Tag: TriumphantArtists

Happy Holidays (2019)!

Hello everyone, hope you’re having a good time as 2019 nears its end.

I’ve got a few key updates for all of you.

Etsy update – My often dormant Etsy shop actually has some listings available again. One of them has already sold!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

Better: All prices are 25% off during the Black Friday/Thanksgiving/Cyber Monday span. So if you want an item… now is a good time for 25% off.

Remember my Etsy shop? It’s active again. Here’s a pumpkin pie painting I made.
Happy holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah, New Year’s, etc.

Pinteresting… As a result of posting a ton of freshly revealed .GIF clips from my video productions and other projects, I’ve had a staggering 800+% spike in Pinterest views from October to November, which I suspect drives some of the activity I’m seeing elsewhere [the above Etsy sale, for example].

Check my Pinterest boards to see why that’s taking off like crazy:

Pinterest – Matthew Hornbostel’s profile

And also active [through Cyber Monday is a jaw-dropping 81% off sale on all of my Itch.IO stuff [asset packs with 3d models, stock video FX elements, and texture maps] bundled together. Five asset packs (AND) an early Miniature Multiverse preorder, for $1.69.  Here’s a direct link to the bundle page:

Holiday Bundle – Cyber Monday sale!

There are some new GIFs, video clips, and stills scattered across my ITch.IO pages to showcase the evolving status of my asset packs. I pushed a big update recently to some of them and will be posting some smaller incremental updates very soon – fixes to a few texture-file links and a couple of other small but noticeable glitchy details [like the dandelion texture which I noticed issues with] and I’ll also be adding the long-awaited hanging spanish moss to the ‘Marshes & Meadows’ pack. So those fixes will be posted soon. I tried to participate in the Icehouse Game Jam but fell behind my intended schedule and opted not to submit a very incomplete minigame. However, I’ll still finish the mystery game production [teased on Twitter & Pinterest] at some point.

A new plan… I am working on overhauling HornbostelVideos.com and TriumphantArtists.com. 

There will be a lot of new  stuff for everyone, massive improvements in content and responsiveness for various devices and the new drop-down navigation is way nicer, plus my video-player setup is way cooler, with a wide range of professional-ish features. Plus it’s all way cleaner looking and no giant endless blocks of text. And long awaited comics and a few more articles actually posted which are not currently available.

HOWEVER, VIDEO IS STILL A LEGAL MESS:

There is a tangled mass of challenges in terms of dealing with video content I have made over the years. I’d love to hit the ground running VERY FAST the day this large-scale new overhaul goes live in mid January of 2020. I need to convince the assorted family and friends to accept terms I’ve laid out [quickly] but that’ll require them to believe signing on [ie allowing their roles to be public and facing possible embarrassment] will somehow be worth it. I have a way to do this but it’s a bit tricky in a few ways, and I will NOT guarantee the online survival of the site video content beyond its first year. I do think I could pull off the plan [but] it’s contingent on this stuff finding an audience.

TV networks need subscribers or millions of live viewers bombarded with commercials, and I will not intrude on my stuff with video ads stalling the video content, nor will I require a subscription or paywall. There will be a still, not animated, banner ad at bottom of each page below the video stuff, and a widget for social media sharing, and that is *it*. So I expect far less revenue per viewer, as a result, than ‘TV’ because I refuse to be intrusive and wish to respect my audience.

Resulting harsh truth: I’ll launch with about 25-30 videos in the site library, and each of them needs to, on average, hit nearly 7,000 unique, REAL views/month. Minimum. That is, 2 million total [combined] video views in the first year. I have had family express skepticism that my VFX-laden, comedy and/or action videos will be of any interest to the broader world.

Well… Pinterest is a fascinating case study. The REASON my Pinterest views have exploded to 800-900/day has mostly to do with about a dozen amusing .GIFs from my video projects. Some of those have been seen by *thousands* of Pinterest viewers. So I figure, if a 5-10 second GIF loop from me grabs a thousand viewers in the past week… how well might the actual high-res video do? I truly believe what my family finds fun the world will too. So that’s why I’m emboldened to give this a shot.

THE SCHEDULE:

Currently, the Cyber Monday sales are active –  and some Etsy art is viewable and some Itch.IO asset packs updated, but little else is new.

Lots of gamedev, video, and web design stuff is going on in the background during December, though.

Jan. 20th, 2020 – the web network updates go live including way more video content, new design, comics, articles… etc.

Feb. 15, 2020 – the Miniature Multiverse extras pack and a bunch of new preview material gets posted online, generating further buzz.

March 15th, 2020 – the full game (Miniature Multiverse) hits Itch.IO and Steam.

Shortly after that I will be reevaluating my plans based on how successful or not, that game’s been. If it goes well, more will happen faster. We’ll see.

 

 

FEBRUARY 2017 RECAP

Recapping the recent events of February 2017, just the last month, to remind everyone that despite appearances, a lot of updates do actually happen on my web network if you keep looking:

-eBay auctions with low starting bids continue.  Look at these three in particular, especially the top two as they’ve gotten relatively few views so far compared to the third but are nonetheless impressive value:

Pastel Pencil art, 16×20 inches, starting at $1.99

Oil pastel art, 18×24 inches, starting at $2.49

Acrylic Painting, 18 x 24 inches, starting at $2.99

-The new batch of polls continue to go largely ignored by website visitors.  I’ve gotten *hundreds* of visitors to my websites in the past week, over 700 actually, but the polling page seems to be a bit hard for them to find for whatever reason.  It’s a shame, too, given the amazing opportunity for the few who actually take a look at that page.

The polling page.

-Membership options just launched.  There are some stupendous perks to being a subscriber and signing up for a Premium Membership status here.

The most obvious is free shipping while a member and 15% or more off all HornbostelProductions.com store items.  You could get some great bargains on handmade art doing that right now.  $4.99/year for 15% or more off everything, and a list of other extras.  Really reasonable.

Membership benefits

-The VFX section of Articles were just recently posted.  There are four new articles on TriumphantArtists.com, and they are all in that category.

VFX and 3D art-icles

-Still Art section has a few new images and is now sortable.  You can now view the artworks I’ve made, organized by year, art medium, or size.

Still Art Page – now sortable!

-Ground work laid for some big stuff updated in the next 30 days.  As in, major news related to ‘Spiral Skies’, release of House Trek content, and a new batch of HD stock footage, as well as more comics stuff, finally a new vlog entry, and continued expansion of the articles section with even more valuable information.  There’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes and it’ll be publically revealed over time.

-That goofball auction of five hours of my time.  Nobody bid, but I am not really surprised given the brevity of the auction.  It was kind of an experiment and it failed.  Time to move on.  Maybe I’ll try that idea again later on with a longer build up beforehand.

-The Vineyard Video Leisure Group is now moving closer to fruition.  I posted a teaser image for it just this evening.  [See previous post]

MEMBERSHIP PLANS ACTIVATED

You can show your support for my work by becoming a paid member, for a really low price.

You’ll find it’s actually a very impressive bargain given that all the products on the HornbostelProductions.com shop are 18% off or more for members, with free shipping also.

Take a look here.

I know, I know, the auction thing I tried last week didn’t go well.  I figured it was worth a shot.  Maybe I’ll try it again in a month and see if anyone is interested then.  A lot of ideas have been suggested to move my creative work forward – and most of them have been underwhelming.  Ad revenue?  Less than $2 per month at best, even with a few thousand regular visitors, so not a viable option.   Art sales work great, on eBay, but that fluctuates wildly and eBay’s fees aren’t great.  The subscription option I’m opening up for you here right now, plus the poll I mentioned earlier, seems like a good way to smooth that out – encouraging people to buy on the HornbostelProductions.com shop instead of eBay, by giving everyone great deals.  It’s worth a shot and I’m optimistic about how it’ll end up playing out.

The unconventional work auction commences, and will run until midnight on the 23rd.

I’ve offered the winner of the auction I just posted, a chance to redirect five hours of my time on the morning of Friday, Feb. 24, 2017, to the project of their choice.

So this is a chance to ‘put your money where your mouth is’.

If you voted in the poll (see previous post) and you felt strongly about a particular project, you can get me to commit five hours of work to it this Friday for as little as $0.01.  (Seriously, the opening bid is actually a penny, for five hours of my time.)

You do not want to ignore this!

My morning of Friday, Feb. 24, 2017

Auction Image

My first five hours of personal work on Friday, February 24th, are on sale, and the winning bidder may choose what project I commit them to.

It has occurred to me that I not only have $7500 in funding to raise between all my unique projects, and that it'd take 3 1/2 years to fund them all at the current rate, but that I have an additional issue of time as a limited resource.

Think about your favorite highly anticipated project you've been waiting forever for me to finish.  The one that you probably ranked a '10' in my poll on Triumphant Artists.com.  You've seen that sit mostly on the backburner for months or years and want it done faster.  Now you can toss a few pennies in the ring as a bidder, and say, for example, for $0.01 (one freaking penny!) I could convince Matthew to put five more hours of work into the specific project I am actually excited about.

So you may have been waiting forever for 'Isola' to actually be done.  I hear you on that.  So you place a penny towards that.

But then, someone else wants to push for 'Vivid Minigolf', for example, and raises the bid to two cents.  And on and on it goes.  Some of you want me working heavily on other things altogether, maybe a particular video project, or what have you.  It could even turn into a small scale bidding war!

So the former scouts from Troop 4 who want me focused on the T4 comics and videos, might face off against the Missio Dei/Redeemer people who want me to resume work on the virtual tour of the old church which is now being sold off, and they in turn might face off against adventure gamers hoping for 'Panoramic Worlds' or a certain fangame, or fan-created world, versus some friends who want a movie like 'Eutopia' improved, and even they could get pitted against the family members who want '1999' done right NOW.

Heck, if the bidding goes above $4.95, or $0.99/hour, at that point I'll even open this up to a roster of tasks that are your project, not really at all mine* which might include:

-graphics elements for your web page

-a video vfx shot or two for your video project.

-photo editing of some pictures you want modified

-an online meetup, over an online voice/video chat, to discuss a topic that you want help with or are interested in.  (tutoring, interviews, whatever.)

-a 3D model for a game you're developing.

-general-purpose video editing and audio editing/clean up.

-editing passes on a written story/work/article offering proofreading and feedback.

-roughly a few seconds of cartoon animation or about a page of comic/graphic novel content based on your ideas.

and pretty much anything else creative work wise, that uses the 5 hours of time but does not use up physical materials [that] would cost me money.

IF THIS GENERATES ANY REASONABLE BURST OF BIDDING ACTIVITY, I WILL DO THIS AGAIN ONCE A WEEK.  If that occurs, it could amount to 20 hours sold a month, or 100 hours in the next five months, enough to make a major dent in even the biggest projects, assuming the same person keeps winning the auctions most of the time.

Note that you will be asked to - upon winning - pay the auction end amount using PayPal.

Starting at $0.01

Refresh Current Bid

  • Ending Date - 23rd Feb 2017 18:00:00
  • Ships to - nowhere - no shipping
  • Location - Houston, TX

Auction closed

Current bids
    Payment Details

    Payment must be made using the following method

    PayPalAuction winner will get a PayPal payment link via email.

    Two artworks added to ‘Still Art’ page and new eBay auctions posted!

    Two more artworks (one from 2015 and one from 2016) were just posted on the Still Art page.  More archived stuff will be uploaded later tonight, plus a couple of alternate sorting methods will be set up soon beyond the current chronological method [images will be sortable by art medium, and by size]

    If the Still Art page looks really screwed up briefly at some point around 11 pm to midnight, that’s because that’s when the HTML and JS stuff is being actively changed.

    Also, three auctions just posted on my eBay shop, all priced under $4 for the opening bid.  Haven’t done actual auctions in a while so I figured now was a good time for that.  Check that out!

    Incidentally, I’ve just ordered some new art supply materials.  More pastel pencils, and a few other things.  I’m ready for the next wave of orders.

    LINKS – these are important to notice!

    Date the below entry was originally posted – June 21, 2016.  If you don’t know why the old copy was lost, check this post:  Website Port and SSL upgrade completed

    LINKS YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF: –TriumphantArtists.com –PanoramicWorlds.com –VividMiniGolf.com –IsolaGame.com –Troop4Houston.net –HornbostelMedia.com –HornbostelPortfolio.com –The TriumphantArtists Forums –The TriumphantArtists Shop –Triumphant Artists Affiliate Program –TriumphantArtists on eBay –TriumphantArtists on Etsy –TriumphantArtists on CafePress –TriumphantArtists on Zazzle – Triumphant Artists on YouTube

    There are actually a number of other pages I run, and the list I just provided is merely a jumping-off point to start with, but these seem to me to be some of the most significant ones right now.

    Introduction

    Date the below entry was originally posted – June 21, 2016.  If you don’t know why the old copy was lost, check this post:  Website Port and SSL upgrade completed

    ORIGINAL POST CONTENT:

    Hi everyone! Welcome to my WordPress blog! I had a minimalist blog planned here before but this is arguably simpler to maintain, searchable, and, well, just better than coding my own blog by hand. You can comment if you want to, or subscribe via RSS, or search the blog posts for relevant content. I will also be setting up a shop here with WooCommerce, as a supplement to my eBay and Etsy storefronts. Let’s face it, eBay is charging a lot of fees, and I can trim the prices down by about 4% for anyone who buys here instead – and, in some cases, maybe even more than that! I sell unique handcrafted artworks in acrylic, pastel, colored pencil, and other media, but I also offer services as a video editor, vfx artist, 3d artist, miniature artist, and web designer. You should definitely bookmark this site as things are going to be very interesting very soon.