Gallery Update: Still Catching Up…

My awesome wife picked up on the fact that my favorite ballpoint pens for drawing were running out, so she did a little research and found me (and the kids) some cool pens. They’re nothing special, amazingly, just Amazon Basic 1.0. But, they work really well. They have good flow and are very responsive to pressure, meaning I can get a variety of tones without necessarily cross hatching. They’re almost pencil-like. She handed me one to test out, so I grabbed a dog toy that had some cool shapes and volumes for a quick sketch. I got a little carried away…

Now that that’s out of the way, time to talk about t-shirts. No, not the fabled Etsy endeavor I keep mentioning but not acting on (I will…one of these days…). Camp shirts. If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that for the last several years I’ve been designing shirts for our Cub Scout pack to wear at summer camp. Every year there’s a theme, so every year I have to come up with something new. This year was a little tricky: Cub Scouts Investigate. A cool theme, but a little hard to design something cool around (to me, anyway). But, I hacked away at a lose idea and came up with this:

We print the design on a different color shirt, one for each. That way we can be certain the elementary school kids are at least changing their shirts each day…plus it makes them easier to spot walking around camp.

I think I finished this up in May? Maybe I was still tweaking things in June? I really can’t remember at this point. As I’ve said before, this was my youngest son’s last summer at Camp Carpenter, the Cub Scout camp. His favorite color (an obsession, really) is purple, so we made sure to have a purple shirt this year. I won’t wax poetically about how special the last 6 years were for me and my kids at that camp (I’ve already done that a few times in a few places), other than to add that it’s a little extra cool to have souvenirs in the form of shirts that I made to help recall all the adventures.

At the same time I was working on my last Camp Carpenter shirt, I also was coming up with an official “logo” for a Class B shirt for our Boy Scout troop (that I had just become scoutmaster of). As I usually do, I came up with a handful of designs, mostly variations on the same theme. I came up with too many, actually. About a dozen. I decided to have the adults and volunteers help me whittle the selection down to four, and then let the scouts vote on their favorite.

Behold: the official troop 8 Class B shirt! (The shirts are roughly this color, too).

The mountain is a representation of Mount Monadnock, our local peak and the namesake of our district. My hope is that over the years, everyone in the troop will be able to accumulate enough of these shirts to wear one every day of a summer camp stay. It helps us still look like a cohesive unit without relying on the full dress uniform.

There you have it. Speaking of shirts…I’ve been picking away at another new design or two for the non-existent shop. I’ve also come up with some ideas for other products and Plunger Monkey related merchandise. I’m still stuck on the same issue: the financial component (and doing the product write ups for the shirts and such). Should I have a separate bank account for my “business” (I make up my mind one way, then I read something and change my mind. Then I read another thing and change my mind back)? That’s a big one. Do I go all out right out of the gate and set up some kind of small business thingy or LLC? Should I wait until I actually sell something to see if all that hassle is even necessary? I don’t feel like I should even set up a PayPal account until I figure that out, and I don’t want to try to make any sales until I have a PayPal account to go through. Hrm. There’s, like, 52 right answers, but I just can’t seem to pick one and run with it. Anyone out there want to be my personal accountant? For free? No? What if I pay you in t-shirts?