Kickstarter progress

We're excited about our Kickstarter project. We're a third of the way to our funding goal, and as it happens, a third of the way into the time we set aside to get funded. That means we're right on track. Of course, we only got this far because of all of you that have contributed, and more importantly, shared our project with your networks. The support is appreciated more than you can imagine.

We've been at this long enough now that we actually have some frequently asked questions that we'd like to answer.

What are you working on now while you're waiting to find out if you get funded?

For starters, we've been spending lots of time on kickstarter.com looking at other projects to see how we compare. As a result, we've become backers on a handful of other projects.  That sort of runs counter to our efforts of raising money, but we've been having fun doing it.

On the sculpture front, we just did an installation at a local night club, Heat. We did an installation of circus aerialists.

On the micro-sculpture front, Kelly just completed a piece for the Strong Museum of Play. She had a micro crocheted Yoda in the museum's Star Wars weekend.

What will you do if you don't get funded? Will the project happen anyway.

We're artists. What we do is create. We won't drop the project idea entirely. But part of the reason for doing this on Kickstarter was to find out how much interest there was in this work. If we don't have sufficient interest to complete the project, we'll go in another direction. You see, despite being artists, we do not believe in starving for our art. Therefore, the other direction will be one that feeds us. We'll make pancakes.  That's right. We make fine art pancakes when we aren't twisting balloons and working on kid's books. We can either illustrate kid's books and starve, or make fine art that we can eat.

Is there a charity component to what you're doing?

No. Larry has become known for doing large charitable projects and both Kelly and Larry intend to continue that tradition. This just isn't one of those projects. In fact, Kickstarter states in their guidelines, "We know there are a lot of great projects that fall outside of our scope, but Kickstarter is not a place for soliciting donations to causes, charity projects, or general business expenses." There's no other agenda here. We just want to do something that we think is really cool, and we're hoping that enough people agree with us to get funded.

You're just trying to illustrate a kids book? Is there some other larger piece to this?

This is a pretty large undertaking. Each illustration in the book will be as large, if not larger than many of our installations. Each page will be a new work. The only larger piece is our secret (oops) hope that this is so successful we can do a large number of illustrated books.

Why isn't there a reward level that's basically the equivalent of pre-ordering a retail copy of the book?

We are offering an artist's edition of the book as a reward. We ran numbers on a retail copy of the book, the number we'd need to produce to make it cost effective, and estimated (guessed based on other projects we saw getting funded on Kickstarter) the number of people that would buy such a book via Kickstarter and decided the Kickstarter project had the greatest chance of succeeding and allowing us the funding we needed to make it happen if we focused this on making the book and artwork rather than on a large print run. Once we're successfully funded, we do intend to do the large print run, but that will be a separate edition.

How can all of your fans help you get this project funded?

Keep spreading the word. Share the link to this project. We can't do this without your support. It's not necessarily the size of the pledge that helps but the viral nature of the Internet. The more people that choose to send in a dollar, the closer we get to our goal. (But if you happen to know someone that wants to support us at the $10,000 level, we'll take that too. :-) )