Custom Toys, Spade-Skulls, Totem Art and Much More : Reactor-88 Blog

Every time I drop pictures of a new custom, I get a few requests from people wanting me to paint a custom toy for them. Sadly, I have to tell these folks that my commission list is currently closed. I just realized it’s been about a year since I officially closed it, so I thought I should give some sort of update as to what’s going on. First off, I honestly thought that I’d have knocked my list down quite a bit by the end of this year so I’d be able to open it up again- unfortunately this didn’t happen. I got involved in a few more shows than I had intended, as well as worked on some projects I felt would be very beneficial to my toy design future. Anyway, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve made the decision to drastically cut down the number of shows I participate in during 2010 so I can put the bulk of my energy towards my current commission list. Note, I’m currently focusing on four pieces for shows in the first quarter of 2010, but once these are done it will be all about commissions. Lastly, I’d like to thank all those that are currently waiting on my list for being so patient. I plan to start contacting you to make sure you are still interested in a custom from me, and we’ll take it from there. So if you’re on my list, keep an eye out for an email or PM before the end of the year…

I’ve been playing around with the design of my new blog for the last few days. One of the main reasons for having my blog on my own server was that there would be no limit to the customization/design, but now I’m finding I just want to get it up and have the design not scare anybody away. With that, I was initially going to keep it pretty stark white and use sort of peachy orange accents (like my website), but now I’m starting to play around with some color. I thought I’d try really warming it up with some really rich reds. I really like red/black color palettes. So with that, I think it’s pretty much set for now design-wise. Before I “sign-off” on it, I want to create a subtle container for the modules in the right column, dig around for a Flickr and Twitter WordPress widget, and maybe fix up the links a bit. I know there’s tons of other cool things I can probably do, but I’m really anxious to move on to my store and get that going.  Exciting!

I had to jump through a couple hoops, but importing my old blog in its entirety was a success! WordPress has a built-in importer for just about every different blogging platform out there, but when I tried to use the Blogger importer it showed that it had imported one post, but then it just sat there and did nothing. So I then checked out the WP Support forums and found there are a handful of people that had this same problem. There were a couple of different solutions to try, and luckily the second one worked for me. I ended up having to create a WordPress.com blog, import my Blogger blog into that blog, then export the contents of the WordPress.com blog into a special WP XML file, that I was then able to import into my new WordPress blog that’s on my server- whew! So now my new, empty blog doesn’t look so empty anymore. Now onto the design…