ToysoldierThor
  • Home
  • ToyTalks Blogs
  • BronzeArt
    • PrincessGoblin
    • Shattered
  • Landscape / Art Store
  • Toy's Art Gallery
  • About Toy
  • Contact Toy

Toy's Real Life Artist has his 1st Art Exhibit

10/27/2013

1 Comment

 
On October 26th, 2013
the RL Artist behind Toy 

reached a major milestone


He hung up 40 of his artworks 
to begin Toy's 1st Real World
Art Exhibit for a 6 week period
A Background
In April 2010 within SecondLife®, Toysoldier Thor formally kicked off his passion and interests in becoming a Digital Artist.  Prior to this, Toy used many of his digital creative talents for creating commercial content and/or using tools like Photoshop for utilitarian purposes like creating textures for content and advertising & promo content for products.

Toy became an artist in SecondLife and as a result of all his artistic friends involved in the SL art community.  Once he got the bug to be artistically creative in 2010, his passions and interests in digital art exploded and expanded past the bounds of SL photo art.  The number of his creations in the past 3.5 years exceeded over 200 works.  He and his art creations were accepted and promoted by the SL art community that honoured him with with invites to many of SL's finest art galleries and exhibits they held for their patrons.  Toy even created his own large art gallery within SL where he sells much of his 2D wall art as well as 3D sculptures.

In 2012, Toy decided to take on the challenge of taking his art to the real world community of potential art lovers.  He knew this was an enormous challenge as having ANY success in having ones art recognized or sold in the real world is equal to winning a lottery.  But, he decided to take it on.

He created his own RL art website, experimented where to get the best quality / priced printing of art to canvas, and began printing and promoting his art to his real world community.  He negotiated to get his art hung at a local hair stylist on consignment.

The Big Break
Then in late 2012 he got his big break when he reached out to the art committee of a large international corporation asking if he artworks could be considered for an exhibit at their large art gallery of their corporate head quarters.  They said they would love to have him exhibit his art for one of the six week exhibit windows they offer.

They told Toy that the exhibit displays up to 40 artworks.  This was a HUGE challenge and investment for Toy to take on since he did have more than 40 works but he would have to pay for the printing of all these artworks with NO assurance that any of these artworks would be sold.  But Toy used his profits from his SL Landscape content business to fund this investment.

Prepping for the Corporate Exhibit
Toy knew that digital photo art was not well respected by the traditional real world art community - mainly because the art created did not have a master "ONE OF" original artwork. 

As such, Toy came up with ideas to generate a form of uniqueness to his printed canvas art.  He registered each of his canvas prints with a stamp on the back of each canvas that identified the Series and Print number for each print he created.  

He also leveraged an idea he created in his SL gallery of provide a unique Artists Comment for each artwork.  For this exhibit he created a label for each of the 40 artworks on display.  The label provided the art patron with every bit of information that they would want.

Information on the Art, its styling, when created.

Information on the specific print that they were looking at, its dimensions, date printed, its Series & Print #, and the price of this specific print.

Then information in the form of the Artist's Comment regarding the artwork.  What was his thoughts behind the art.  What were some interesting notes and history of the art.

It was felt that the Artist's Comments will develop an added affinity to the art and make it more than just another of the billions of pretty pictures or commercial obscure canvas prints you can buy at Wallmart.

From there - Toy's fingers are cross that all these ideas worked.
Picture
Picture
The EXHIBIT
On Ocober 26th, Toy and two helpers arrived at the corporate campus and spent 3 hours hanging all his artworks.  The gallery is actually an extremely long centre hallway that is fully exposed to a massive underground cafeteria.  This long hallway inter-connects two major corporate buildings and provides access to this cafeteria / sitting area.  The hallways is the centre of the campus and has daily traffic in the 1000's.

The exhibit started as soon as the art was hung on the 26th and it will stay up for six weeks when it comes down for the next exhibit.

This is an extremely exciting accomplishment for a artist of only 3.5 years into his career.  Toy is so grateful to have been given this opportunity. to show his work.  And Toy can't thank those of his fellow Artist friends in the SL Art community for all they have done to inspire him to become the artist he is to date and to provide him all the support he has received from this amazing community.
1 Comment

Welcome to my new TOYSOLDIERTHOR.COM site

10/27/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
This October, I officially released my completely overhauled and re-branded website and called it....


ToysoldierThor.comTM


Why did I need a site Overhaul & Re-Branding?
Well basically, I completely replaced the old "toytalks.weebly.com" website that I create about 3 years ago with a completely new brand and cleaned up structure.  The old site was initially created with a strong branding and emphasis of it being a blogging site.  Hence the name "ToyTALKS".  But over the years it became clear that the site was more universal in servicing all the interests of Toysoldier Thor than just to be a blogging site.  Also, the "ToyTalks" site name was only a subset of the "weebly.com" domain where it runs on.  I didn't think this was helpful to the cause to better promote all of Toy's efforts.

So I decided a complete overhaul / refresh of the site structure was needed.  More importantly, I decided to re-brand the site with an actual available domain name of "ToysoldierThor.com" so that it would be easier to promote and it would very strongly establish my TM (Trademark) to my avatar name that I felt was important to protect the art and content I create for SecondLife.

The RE-BRANDING to ToysoldierThor.com
The most important thing was to acquire the "TOYSOLDIERTHOR.COM" internet domain and begin the complex job of establishing a branding around this domain.  Its obvious where the name came from - my avatar in SecondLife® that came into existence on January 23, 2008.  That date of initial existence and my TM to that name is pretty rock solid for evidence.  But I wanted its usage to be more of a branding name - not just an SL avatar.

As such, I created a set of common style logo's for the website banners as well as to be used elsewhere that uses the new TM'ed brand.  I even placed the TM on the logo.

The BIGGEST PAIN when re-branding is to go back to all the countless places that you promoted / posted / displayed your old brand and replace it with the new brand.  For me, that is EVERYWHERE !!!  Even in places where I cant update - like the notecards inside all the artworks that I have sold in SL.  This slow clean-up or all posted old brands to the new one will take some time.  As such, I had to keep the old "toyTalks" website running, strip it, and then make it into a "redirection" site to my new site.  I see this site will be up and running for a long time.

Re-Structuring the site
Since a new website was created for the new ToysoldierTor.com brand, I decided to update, clean up, and better align / structure the site to promote all my primary interests.  This would be the Blog page, my Art activities, my Merchant activities, and a Bio or myself.  The top menu structure reflects this new structure.

I also decided to clean up, update, and re-structure the content in these pages that were out-dating or missing data on the old site.  I developed some alignment between the pages as well.

Finally, I also updated the weebly template that the old site was running on.  By doing this, I was also able to leverage some of the newer features of the new weebly.com templates.  A visible enhanced feature was the Social Media Icon links you see at the top of the site.  This expanded list of icons take visitors directly to many of my other social site.

The New vs. OLD Blog Site - a Gotchya!
The overhaul could be without its roadblocks.  I had one biggy.  The Weebly.com website development software is pretty powerful and it let me COPY the entire old site to a new site.  WITH ONE EXCEPTION... their system could not copy over any of the BLOG CONTENT.  This was a major Grrrr!  I had 3 years of blogs and they were not able to be copied to the new site.

After talking to the Weebly.com support staff, they suggested I leave the old site up and strip it down to its basics.  I could also re-brand the old site to look like the new site.  And then point all pages of the old site back to the new site with page re-directs.

I didn't re-brand the old site but I cleaned out all its old content and just put large "WE HAVE MOVED" redirect to any visitor that goes to the old site.  I then 2-way linked my new and old blogs to each other.

Conclusions
I am very happy with the new structure.  I am not finished with it yet as I am still making fine tuning adjustments to further enhance the site.  But I now have a great new re-branded TOYSOLDIERTHOR.com domain and site to centralize all things related to my SL identity.  I hope you all like the new stie.  Please provide feedback if there are things you don't like or would like the site to have.
0 Comments

Recap & Audio - Inworld Legal Panel Talk on LL TOS

10/19/2013

5 Comments

 
Picture
October 19th, 2013 inworld Legal Panel Discussion

TOPIC
August Changes to the SecondLife® TOS
What Are They & How Does It Impact SL Creators


Location: The Rose Theatre
Date/Time: Oct 19th @ 10am SLT (3 hours)

Today, the SLBA (SecondLife® Bar Association) held an SL inworld meeting to be legal panelists and talk all about what has become one of the hottest and contentious topics among the creators of SL - the August 2013 changes and user required agreement of the Linden Lab released SecondLife Terms of Service (TOS) if any user wished to continue to access and use the SL service.

This meeting started promptly at 10am slt and lasted for exactly three hours.  About 1/3 of it was the panelists presenting a highlight of general related legal terms as well as what they know of the current TOS and even how this relates to other Internet based service contracts.  The remaining 2 hours was used to answer the onslaught of questions that came to them in an orderly manner.  The entire presentation was primary communicated in VOICE by the legal panel - and translated to voice where a panel member was not able to voice.

It was clear the topic was VERY POPULAR as the sim was full with over 70 people attending and most stayed for the entire 3 hours.  The questions were excellent but there were more questions than time as you will hear in the audio.

I am sure the new UCCSL group as well as others parties will be providing a full transcript as well as the presentation slides and the video/audio versions of the meeting shortly.  But I wanted to submit my captured 3 hour audio of the entire meeting for any of my audience that wanted to hear it right away.  Sorry but I didn't turn on the audio capture until after 1 minute went by so I missed the VERY beginning of the kickoff of the meeting.
Click the Audio Play Button to listen to the 3 Hour Meeting
The session and the information was EXTREMELY informative and IMHO very unbiased how the panel presented their answers.  Where there was bad news - they stated it.  The panel clearly explained their own Real Life credentials and the role of their organization and any affiliations or not to LL.

I will not post my own personal interpretations from this meeting.  I feel it is more important that all creators in SL learn from what was talked about and make up their own minds on what action or non action they wish to take regarding the LL TOS.  But, if you want to get involved more actively I would strongly encourage you join the quickly growing UCCSL group and get involved.

5 Comments
    Picture
    Contact Info
    To contact Toy for any reasons, use the CONTACT TOY page or click on any of the social media icons at the top of this site.
    or...

    SL / IW / Avination Avatars:
        >  Toysoldier Thor
    DeviantArt, Twitter, Koinup ID
        >  Toysoldierthor
    Picture

    BlogPost Archives

    April 2016
    December 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013

    Categories

    All
    Art Exhibit
    Content Creators
    Inworld Meeting
    Linden Lab
    Sl Features
    Terms Of Service
    Tos
    Toy's Art

    RSS Feed

    Picture

    IMPORTANT NOTE
    Old ToyTalk
    Blogs Moved

    On October 19, 2013, Toy released his completely re-branded website and left his old toytalks.weebly.com" site that existed for 3 years.


    Due to limitations on the weebly hosting site, old blog postings could not be migrated .  

    ALL TOYTALK BLOG POSTS PRIOR TO OCT 19 2013
    are still available
    at the old blog site.

    Picture