel it's important to take the time to acknowledge this, not only give everyone reading this an overview of what this involves but to possibly demystify the conception that Decobot is a large company. Our team is very small: Ali, Shawn and I are core team, we alone dealt with the development and production of the game and were the only ones handling any of the orders received during or after the Kickstarter campaign.

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Little did Ali know that this human sized bag of peanuts still wasn't enough to pack all the orders.

After a grueling few months in production (of which Ali took full lead), the game arrived in Long Beach, California one day into San Diego Comic Con. As if stress wasn't high enough getting ready for the con, Ali was forced to leave the convention center and rush 2 1/2 hours north to receive the game before the port closed for the day. Then he had to bring 1000 copies each of the game, sidebars, and playboards on another journey to Northern Los Angeles approximately 1 from there and finally drive a car full of everything back to San Diego in time for day 2 of the con. I still remember vividly how physically drained Ali was for the remainder of the con. If it wasn't for his brother helping at the Decobot booth (I was too busy manning my own booth), Ali would have likely collapsed. On top of still having a full time job at Apple, he was the one fully in charge of paying our artists, finding and communicating our products vision to the production company in China, and coordinating our affairs with customs. Ali truly is the unsung hero of making this game happen.

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Hand assembled Manticore Correction Cards packs

With San Diego Comic Con over, the hope was that we could breath for even a day, but that was not the case. The games were in our hands and it was time to get it out to 303 backers and over 200 pre-orders (both online and from Anime Expo). As we were getting ready to ship these out it had been called to our attention an error had slipped past our tired eyes and made it into the final production of one of the creatures cards, the Manticore. We quickly placed an order for 4,000 new cards to be printed (4 of this card shows up on each Battle Set) and had to wait for them to come in before we could ship a single game. This however did not mean that we twiddled our thumbs in anticipation, instead we began pre-packing and labeling boxes, sorting orders and preparing for the thunderstorm of shipments, order tickets and other unexpected events that would follow. 

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Me on a supply run.

It's a known fact that we raised $23,000 dollars for our Kickstarter, that sounds quite amazing doesn't it? We were so excited about the fact that we were going to likely have some extra cash to be able to pay for conventions, advertising and use this money other essential things to try to build a business as a result of our successful funding of the game. This however was not the case, and here in lies one of the hardest lessons we had to learn. Things never go as planned and even if you set a sensible budget, when doing something as big as this, you can not plan every aspect of who or what will need money from you at any given time. With a few backers bailing out, taxes removed from our initial earnings, the printing of the Manticore correction card and apology cards explaining how and why we amended a new card, errors in art prints that needed reprinting, miscalculating supplies, and the worst of all the Post Office raising their shipping prices for international shipping rate ( 1/3 of our orders), we exceeded our budget. 

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We spent many late nights like this. [Pictured: Shawn Showkati]

I really can not stress how much the shipment of these games really affected our budget. My first book L.A.W.L.S. Vol. 1 weighs between 1-2lb (depending on which edition), and on average and cost between $3-6 dollars to ship domestically. It also cost no more than $10 or so to be shipped internationally. Considering that, plus our calculated research from the Post Offices website we decide on reasonable prices for the games shipment. This however was before two key factors changed. Firstly, we weren't able to get accurate weights of things from china because the game had yet to be assembled. The actual weight per item ended up being much more than we expected. The second factor is what I mentioned before, the Post Office considerably upped their prices to ship all orders, particularly international orders. Just to give you an idea of what it cost to ship out a Genesis Collectors Set (our highest ordered product) here are some numbers:  It cost somewhere around $12 to ship domestically and international orders can range anywhere from $25-45. This means that after every 3-5 games we ship we've already spent around $100. It doesn't take long for a couple of those to add up to a grand, and so on. You can see now how we burned through a lot more money than we had expected. 

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This is just one of many shipments that went out into the world over the duration of fulfillment.

After weighing our options, Ali reluctantly had to take out a business lone to make sure that the remaining orders would be shipped to everyone who had paid for the game. Fortunately this also allows Ali the opportunities to cover other emerging expenses as well as begin the process of developing new projects under the Decobot name! Luckily we can now say that all the games have been shipped and that we've finally been able to breath before what is coming next! I can't talk too much about what we are working on at this moment, but one thing that is actively in the works is the next set of cards for the game! The next series will have original artwork by me and other fantastic artists. With being part of this game from the beginning and now watching the growth of Decobot success, I must say, I can't wait to see where this game and all Ali's future projects go!

Destined Legends: The Art & Design

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Sketch by Cari Corene for Beta Release

Now that we've explored some of what it took to get Destined Legends through alpha and beta testing, I'd like to move on to my involvement in the art and design of the overall game. By the time we entered the beta testing stages of development we had already hired on two of my personal friends, Scott Ferguson and Cari Corene, to do art for the game. Up until this point nothing about the game had any sort of risks, we were merely having fun and hoping we could make something real from it. With our first Kickstarter for the Destined Legends Battle Set on the way, we knew that we needed some nice artwork to relay our artistic vision for the game. So our first risk began, paying for some art pieces before we were even funded. 

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Initial Roslynn Sketch Concept by Scott Ferguson.

Art Planning

Fortunately since Scott and Cari are close friends of ours they gave us decent rates but all the same, we paid them very well over the duration of the project and the art was not cheap. If you're curious as to why I didn't step in at this point and do some art myself, I discuss that, our choice of artists, and a bit about the individual artists backgrounds in a previous blog about the birth of Destined Legends. Since we were limited in the amount of money we could spend, we had to sit and make choices on what pieces we should pay for up front and what exactly were wanted to reveal early on. We decided to pay for 1 Dragon (from Cari), 1 Legend (from Scott) and preliminary sketches of the remaining Dragons and Legends. As you can see from the image above, working with friends in an environment like this leads to silly things that will never show up in the final production, such as Scott's "the money $hot" joke or other childish musings we've written into character descriptions or future comic scripts. 

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Art place holders featuring art from L.A.W.L.S. and Scout Crossing

Card Design

Being that I stepped aside from doing illustrations for this release of the game, what I spent most of my time artistically (at this stage) being involved in was focusing on the design of the cards with Ali. The card's actual layout went through 10 revisions, each refinement being a direct reflection of things discovered during play testing. One thing that we realized and struggled with a lot was something I believe all artists have issues with: refusing to let go of initial concepts merely because they look nice. For any aspiring artists or anyone seeking to create something like this remember one thing, just because something is visually pleasing and presentable that doesn't mean it is the right way to go. In real world production, understanding ergonomics (or human factors) is a key factor in the success of a product because it involves the understanding of interactions between a human and different elements of a working system; Just because it works in theory or simply looks really good does not mean that the person using the item will understand how to use it. The location of things on the card became a huge point of development and were altered all the way until the closed beta was printed and shipping out to Kickstarter backers.

Artistic Work on Cards

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Punisher (Rare Card) - Art by Denis Caron

Though I said I had to stepped aside on doing illustrations for the cards themselves that's not entirely true. I was doing two things before the game went into production: Art touchups and illustration for one card.

It's not uncommon in the artistic field, especially in animation and comics, to have one artist fully draw something out and another to take the submitted piece to clean up certain lines or modify the art slightly to work better for production. For example, on a few of Scott's designs we decided to make certain elements of the art, like a sword popping out of the appointed art space and overlay parts the frame of the card (the card above is an example of what I'm talking about). Since I've worked closely with Scott through out the years we've shared a lot of techniques, which led to me being able make alterations to his pieces without it looking any different than if he had done it himself.  Also, due to how heavy Scott's workload was near the end of development, he wasn't able to complete one of cards; time constraints on being able to get the game into production and receive it in time for both San Diego Comic Con and Kickstarter reward shipments became a pressing matter. The "Punisher" sword featured on the Daxtes card that Scott illustrated did not have it's own card. Since we very much wanted to have it as part of the 5 rare cards we were releasing in the initial run of product, we had to figure out fast how to go about this. We toyed with the idea of having Scott crop out the sword directly from his original drawing (his suggestion) and I touch up the art, but the sword would have ended up looking dull and not unique enough to be considered a rare card. At this point I decided to go ahead and redraw the sword using Scott's design as a reference. The card above is the version that was delivered in the final production of the game!

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Mark of the Dragon Design by Denis Caron

The Mark of The Dragon

The last artistic thing that I wanted to discuss was the "Mark of the Dragon" design I did for the project. During the last leg of our Kickstarter the possibility that one of our stretch goals, a official Destined Legends shirt, was gonna be unlocked. The second it seemed as if it was going to be a possibility Ali gave me the green light to design it. Though the stretch goal was not met, we were so enthused about the design that I created that we decided that we should print a limited run of the design (only 72 units). Ali pretty much gave me free reign to do whatever I wanted with concept, which was excellent for me. My initial concept for the design started with a style of drawing I've done all my life. I'm not quite sure how to explain it but it's basically a combination of very sharp and round shapes. While drawing Autumn's magic effects in L.A.W.L.S., I used the same style but over the duration of working on the comic, I changed my technique from adding to subtracting shapes. Basically this means I would draw the over all shape I was looking for and use the erase tool to make different parts of that shape more unique. This is precisely what I did with the dragon above. A little secret, I erased my initials into the bottom half of the dragon's torso! Do you see it? 

After running through a few concepts and discussing the idea of exact what Ali would want this design to signify, we decided I should go with something that looked a bit more like a tribal like design. Reject ideas including blood spatters from an epic war (too much like Dragon Age II) and gold that had fallen from a mixing pot that a smith would have had while crafting weapons. We went with the tribal design because it fits well with the lore we've been developing. This mark would be something you would see inscribed on a building, painted on a rock, or embroidered on a flag to indicate that a traveler is about to enter a place blessed by the spirits of the dragons. I can't go too much into this at this time, but there is a particular location that Ali and I had in mind on our world map that has a strong connection to the spirit realm, where the dragons reside. This emblem would be found there.

Unfortunately we are out of most sizes of the shirts unless you wear 3XL or 4XL, but if you like this design you can buy "The Mark of the Dragon Print" in my store now! The my next segment on Destined Legends will discuss fulfillment.