An idea for a new small business has been floating around in my head for a few weeks, and I’d like your input. Feel perfectly free to tell me I’m crazy. Or not. Honestly, I really haven’t decided myself.

This would be a way for me to expand my own income while also giving me a really good excuse for making more sculptures.

Here’s the idea: I’ve been thinking about making rigid foam copies of a few of my animal sculptures. The foam copies would be positive molds that people could then cover with a few layers of paper mache. Buyers could then paint their sculptures with their acrylic paints to personalize them in any way they chose. So, basically, I’d be providing a base for the sculpture, but not the finished sculpture itself .

Paper Mache Bobcat

Most of the sculptures I’ve already done are rather large and they’d need a lot of foam, (which tends to be rather expensive), so I would probably start with smaller ones, custom-made for the purpose.  I wouldn’t want to do forms for wearable masks, because then I’d have to compete with the mask forms from China.

Gearing up for this kind of enterprise would take money, and a whole lot of research and time. I don’t want to go any farther with the idea if I’m the only one who thinks it would be fun. I’ve been known to be wrong – after all, I would have loved my coloring book when I was a kid, but I’ve only sold about five of them. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t…

Perhaps the most important consideration is the cost of the foam. Most of us get started in paper mache precisely because it’s cheap. And these foam molds would not be cheap.

So tell me. Honestly. No holds barred. Would it be fun to cover a ready-made form with paper mache? Not for a hypothetical “other” person, but can you imagine it being fun for you? If you saw such a product for sale on my site, would you ignore it, or would you be intrigued? If it seems somewhat interesting, is there any particular sculpture that I’ve already done or might do in the future that you think I should make available as a mold? What price do you think a reasonable person would pay for such a thing? Have you ever seen anything like what I’m describing for sale somewhere else? And, most importantly, should I just consider it another one of my crazy ideas, and move on?

I can’t wait to hear what you think.

And by the way, if you’re working on a cat from our previous series, but you haven’t shown it off yet, please do. I’d love to see how they all turned out.

I made a short video to show you a little portrait mask I made of a puppy. This happy guy invited himself to my house last weekend. (I saw him later, tied up in front of a house a few blocks away — so I’m happy to say that his owner quickly found him after Animal Control took over).

This is a practice mask. I felt the need to practice because I agreed to offer a pet portrait mask for an upcoming fundraising event for an animal rescue organization. I think the pup came out OK – but as always, I’d be happy to hear your input. I’ll tell you more about the fundraiser in a week or two.

I also want to talk a bit more about Pinterest, down below the video.

You can find my book “How to Make Masks!” here.

Now, my evolving thoughts about Pinterest:

Several weeks ago we had a lively online discussion about Pinterest and the copyright issues that are involved with this and other popular sharing sites. I read everyone’s comments, added many of my own (I do get verbose at times), read a book called Curation Nation, and read many web articles, including this one at theAbundantArtist.com. I also whipped together a “test” website to see if Pinterest really helps new sites get traffic.

After all that, here’s my current thinking about Pinterest:

• My test site does prove that a brand new site with almost no other inbound links can get traffic by uploading images to Pinterest, if you also take the trouble to “follow” other boards that were created by people interested in similar works. I don’t mean you can get floods of traffic – but for a brand new site, 10 to 20 visitors a day is better than no visitors at all. If I worked at a bit harder, maybe there would be more.

• That said, I don’t think any website should rely entirely on Pinterest for traffic. Because of that, I’m also using YouTube, Onlywire, Facebook, and Google Plus to get links to the new site. Those links might eventually help the site get ranked for it’s keywords on Google. Those things take time, though. Pinterest seems to be faster, although I don’t know if I’ve made any sales yet from that traffic.

• I still am not sure that pinning other people’s images is legal. Since it is against the Pinterest terms of service to do that, I have to assume that they aren’t sure either. I’m not sure that anyone is sure – the Internet seems to be moving so fast even the lawyers can’t keep up. So, for the time being and for the foreseeable future, I will only pin my own images, (as the Pinterest member agreement requires). If I see nice artwork on Pinterest that has been uploaded by the artist, I might repin the image. I assume that people agree to that when they pin their own work.

• Getting found on Pinterest seems to involve two things – adding comments that include keywords, and following other people who like the same kinds of things that you do. For instance, if you go to the site and do a search for “paper mache mask” you’ll probably see several of the masks I uploaded, because I was careful to include those words in the comment section.

• “Following” people (and, hopefully, getting your images repinned by the people you follow) seems to be one of the keys to success, but finding artists who pin their own work isn’t easy. Most of the paper mache items I found were posted by people casually surfing the web. So, if you happen to have a Pinterest board that is clearly marked as your work, please put the URL in the comment section below and I’d be happy to follow you. (Speaking of which, you can find my boards, and follow me if you want, at http://pinterest.com/jonnigood/ )

We probably don’t need to go back over any of the copyright issues, since we covered that extensively in the previous post. So – if you would like me and other readers to follow you on Pinterest, and if you have at least one board that clearly includes images of artwork you created, feel free to let us know in the comment section below. Maybe we can all help each other get some traffic. Probably not a whole lot of traffic, but still…

And in a week or so, I’ll tell you about that fundraiser, including info about the other artists who are participating, what the funds will be used for, and how you can participate. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.

[Edit: the lessons have begun! You can find lesson #1, How to Make a Paper Mache Cat, here.]

I’m not procrastinating, honest. I really did start my figure sculpture. In fact, I’m now on the third one, because there’ s a bit of a learning curve going on. In fact, right now my latest attempt is sitting in front of the fan, drying. Which brings me to the reason for this post:

I need a fun and engaging project that wouldn’t take a great deal of time, to give me something constructive to do while my paper mache is drying. Then maybe I wouldn’t find myself wasting so much time watching uninspiring Netflix movies…

So, I’m thinking, maybe we could have a “class,” right here on this blog.

Here’s what made me start thinking about having a “class,” of sorts. A few weeks ago I was approached by a start-up company that’s putting together an online art school. They wanted to know if I’d like to be one of their teachers. It sounded like a lot of fun, but there was a downside. Only 20 people could take the class at any one time, and the students would have to pay for the lessons. As you probably guessed, most of my video tutorials are also low-key home-made commercials for my books, (see how I casually slipped that in?) so limiting the viewers to only 20 would be kind of self-defeating.

Still, a class would be fun, especially if there was a lot of feedback from readers. I’d know ahead of time that people were interested, instead of me just coming up with an idea for a tutorial all by myself. So here’s what I thought we might do:

If anyone is at all interested, we could start a list of things that people would like to make with paper mache. I’m hoping these would be things that I might actually be able to create some lessons for. Obviously, if it’s animal-oriented, that would help. (I don’t make paper mache bowls, so that wouldn’t be a good lesson choice until we could find someone else willing to give lessons in bowls. And I’m not so good with balloons. I gladly admit to my limitations.)

Then we could do the lessons much like the Pantalone Mask videos, with the steps broken down into fairly small peices so those of us with time constraints could follow along. Your part, if you chose to join in, would be to follow the steps, upload images of your work if possible, and then we all get to comment, suggest, and enjoy each other’s efforts. Then I put up another post for the next step until the whole thing’s done. Many people would find the posts on the blog next year, of course, but they could still get the full benefit of the lessons.

It doesn’t sound much different from my usual tutorial posts, except that I’m hoping it would be much more interactive. If anyone had problems with a particular step and found a better way to do it, we could all learn from that. And I’d get to actually see if my instructions “work” (I know you’re all too polite to mention it when I say things that don’t really make any sense…)

Does this sound like fun? If you were to “sign up” for a free online in-depth paper mache sculpture course, what specific thing would you want to make? Do you think there could be one particular sculpture that enough people would want to do? (I have received a lot of requests for cats, and there aren’t any cat tutorials on this site yet. Anyone interested in cats?)

I spent some time today making a new mask form over a life-sized plastic skull, and then modified it a bit so it will (hopefully) work for animal masks as well as people. I also made a few changes to the tiny rolling table that I like to work on, so I can work on my masks while looking at them from the proper angle. I’ll tell you my reasons for these little changes to my studio in the video.

I’ll start working on my wolf this afternoon, and if it turns out OK I’ll show him to you in the next post. I will probably turn him into a wall mask, and I have to decide if I should use the two-layer paper mache system I used for the masks in my new mask book, or if I should make a silicone mold and use the instant paper mache recipe. I suppose it depends on how well the wolf turns out – if it looks like the world needs more than one of them I’ll make the mold. If not, I’ll make just one using the sculpture as a positive mold, and keep him on my own wall. Wish me luck.

I’m between projects now. My new How to Make Masks! book has gone to the printer, but it still hasn’t appeared on Amazon.com. Soon, though, so I’m on pins and needles, waiting…

Meanwhile, my daughter and I have been having long discussions about artist’s websites, and we’d like to get some feedback from you, too. Questions keep coming up in our discussions, and there doesn’t seem to be any definitive answers for them.

For instance, I found this article about sculptor’s websites that immediately convinced me that the site’s home page should be all about the artist. But, on the other hand, you also want people to see your artwork right away. And it should be really easy to figure out how to buy something – you don’t want people to click so many different links that they change their mind before they hit that order page. And, most new visitors probably won’t land on the home page anyway, because they’ll come in from the search engines and land on one of the inner pages of the site, which means that the whole framework of the site has to be set up to make things easy for visitors.

Jessie is in the middle of re-designing her artist’s site, and, now that my latest book is finished, I’m thinking about trying to sell some of my own work online. Before we make huge decisions about what our sites should look like, we’d really like some feedback from you.

Here’s some of the questions I hope you’ll help us answer:

• When you visit another artist’s website, is there anything in particular that makes you think you’d like to own that person’s work? Is it the artist’s statement? The way the images are presented? A story that goes along with each piece of artwork that makes you feel connected to it? If you’ve actually purchased art from a website recently, what made it easy for you to make that decision?
• What sites have you visited that you liked so much you bookmarked them or sent a link to friends? Did you like the site for the basic design, the work that was shown, the text? Would you actually buy something from that site, or do you just like visiting?
• How important is the “design” of a website when you make a buying decision. Does a pretty design sometimes get in the way?
• How can you encourage people to comment on pages that show a work of art? It’s easy to get comments on a site like this one, where people come to learn how to do something, or share their own knowledge with others. But feedback is so important to any artist (it gets lonely in those studios), so any artist would like to get comments on pages where they show off their work. Have you seen non-how-to art sites that made you want to enter the discussion?

If you have examples of “good” websites that you’d like to share with us, a link would be nice. But be sure to tell us why you like the site, and if it made you want to buy something. There’s a very big difference between an attractive website and one that actually works as a store. I think that’s the biggest problem when an artist designs a site – designing is what we do, and selling is something that we usually hate doing, so we’re probably the wrong people to design our own sites. But, on the other hand, nobody knows our own work better than we do.

Of course, there’s a whole ‘nother issue – should we sell our work from our own website, or should we put our work on a site like etsy.com, instead? I’ve checked the sales stats on a lot of pages on etsy, and most people don’t seem to be doing very well. Is it because their page gets lost among so many different artists? Is it easier to send traffic to a separate site, or to get traffic to a page on a huge site like etsy?

So – if you have an opinion on this subject (and I hope you do) please add your comments to this post. What makes a good artist’s website, from the customer’s point of view? While you’re at it, are there any changes you would like to see in the UltimatePaperMache.com site? Let’s talk…

Herding Apples, Jessie's Oil Painting for the "Every Mother Counts" Benefit Auction

This is going to be a fast post. We have another mask post coming this afternoon, I think, but I wanted to make sure nobody missed Jessie’s benefit auction. Jessie will donate 100% of the final bid to the charity Every Mother Counts. (Check out the movie on the site to see why this is such an important cause.)

Click here to see Jessie Rasche’s post about the auction and find out how to participate. A lot of other artists are also in on the event, so you’re sure to find something for your own home, while helping so many mothers in need.

Happy bidding!

This is going to be a fast post today. I have no new artwork to share, and we haven’t received any new masks lately (the ghosts will be arriving any day now, folks – time’s flying by fast. Submit your Halloween-related items here and show them off to the world.)

But I did manage to put up over 30 quarts of tomatoes recently, plus another 20 pints of green tomato salsa (yum). I dug over 100 pounds of spuds yesterday before it started raining again, and I’m starting a new art project (which you won’t get to see for quite a while) that was inspired by the mask-making party. And I’m reading several very good books.

Plus – the new community website that I told you about a few weeks ago is now online.

I didn’t choose any of the wonderful names you suggested for the site, (to make Google happy. It turns out that the word “querencia” is a fairly popular search term. I only discovered it a few weeks ago, on a poster a the local library).

I’ve written all I intend to write on the new site (except for comments, of course). Now I’m hoping to hear about the kind of communities you would like to build or live in. Since we’re just making it up, you don’t need to worry if your ideas are practical, or reasonable, or affordable – we’re just playing. A collection of essays, poems, drawings or sculptures about imaginary communities would be rather fun, don’t you think?

So, if you have a few spare moments please go check out the new blog, called the Querencia Project: Writing a New Definition of Community, One Idea at a Time. If you have any ideas about how I can make the site more interesting, please let me know. And be sure to submit a post of your own so we can see how you think an ideal community would look like and how it would feel to live there. (If you have any ideas about how we could get high school students interested, that would be great, too – they’re the ones who will actually build the communities of the future, and I’d really like to see what they imagine those communities will be like.)

Or just come visit if you’d like to know what the word “querencia” means.

UPDATE: a name has been chosen. Thanks to everyone who submitted suggestions, even if I didn’t use your idea for the name of the new site. Now I hope you’ll all start thinking about how you would describe your ideal community – your ideas will be the core of the new site.

Original post:

While we wait for more submissions to our Halloween Mask Party (I was really expecting to receive more of them by now – you are working on your masks, aren’t you?) I thought I’d ask for some help with another project I dreamed up this morning. (I love our group projects! And so do a lot of other people – our Practical Paper Mache page has been viewed by over 2,000 people this month, and the free paper mache ebook you helped create has been downloaded almost 500 times in September alone.)

This new project isn’t about paper mache, but it will definitely be creative. I have been thinking about intentional communities a lot lately, and it’s a subject we’ve discussed on this blog before. Every time I’ve posted any thoughts about an artists community (or eco village or whatever you might want to call it), we get a lot or comments, even though a post about this subject doesn’t fit very well on a paper mache blog.

I think many of us sometimes daydream about what it would be like to live in a community that reflects our values a little better, or where we could more freely create alongside others with similar interests, or where we might  feel we belong in a way that we don’t in our current neighborhoods. But we don’t pursue the idea because we think it’s not important, or we think it’s pie in the sky, or we think “normal” people who think about normal things might smirk — so we hide our fledgling ideas in our mental closet, not yet fully formed. The ideas might flutter a bit when we’re rummaging around in there, looking for some other idea or thinking about something else, but we never let them back out so they can fly…

Whew – that was a lot of bird metaphors – I’ve been reading a book about parrots this morning…

Anyhoo – I thought it would be fun to put together a new website where anyone who’s interesting in this subject can express their ideas, both practical and fanciful, about what an intentional community could look like. At this point, I know pretty much how the site will look, and I’m building some ideas about how each of you can participate in a fun and inventive way so that all the submissions will have some continuity of form, even though the ideas we submit will all be very different. In fact, the more different the better.

But I can’t start building the new blog until after we have a name for it – and that’s what I need your help on now.

I hope you’ll get a few brain cells firing so you can help us come up with a catchy name for the new site. It will be about imaginary intentional communities, so any site name we choose will need to allow for a great deal of creative diversity. After we get a few ideas for names we’ll pick one that we think would work best, and we’ll go from there.

And if we don’t get any ideas for the site’s name, I’ll know that this isn’t a project worth pursuing — which is also valuable information to have.

Have fun. Be sure to put your suggested names for the new imaginary intentional community blog in the comments below. If you can’t come up with anything catchy, ask your kids to help you out.  And remember to get those masks (or any other Halloween-related project) done soon so we can showcase them here before Halloween! (Not that I’m nagging or anything…)

Update: I think I’ve come up with an imaginary setup that will help us think freely about our intentional community ideas, without the usual constraints – like reality – getting in the way:

The UN has determined in their infinite wisdom (we’re making things up, remember) that the world’s leaders are not able to come up with useful solutions to all the problems that are now facing us. They decided that it’s actually the individuals and communities of the world where solutions will be found. To help create an environment where people are free to experiment and play with new ways of living with each other and the earth, the UN created a powerful new committee that will support a giant social experiment, and you’re invited to participate.

To participate in the experiment, you and other people from around the world will design new intentional communities. In our imaginary world, your new community plan can take any form that your creativity allows. In spite of their great diversity, all the new communities will be linked together so they can freely communicate with each other, learn from each other, and offer each other encouragement and support.

The UN can’t offer financial support, but they will help convince local authorities to bend the normal rules a bit, if zoning requirements or other regulatory impediments might get in the way. In spite of their lack of funding, the UN believes the opportunity to be a pioneer in such a huge and important project will be enough to encourage the creation of at least 1,000 (imaginary) experimental communities, all of which will be searching for a solution to a specific problem.

The problem your community chooses to address can be social, environmental, political, spiritual, psychological, or anything else that matters to you  – as long as you can find 19 to 150 other (imaginary) people to build your community with you.

That’s where the new site comes in – before presenting your plan to the UN you would need to advertise your ideas in a convincing, compelling ad to help you find those other like-minded people. The new site is where you’ll place your “ad.”

Your ad can be all text, or it can include original photos, drawings, paintings or sculptures that illustrate the essence of your idea. What problems will your community address? What will living there be like, both in physical terms (land, houses, amenities) and in emotional and spiritual terms? Where will you put your new community? And why would other people want to join you, instead of staying where they are?

We’re still looking for a perfect name for the site, but we’ve received some interesting ideas already. We seem to have a bird theme going so far, which is rather nice, I think – so if there’s a way to bring that into the mix while also showing in as few words as possible that these new communities will all be part of an (imaginary) international social experiment, and that they’re all different but connected to each other, that would be fabulous.

And, of course, if you think of any improvement for this imaginary framework for our project so more people might want to play, please feel free to contribute your ideas about that, too. Since we’re making this up as we go along, we still have time to change the rules.

Yesterday, Tejae suggested that we have a Halloween Mask Party here on our blog. Now, I must admit I don’t know exactly what she meant by that, but it does sound intriguing. So much so, in fact, that I started my mask this morning while my onions were in the oven. I even decided to do some experimenting, which actually means that my mask may flop entirely and I’ll have to start over. But that’s another issue…

I think it would be the most fun if we don’t have any rules or anything. To make it easy, we can just have a series of guest posts, (with you as the authors and artists, of course), with Halloween masks as the theme. I know tons of people are looking for Halloween ideas right now, and you may have just the idea they’re looking for.

To submit your Halloween mask guest post, you can use this form to submit your images, thoughts, instructions, commentary, philosophy – whatever, as long as it’s vaguely related to the item you’re showcasing. Does that make it a “party?” Close enough, I say.

No deadline, this time – but remember that Halloween is coming up soon, and paper mache takes time to dry. If we don’t publish our posts and tutorials early enough, other readers won’t be able to use our ideas to create their own masks. No pressure, though —

And by the way, I often hear from people who are reticent to post anything because they don’t write well enough, or English is a second language, or some other insecurity. Fortunately, we have a fabulously supportive community on this blog, and nobody cares if you spell something wrong. We just want to see what you’ve made lately, with paper mache.

I mentioned back in July that I was trying to learn how to make felt. Now it’s September, and I finally have one pair of moccasins that I actually like. (Next week I’ll start working on those hats again…)

Felt Moccasins

If I can manage to make a few more slippers and hats that I like, I might even start a new blog – since this, of course, is supposed to be a blog about paper mache.  By the way – I want to thank all the guest authors who’ve been sharing their wonderful creations with us lately while I struggled to learn my new craft. We’ve had some fabulous guest posts lately, don’t you think?

There are a lot of reasons why it’s taking me so long to get the hang of this felting business. This process is a lot harder than it looks, especially when you’re learning from books. The biggest reason, though, is that I can’t seem to stick to the instructions – I always figure there’s an easier way to do just about anything, so I meander off, experimenting with this and that. Of course, most of my experiments don’t work, but that doesn’t seem to stop me.

I was trying to find a method that takes less physical labor (not that I’m lazy, or anything…), by letting me use the washing machine for fulling. That’s the wet part of wet felting, and when I do it by hand I end up with water all over the floor and my arms get tired. I also tend to get bored with the process long before the felt is really done. So I experimented, trying to find something that works as well but is easier for me. I think I have at least part of the process figured out (and I have a big pile of rejects, from all the experiments that didn’t work). Of course, any true felter would probably be appalled by my method, but that doesn’t worry me too much.

For these slippers, I started out with a traditional center seam moccasin pattern. The wool is needle-felted on both sides of cotton muslin, with white wool on one side and the other side is a mixture of naturally dark wool (thanks, Becky!) and alpaca (thanks, Mary!). Then I dyed the pieces, added the spots and blue trim, sewed them together, and fulled. The blue trim is yarn made from silk sari material. I love the colors, but the yarn breaks easily, so I wrapped it in blue wool and hand-rolled it to felt the wool, trapping the pieces of silk inside. There’s a fairly stiff core inside the silk yarn, and I like the way it helps to hold the upper part of the slippers at a jaunty angle – these moccasins are intended for an adventurous 4 year old boy.

I have several more pairs already dyed and ready for me to finish – and then I start on hats, again. Wish me luck!