Thank Art it's Friday! March 14th

Our days are getting closer closer closer to the reptile show. We're doodling as quickly as we can so we can have more stickers available for pre-order at the show for both regular and wholesale orders for pet stores and vendors alike and we've started a few little things in our shop to make things more exciting for you!

Thank You For Voting!

Sticker of the Month

Last week you all voted on what snakes you'd like to see. You're totally going to be able to vote for what you see next every time we finish something you already voted on. The next poll will take place after the last drawing, a sand boa is complete and debuted. If there isn't a voting poll, we'll be doing little games instead to make things a little more fun.

Another new thing to make stuff more fun is the Sticker of the Month! Every month you can get one sticker from our shop for 20% off! The Sticker of the month will be announced on the first of every month. This month you can get the Golden Mantella for 20% off.  No coupons necessary! The discount is already in place on the listing. No limits or anything either. Just this pretty little thing for 20% off the retail value.

Our New Designs

Hermann's Tortoise!!

You've all been waiting for that little Hermann's tort to be finished and debuted. He was completed last week and debuted on Monday on our Facebook page and Tumblr. We also started a rough sketch for our corn snake and finished one morph of him. For some reason or another the line art takes a million years for completion. I get pretty picky, and sometimes redo the entire line art before I'm done and satisfied with it. You can find sketch doodles and work in progress on our Tumblr blog. We aren't sharing any work in progress sneak peeks of doodles on Facebook anymore, though, only finished doodles.

Our finished normal corn snake

The next two corn snake morphs that we plan to have finished by next Friday's installment is a bloodred motley and a lavender. So excited to have these done. You'll be able to purchase these pretty little things in April.

 

 

What My Time Kind of Looks Like These Days

It feels like drawing has been taking forever. If I could give my whole day to just drawing I would live in a completely blissful world. I spend a lot of time caring for the geckos, though. And working full time at my day-job too. The geckos alone take 2-3 hours a day to check on them, feed, mist and sometimes clean and weigh them. A lot of this time I actually spend observing my animals, turning them this way and that way, and cuddling and kissing them. Sometimes I hand-feed a select few who are my most special ones. 

Maté on my laptop.

My average feeding schedule per week is a fruit-eater feeding every other day. On non-fruit-eater days I feed my bug-eaters. All the bug eater babies and smaller geckos get fed every day since they either have super fast metabolisms or are growing and need that extra nutrition. I spend about 15-20 minutes on my bug eaters sorting out appropriate sized food for them. I do a big sort of my roaches and mealworms about once every two weeks that takes an hour or so, but every few days I'll go in and pick out a few small feeders to put in my roach nymph tub to keep up with the demand of my gecko colony. Once a week I do a paper towel and hide change. Once a month everyone's tubs get deep cleaned. This takes me HOURS. I love it though. I wouldn't give it up for the world. Although I do have small project plans for breeding geckos, until the shop is doing better and my schedule frees up a little bit I've decided that this isn't the time to make more baby geckos. With a crunched schedule having 100 animals to care for could be pretty daunting. The forty or so that I have already is my limit for sure with everything I have going on.

I typically don't get to drawing anything until around 8 or 9 at night if I do draw in the evening. Some nights I don't even get to it. One drawing will take me anywhere from 3 days to a week with a few hours set aside for it. But I'm doing my best to get a few more squigs finished the next couple weeks leading up to the show so I'll have more options for customers to pre-order from or get some wholesales for.

The Show is On the Road, Sooooooon

Pacific Northwest Reptile and Exotic Animal Expo

Show, show show! We've been preparing for it for the last couple weeks or so. It's on Saturday the 29th and 30th of this month. If you're in town, stop by! We'd LOVE to see you. Jason and I will be manning the table.We've got all our ducks in neat little rows, and all we're waiting on right now are the newest stickers and more stock to get here. It's been a breeze so far with the new company. The only thing we have left is setting up the table at home to make sure everything is aesthetically pleasing. That may add a couple things more for us to do. I always get so nervous a couple weeks before a show. Leading up to it, those nerves get bigger and bigger and bigger until about a half hour after doors open. Then I relax. Shows are so fun, though. I definitely enjoy meeting all of you.

We'll remind you every Friday on this blog until the show is actually here. We'll also have some coupons for those of you who won't be able to make the show to use in our shop while we're away. That way you can take advantage of similar specials even if you aren't with us.

New Website and Shop on IndieMade

Click to Shop

Now you don't have to sign up for Etsy to purchase items from us! There's this amazing little web host called IndieMade that allows you to purchase items without having to have an account. By all means you could certainly do that. From this new shop, you can pay with PayPal or credit card and everything is totally secure.

While the website is still under construction and has a myriad of tweaks going on, you can still browse around and see a little bit of the behind-the-scenes stuff in our Gallery section. Photographs from shows will most definitely be posted in there and we also have a gallery of pictures that you have shared with us decorated with your stickers. When you send us pictures of the stickers you get, it just makes our little hearts jump for joy.

If you happen to have a shop, or are thinking about opening one up with your artworks, we'd highly recommend IndieMade.

 

What Next Week Will Look Like

We got the corn snake finished this week, and hope to have that bloodred motley done tonight. So by Wednesday expect to see one more corn snake morph. Also, that little hog nose snake. Yes! Next week is the week for the hog nose snake. You're all excited about that and it makes me super duper excited about it, too. I think the hognose snake has had the most votes for a sticker than any other sticker we've asked you about! Wonderful! Hoping for that one to be finished by Thursday. Deadline for the hoggie is Friday afternoon, of course. If we finish up the artwork by Thursday of the hognose, we'll begin art for the rainbow boa. Which, will indeed, have a sneak peek on Tumblr and here on our blog.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Sticking!

Rachel