I am The Goblin Tinker! I make custom hand crafted and hand painted reproducible terrain from silicone molds for table top gamers!
I decided to make something more of crafting terrain in March of 2020 and started to blog about the new terrain I was making. You can view it at www.thegoblintinker.com/blog !!
I had been making fieldstone dungeons for myself for a bit more than 10 years to throw on the tabletop and game with. I loved it.
I learned how to cast in plaster. I learned how to make silicone molds. I learned how to paint. But most importantly I had begun to learn how to DESIGN!
Like everyone else, circa early 2020, I realized I’d be at home a LOT and was faced with a significant opportunity to rediscover the love and joy I had when creating new designs, terrain, buildings, and HOW to begin to acheive mastery of this challenging craft.
It has been a joy, and now that I’ve added another 3 years of +1000% more experience to my skillset by challenging the bounds of what many may have thought ‘audacious’ *that’s being kind* projects, like solid casting each level of an 8" round tower, I have truly grown happy making this venture a success!
Not only has The Goblin Tinker been an experience of hard work, long hours, learning new skills, and devoting neccessary time to the detailed minutia of growing a small business from scratch in a competitive, niche, and small market segment, but it has given me a window into just how much my creative soul yearned to build, create, grow, learn, and strive to better each of those important skills necessary to arrive at that nebulous place called success.
Victory, that fickle nasty bitch of endless toil, always seeking to ceede a glimpse up her skirt, to her more common twin, Failure, found me face first in the dusty earth eating dirt and fecal matter all too often.
But ‘love’ doesn’t care. Ego certainly does, *ahem*, but love does not!
It was very ‘very’ challenging to keep sight of this fact over the course of these last few years. I need not recount them, you too may have lived through several similar experiences yourself, I’d imagine. It was humbling, no?
Yes, it was the often dim light of the love of Victory guiding my soul through the fractured tempting criticism of repeated failure, that steadfastly winnowed out the pain of that failure, that I had tapped into. I needed it.
I needed the fidelity of that discerning rudder to overcome the bad choices I had made to decide how to make better ones. It was a journey. Don’t let me fool you though, it’s STILL a Journey. Yet, this course, now firmly set on the foundation of better skills, has brought The Goblin Tinker to this destination, where I can celebrate the true victory this toil has birthed deep in the warrens of the Goblin Tinker’s workshop. *sounds of a busy workshop*
So, let me recount these last 3 years of Victories!
- the creation of 20+ unique products
- created 100+ silicone molds
- replaced a few aged molds too! Huzaah!
- designed 5+ accessories of my own art
- delivered ~100 finished products to patrons.
- designed 2 new product offerings through commissioned work!
- accumulated about 15 unfinished or abandoned projects
- added another half dozen projects I'd LIKE to dive into! *harmpffth* - toiled thousands of hours through the dark of night and the dim light of day.
- 1 website: www.thegoblintinker.com
- written +101 blog entries
- accumlated 5000-7000 blog views!
- created 1 Facebook Page & 1 FB group - feel free to join my design group!
- +250 likes & follows
- and established many repeat patrons, some.... several times! Huzzah! Thank You very much folks, you know who you are!
- and lastly grown gross sales by 350% over the Tinker’s Inagural year, and by 165% over the 2nd year.
In closing, thank you for reading my celebration of all that has come to pass in the Tinker's workshop, and what this tiny workshop has begun to wrought in the digital marketspace.
Thank you for making The Goblin Tinker the victory it has become! Sincerly. It could not be done without those of you who admire true craftsmanship.
Now... let the Journey ...continue into the 4th year of this grand adventure! And of course, I invite you to stay tuned to this page to see exactly what I've got in store for it.
The Kindest Regard,
Da'Boss
The Goblin Tinker
@thegoblintinker on FaceBook & Instagram!
PS No post would be complete without a huge gallery!!
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