Horned Dinosaur Heads, Posters, And Other Products?

Hello once again and as we're heading to the middle of this year, I'll first of all mark this particular 6 month anniversary.

That was back in December last year when I've participated at SECAN's Challenges exhibition. Just to recap, SECAN are an arts hub in the outer south east of Melbourne where new emerging artists like myself and current showcase our artistic talents for the local public to see with each monthly exhibition.

What you're seeing are my horned dinosaur head sculptures made by pieces of cardboard from cereal and snack boxes and with great fascinations from other members, they've even suggested I should make them into assembly kits. And with the arts hub revamped for this year, there's the bigger part which is their own gift shop.

Since the reworks have been done, visitors have been buying products with more to be included. So then, the timing will provide me a grand opportunity to sell my assembly kits.

Earlier, I set about making my own mock kits for other members to assemble. I've made the previous post so I'll attach the link here.

Pilot Projects

With that completed and the sculptures assembled, things hadn't gone a hundred percent right.

As you can see, there have been some issues with the end products. On the other end, I've obtained some feedback in order to make some improvements and here they are.

-    The tabs need to be bigger to help adhere to other pieces particularly the front tip of the top piece to be made longer.

-    Fast drying glue to be considered. (PVA glue not ideal and one participant had to tape the long frill horns onto the frill piece - Styracosaurus head)

And aside from having 6 frill spikes for the Triceratops head instead of 12 (my mistake), the instructions are good so no improvements are needed.

With these notes as well, it was time to do another stage to work on what needs improving.

My first task is redoing the templates particularly extending the tabs to be then traced onto carboard sheets.

With the revamped templates completed and cut out, I then traced them onto these carboard sheets.

With all these pieces cut and fold lines scored, it's time to have another go assembling these making this my run to see how the whole process will go.

Throughout the process, I've been making some certain adjustments such as trimming tabs for easier assembling. I even decided to include the tab sticking out of the bottom piece. The aim is to attach the top piece rather than the original idea of attaching the top piece via its front tab to the bottom which proved more tedious.

Along with the faster drying craft glue, the assembling has been proving so far so good. Next comes the tedious task of assembling the horns.

Here, I'm assembling the nasal horn for the Styracosaurus head. At least I've trimmed one tab off.

With one tab off, this process of the horn becoming 2 pieces to one became a better process. Another stage is attaching this horn to the top piece.

With the top piece, the task is working out how big enough the hole will need to be in order to slide the nasal horn underneath and with the appropriate amount of trimming, this task is complete.

I'm nearly complete on this one. You can now see the tabs particularly from the bottom piece, from there is the process of gluing all these tabs together.

Now, this process has been mastered without getting myself too frustrated. And that's a good thing assembling these by myself to work out things to improve for anyone else.

From the assortment of pieces modified to this complete Styracosaurs head. This has been a decent improvement, in fact better than my original version.

And with the earlier model assembled next to the one I've assembled myself, the tweaks have been worth it. My next and final task is to apply the tweaks for the Triceratops head.

With that usual process till complete, the Triceratops head looks indeed suave with the other. With the gluing process, I've been applying even coats on the tabs so that it wouldn't be too messy. I've been pleased my hard work has been done and with my idea of overhauling the instructions, assembling will become more a piece of cake for potential customers.

I'm not going to end here just yet as there are other potential products I can potentially sell. In fact, I've attempted to sell my own posters at the SECAN arts hub 2 years ago.

These are the posters I'm talking about. The way I've done them is basically have my drawings scanned and printed out as these A3 sized copies. Although they been one bit of evidence a visitor had a look, none of them have been sold.

There's a previous post dedicated to these posters that were in the making.

Time To Sell Posters

However, I came up with another approach and so.

This is my second phase. This time, 2 ranges for my coloured drawing and my black and white drawings of musical instruments particularly the topless grand piano and Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet. All of them are printed in A4 sized satin photopaper with more to come.

Even the idea of my own greeting cards such as this Happy Big Bass Birthday! card for my dad's birthday. It took me by surprise how I hadn't even thought of doing anything like this besides my oil painting but what's useful is finding doorways which your hobbies can become something bigger.

But this is something extra. All these got me thinking of an idea of marketing my own merchandise, perhaps having my own Etsy account. It'll be too big though but we should all start small and somewhere.

See you next time!