Description
YOU CAN ORDER A UNIQUE, MADE-TO-ORDER ACRYLIC ARTWORK FROM MATTHEW LYLES HORNBOSTEL, IN A VARIETY OF SIZES SECURELY ON THE HORNBOSTELPRODUCTIONS SHOP, AT PRICES BELOW THE EQUIVALENT LISTINGS I ONCE HAD ON EBAY.
My eBay account once included made to order artworks of people, pets, and places that mattered to various customers. You could order at a particular size and I’d make and ship a painting within a week and it’d typically arrive within 12-14 days. While this service was popular on eBay it was also widely abused, particularly the return/refund policy. I lost hundreds of dollars doing several thousand total hours of work for hundreds of people. Ultimately, the art-made-to-order there stopped. Nonetheless, I still buy on eBay and my account there has over 200 positive reviews as both a seller and as a buyer.
I’ve since built a fairly successful Etsy shop but notably the made-to-order artworks are not included as a part of it. That shop has a lot of fanatastic items, sure, and many original artworks of my own design, and yes – there are a handful of scathing reviews along with the 180+ five-star positive reviews. Mostly the bad reviews are for either items I have since discontinued or were the result of an absolutely overwhelming mess from Halloween to Christmas in 2023 – a span during which I saw an unheard-of explosion of buyer activity and could not keep up, resulting in many items being delivered too late for the customers, usually with an exhausted apology and full refund as part of that outcome when it happened.
As of late January 2024, the activity level there has dropped dramatically yet again to a very manageable level. That means for now not only can I deliver all Etsy orders in a more timely manner but I can alos deliver orders here very effectively along with stock media orders via my shop on Itch.IO.
The fact remains that I have had two MASSIVELY successful shops so far (eBay, Etsy) both of them reaching out-of-control levels of activity, after a few years of exponential growth, only to settle down as I raised pricing or in the case of eBay, generally stopped selling items altogether. I have another shop – the itch.IO one – still in the early stages of that growth with only a modest amount of positive feedback accumulated so far. And then there’s THIS shop, the one I run myself with SSL-secured encrypted setup (Comodo) to provide a strong layer of security from outside bad actors, on a WooCommerce/Wordpress site setup, and transactions handled by major third-party systems (Stripe or PayPal) such that I will never see your private info myself.
This shop is the one with the absurdly low prices, items and services that are priced far below what I have them set anywhere else, and in some cases services that NO LONGER are available on any of the other shops I operate.
The total absence of early-adopter customers here, means no reviews exist here yet, which means in turn no customers, which means… a vicious cycle that has kept this shop going absolutely nowhere for half a decade. Not for lack of trying, mind you – THOUSANDS of people have seen this shop. It’s just a question of if, and/or when, anyone will buy and review a thing, and start opening the floodgates. This shop is currently where my Etsy shop was in 2018 – no buyers at all despite the shop having existed for years. It’s like where the eBay shop was in the 2000s before my first positive feedback there as a seller. It’s absolutely at the very start of a VERY PREDICTABLE curve that typically runs over the course of roughly four years. Over the span of that curve, pricing triples or quadruples, buyer activity is doubling every few months, and glowing reviews are pouring in faster and faster from people who took a chance on it and were stunned by the valuable items they got and the unusually, even absurdly low price they got them for. At the beginning of the curve, nobody is buying except a handful of people who got something outstanding for a ridiculously low amount, and at the end, it ends with a sort of burnout where as I vendor I’m completely overwhelmed by the level of activity showing up, pricing is no longer as amazing, basically prices are higher and customer service somewhat weaker, and while the shop’s still great, it also is not as outstanding as it was at the outset and likely never will be that good again. This shop is like eBay or Etsy in the first few years. It’s BEFORE everyone realized they were incredibly cool. It’s before everyone realized, they had amazing deals. That means, for the early adopter, perhaps even you, this is the IDEAL time to jump in. Keep in mind that while customer feedback isn’t present here on this shop yet, it’s a shop run by the EXACT SAME PERSON who ran the eBay, Etsy and Itch.IO shops seen above, which indicates a clear existing reputation of the seller even if this specific shop doesn’t yet have one… you can be one of the first buyers to post feedback, and if you are among the first 7 to do so, I’ll send you $7 in the form of an Amazon gift card. All you’d need to do is buy an item, any item, any price, then review that item, and then message me at matthornb@gmail.com identifying the item you bought, and I’ll send the gift card to the email [account] you messaged me through. That simple. You could, say, spend $4 here on something that is an amazing value at that price, end up with the great deal on the $4 item you bought PLUS a $7 gift card.
SOME IMPORTANT NOTES:
-I will do my best on every art piece that’s ordered but of course the bigger it is and the higher the price the more detailing will fit into it well. It’s not advised to request, for example, a family portrait on a really small size item. The detail won’t be enough to make the people in the work clearly recognizable. Faces are tricky to get right even in good circumstances and it’s worse on a miniscule surface area. If you insist on highly intricate fine detailing, the best media for small work would be the colored pencil, and pastel pencil artworks, then the acrylic and gouache media as next best, and least recommended would be oil pastel, though that medium does have advantages in terms of dense, vibrant color.
-At the bottom of this listing are some examples of the work I’ve already done for customers. Many people have requested pet portraits, especially in acrylic, but I will paint nearly any subject you, as the customer, request provided it is not illegal or highly disturbing in nature.
-I may take a digital photo of the work and show it as an example of past work unless you request otherwise. But whether this is the case or not, the handcrafted original WILL be yours to keep, display, gift, resell, etc.
-I accept PayPal as a transaction method and encourage its use; the transactions are secure (COMODO SSL security and encryption integrated on this entire site) and refunds are available within 60 days of the order placed. My eBay shop has, at this moment, 169 ratings, all positive. 100%. That is a good indicator of the exceptional value and reasonable services I offer to my customers.
If you are dissatisfied with the work I send you, I will attempt to redo the work or refund the sale amount, whichever you prefer, up to the 60 day mark. Please do not abuse this option; if a large percentage of customers are exploiting the refund policy it may be revoked entirely… and in the worst case the shop and my projects might shut down. Note that I want to finish a bunch of fun mini games and video projects, and release most of them as free downloads on my websites, and that the shop here and the similar ones on eBay, Etsy, itch… are my biggest source of funding to make those projects happen. So your decisions here DO affect what released creative content I am able to complete for everyone, and how quickly I’m able to complete it. I would like to have all that stuff entirely accessible for free but maybe with optional added hard copies [offline installers or DVD videos] available on DVD/Blu-Ray through this shop. I believe you – the audience, and customers shopping here – are mostly good people and will not inflict massive losses on me such that the websites and my creative efforts thrive and expand and don’t simply die a slow death.
-I usually make the paintings on a basic canvas material and non-paint items on paper. These are in big rolls of bulk material and they are cut to order based on the requested dimensions. I ship the finished work in tubes if it’s really big, or mailers if it is a more moderate size. The artworks are signed on the back and often wrapped in wax paper in the case of pastels. Allow around 2 weeks for the order to arrive after it’s placed. It may take about 3 days or more if it’s a big item, plus around a week to ship.
– You will need to email me with any directions you have about what subject you want me to base the artwork on, and if the subject(s) chosen include a particular person, place, pet or item, that is obscure and not publically known, you may need to send one or more images so I know what the subject looks like. I don’t know your family, your pets, your home, etc, so don’t ask me to make an artwork of them without giving me any clue what they look like, because in that case I’ll almost certainly get the depiction wrong!
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