A Land Far Away

(I'm posting this at Jaydes Request)

Many of you know that ALFA member Twin Axes has taken to artistically rendering the characters and events of ALFA's Faerun. It has been well received by many of ALFA's members and an idea has surfaced for creating a 12 month Calendar using his art. Now, sending artwork off to printers to print Calendars is not cheap. OK, sending the artwork is free, but getting them to print the calendars is pricey.

Figure about $25-$30 a calendar, if 25 people order one. They get a bit cheaper as more people order. If every member ordered one, we could presumably get them as cheap as $15 each.

Now, Twin Axes has not actually agreed to submit his art for a calendar, but we wanted to see if there was any interest before we started bugging him about it.

For those who haven't seen it, samples of his work can be found here and here.

In any case, let's see a show of hands.

Obviously this is going to be supported by those whose characters feature in the artwork.

I'd buy it anyway.

Id certainly consider it, even more so if mine was picked for July

Great idea though, whether it gets off the ground or not

Twinaxes is crazy talented.

We would make an attempt at gathering art that depicted a wide variety of events across ALFA. If this idea gets enough positive response we will likely be asking for submissions for stories and events that have occurred in the past as well as current events.

I would like to see each month coming from a different server, or at the least different story arcs.

This will have the result of including several PCs, past an present.

Of course, this means we'll be forcing good old TA to render a lot of additional art... but is that a bad thing? Certainly it's no extra effort on my part!

*goes back into the sub-subbasement and whips TA a few times.* "Get to paintin' you lazy slob!" *Whips him again for good measure.*

As an unabashed narcissist, if my PC is not in it, I would not even deign to look at the horrid thing, but if my PC was in it, I would buy multiple copies ...


(Just kidding of course - I would look at it, I just probably would not buy it - still, its a great idea).

A calendar? I have a few calendars already...

The price is high a tad imho, but it's far from a bad idea in itself.

Well if it depicts alot of suggested themes, i suppose you could actually ebay it to those in dire need.

Let me put it to you this way. If you do *not* include Sheyreiza, a.k.a. Mikayla's character, I will buy five copies.

OK please remove one 'No' vote and add it to the 'Yes' votes.

I initially chose 'No' because I hate wall calendars! I never buy them, I don't care what the art is all about. If I want the art, i'll buy it and hang it on the wall without all the dumb dates attached.

But then I realized that buying a TwinAxes calendar is not about the calendar, really. If you like wall calendars its a bonus but really this is about showing support for a talented artist emerging from our community. Artists need the support of their peers and communities, period. I don't like DnD books either, but when Wynna publishes one i'll buy it, for the same reasons.

So yes, I would buy one or two or three if funds permit. Though I doubt i'll hang it on the wall, whether my PC is in it or not! All those dates, staring at me... *shudders*

Aye, the price is a bit high. The unfortunate reality about printing services is that printing less copies ends up costing more per copy. It's how that industry works. There's a base cost to even print 1. Every copy after that may be way cheaper, but you factor that initial cost in.

Printing 1 calendar through a printer would be like, Over $100 for it. Be better off going to Kinko's.

But we can't print out 1000 calendars at $5 each because we can't scrape up $5000 bucks... and we'd never be able to move 1000 calendars, even if we offered them at less than the expense to print them.

It's more realistic to print 25 calendars at $25 for $625.

Less than 25 calendars and we are relegated, once again, to the Kinko's option (something like $30-40 a pop for a nice calendar).

To be clear, this is not a money-making scheme. It's us checking to see if it is worth our time and effort to provide something neat for the community.

Could you not create it as a downloadable .pdf for $x that folk can print out themselves on decent paper if they so choose?

I'm not sure if this has occurred to anyone but once done with them as calenders you could cut the pictures out and frame them afterwards. Buddy of mine used to do that with various calender art for the store he worked at.

Pretty inexpensive way to decorate if you like TA's fantasy art...

$25 for 12 calender month pictures you can later frame isn't too bad in that case.

Mayhem wrote:Could you not create it as a downloadable .pdf for $x that folk can print out themselves on decent paper if they so choose?

My experience is that people won't.

Wha-? I have to do it myself?

That means I have to have a good printer, I have to buy some nice paper, I have to print it out, which will take up my pinter ink... quite a lot of trouble.

Hell, I've still got pictures I took on a CD waiting to get printed out... someday...

Meanwhile, we're asking TA to do up a lot of art so that folks MIGHT print themselves a calendar out of it.

If printing it out was something people were willing to do, no one would buy calendars.

It's not like there isn't a buttload of art and photography out there.

This is a no shit, real deal, professionally printed calendar, we're talking about. With community stories represented in stylish artwork.

But, yeah, if not enough folk are interested in buying a calendar, feel free to go to the library and wrangle up his art and print your own. (the figurative you of the entire community, not Mayhem in particular)