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Ok, I’ve updated my original entry with slightly better photos. On a down note though, my tiger dragon is a flop…so you won’t be seeing him until much later. He’s going to be redone as a red dragon somehow…
Oh yeah, and I did update the ebay photos now. Shockingly it’s just the same wolf…it looks like a whole other sculpture doesn’t it?
It looks amazing. I’d personally not sell it if I had gone through that trouble on those wings. You blend so well and you guys all seem to antique so much better too. Do you use an antique medium to do that stuff? If you do sell it I hope you get a lot for it to cover all the patience you put in. I especially like the wing shading with the blue/grey just as much as the beack sides of the feathers.
I wish my photos came out even 50% as good as yours do. Everything I take looks so flat and washed out. That dragon is stunning. It just has to look close to what it does in person…I mean the shine alone shows that. It rocks.
I wanted to give Melody a special thank you for putting out the PYO line. Not only has it given me a new outlet for painting but also personal business as well. Thanks to Melody I’ve been able to pay off some really major bills.
I’m very happy to have and continue to be painting Windstones. I am wondering how it feels to see all of your creations come to life with all these painters, and how it feels to help support other artists out there like me. Not only does your company and products give a lot of joy to others but you’re helping fellow artists out there too…and on top of that make additional profit for your company and get to create a line of figures you can be more free to design with. It seems to me to be a great win/win/win combination and I just had to give you a lot of thanks because I’ve faced a lot of major house and medical bills and painting the PYOs has helped me keep my head above water.
Thanks Melody!
Why? I mean, are you all looking for stuff to collect you don’t already have? I’ve just about given up on certain things, especially seeing how high the prices have gone the past couple weeks on stuff…like the baby KiRins and Orientals. *sigh* Oh well. I need more PYOs now anyways and should focus on saving for the big dragon PYO instead.
Lol, you found that already? Do you guys check that every day? I plan to reload photos when I improve them and maybe see about showing the interferance paint effects if I can. I am kinda picky about what photos I load here on the forum though, and the gallery, because I want the best possible thing showing. As you all know it’s just impossible to capture the beauty of any 3D sculpture but you gotta try your best anyway. I don’t know why but these greys didn’t capture well at all but morning natural light ought to help.
I finished the grey wolf PYO I was working on and almost done with the tiger dragon, but I think I’m going to have to find a better system of taking pictures because the grey wolf looks real sucky in the photos.
EDIT: Ok, I went outside to take photos but it did wash out colors a little…and the finishing coat didn’t really help that either but I thought it would be best to add the finishing coat before going out into the cold snow.
But USPS doesn’t provide tracking does it? If so, is that something they have started offering within the past 2 years because I stopped shipping overseas with USPS about 3 years ago.
Whenever I ship to Canada now I specify that whatever I am sending has a cost under $10 no matter how much the product costs just to avoid those duty and/or tax fees.
My best wishes in this ordeal TF and please do keep us updated on this. I hope she doesn’t loose her eyesight.
It almost strikes me as a woodland kiRin belonging to elves and fairies. Very interesting color combos.
Whatever you do, try never to ship anything USPS outside the US. I mean if you have to, you have to, but I find the USPS unreliable. Spend the extra money to ship UPS, DHL, or Fed Ex. I have had nothing but grief from the US post office in overseas cases and I never use them for even paper documents overseas anymore.
Insurance becomes a heavy issue because if you put insurance on a piece that say, sells for $100 on Ebay and the buyer is from Canada, and you put on $100 worth of insurance, that will become a duty fee that the buyer of the piece will need to pay. I once sold an emerald fledgeling for $50 and put $50 insurance on it, and the buyer contacted me with great anger that she’d have to pay $25 for the duty fee…50% of what the insurance rate was placed on the dragon. In the end we split the fee. Duties always seem to change and other countries can do whatever they want, charge what they want duty-wise on something that has insurance. Once a package ships outside the US you kinda just have to pray it all goes well. Most of the time it does, but sometimes there can be trouble. I won’t go into some of my bad experiences but now I don’t put insurance on anything unless the buyer requests it and they understand the duty fees THEY may incur by so doing. It can be a touchy issue.
Also, you may have to fill out anywhere from 1-3 forms. Different postal offices have different things but the main form is the customs form, which is no biggie…you just fill out what the item is. Also, a BIG help to avoid duty fees and the like is to list it as a birthday gift because somrtimes if you say “fine art sculpture” or something and the customs agent looks in the box (especially shipping to Mexico), they can say, hey, I think this is worth more than the worth you specified on your customs form and will charge a duty on it. It’s curropt but there’s nothing you can do so try to svoid saying it’s artwork. Just say painted sculpture or painted dragon figure, etc. Dumb down what it is.
Another problem I have run into is that even with placing insurance on something, you will need to proove its value. With artwork this is difficult but since you’re selling over Ebay this becomes much more easy to claim true worth. Print out and keep the ebay receipts! If the sculpture gets damaged and you have insurance on it this will proove that you got X dollars for it. Otherwise you’re screwed. Trust me, I sold paintings and clay and other artworks before off-ebay and couldn’t proove anything in such cases and even with insurance I got nothing back and had to re-imburse the buyer, thereby loosing money off a sale!
I don’t say any of this to scare you but be prepared as a serious seller to come across various shipping issues when going overseas. It’s a gamble. I fear it myself. Maybe others have had far better experiences than me but I do about 75% of my overall business overseas and it’s always an issue for me.
*shrugs I don’t know. Well, I’m happy to at least have that avatar finally. I think I’m going to sleep on the rest, heh. I’m way tried and I got an angry tiger dragon that I need to continue painting tomorrow.
In the profile page, I could swear I typed that exact signature out you put in, don’t know why it didn’t work for me. I note the sig isn’t showing up on other posts I made though, just this one…but pmaybe it’s a time delay? Because the avatar works fine all around.
