Looping the Hen

Working at Romanian wages...

Okay, so not everything goes as smoothly as I expect. Err...or even close. So much for getting rich on little people. I finally sold some custom figures for Heroscape, and at a decent rate in comparison to what I would have gotten selling them for my game. However, the time expenditure was huge and devalued the project as a whole. I've probably spent 60 hours or so working on this project all told, and the total return so far has been around $40 after auction and Paypal fees. Sounds like $.75/hour. (hey, it was $.33/hour two weeks ago...Tammy asked if that meant she could buy three hours of girlfriend time for a buck!) I could probably do better than that with a metal detector at the beach. And that doesn't count the initial outlay on supplies like photo paper, ink, and the like. So I'm still waaaaaay behind.

Still, it's taught me some good things. The best of which is how to use Gimp,(yes, I think it is a reference to Pulp Fiction) a very powerful photo/image editor, near in functionality to Photoshop. And it’s free, while Photoshop runs around $700. I'm not an expert by any means, but I'm steadily getting better at it. The bulk of the 60 hours was spent creating custom artwork. I'll write it off as a training class or something!

The other main positive takeaway is actually completing a project. Sometimes I am more like some folks in my family than I will admit. I think about doing a lot of things, but rarely follow through. From starting this project to first auction was all of 7 days, and I am a little proud of that.

Still, I probably have another 10 hours worth of work before this project gets to go on auto-pilot. When that happens I will probably make more in the $10/hour range. So to make more than minimum wage over the course of the project, I will need to sell something on the order of 150 auctions. I feel compelled to at least make enough to cover my out-of-pocket costs. Once that happens, I will actually be ahead slightly, as I will have the top-end Dremel I bought paid for by little people, as well as a nice Exacto. If things are humming along smoothly when that is done, I might try to sell enough on top of that to pay for the $400 camera I bought partially to be able to take pictures of stuff to put up for auction. (Though not just little people)

Now I can get back to some other projects that were put on hold due to budget time at work and little people! (Sorry G!)