oinkbanana wrote:custom artwork is really fun
yet I love Tanyas work so very much that no DR.S pedal would be complete without her hand in it.
there's art that went into the circuit too, and a breathtaking enclosure helps remind me that I need other peoples art to make my own.
I'd get bored sitting in a room of my own paintings.
but that's just me.
I'm a fan of "more tanya", any day of the week...
her colour combinations are always so vibrant and in turn inspiring.
granted i've had a say in my special orders, but it's Tanya's layout, proportions and overall balance that make the pedals the eye candy that they are.
opening the mail today was such a pleasant surprise at how beautiful they turned out!
but I can understand that as the quantity of pedals in production increases, it's gonna be harder for tanya's hand vinyl cutting to finish every pedal.
I'm very fortunate to have had the luxury!
Thanks, Kevin, that's really cool of you to say and Tanya really appreciates it!
I think what our goal is is to have Tanya always do a small amount of custom order/direct order vinyl finishes, maybe a dozen or two per month, with the bulk of our production pedals being in the powder coated and screen printed boxes.
The thing is, we've had Tanya working really hard to do these finishes for the last 5 years... she has to work pretty much every single day to be able to finish 50 to 60 boxes a month. She enjoys the work a lot and would never regret the time spent doing it, but doing these guitar pedals wasn't necessarily Tanya's calling in life.. it started out as something just to help me get my pedal ideas up and running... and as the years have gone by and the demand for our pedals has increased, it's become a really tough grind doing some of these super time consuming chores.
5 years ago, Tanya had a lot of things she wanted to do... vinyl art, sign making, painting, sewing and creating with fabrics... she's really into arts and crafts and creating and she's basically put everything aside for years to work with Dr. Scientist. Working every single day to make 50 or 60 pedals is really tough though... we worked that hard and still lived paycheck to paycheck with my mom helping us a ton with our bills. In order to stay really small and involved we had to change the way we work a bit.. I needed to stop making pcbs, it was wasting 80 hours a month doing completely brain dead work, and Tanya needed to be able to finish more boxes in a faster time. And so the miniberators were born, and we've been really liking this way of working.
Our goal though is to make sure that our powder coated and screen printed boxes always have the same spirit that the vinyl boxes have and Tanya enjoys working on those layouts and will keep on keeping our pedals looking cool.
We're also open though to letting other artists have a go at our pedals, like Isabel, and in the near future we're going to have a small run of awesome Heartben painted boxes.. stuff like that, stuff that keeps the pedals fresh and keeps us excited about them and doing new things.
I hear you though, Kev, we talk long hours about the changes we make to Dr. Scientist and we really try to do things in a way that emphasizes what's important about our pedals... we don't want to make compromises just to make more money, we want to make progressive changes that let us keep on doing what we love in a way that won't kill us or make us broke.
I think it's very safe to say though that all of our repeat customers and ILF pals will always be able to get a special pedal finished by Tanya, we never plan on taking that completely away!
Symbolique, welcome to the forum and thanks for picking up a mini! Make sure you enter the June IFL giveaway, you could get a murdererator for free!
Blake, can't wait to see your candy inspired finishes! I like the way you think!
... that's a neat way to do a pedal finish!... other people might want to have a go at that too! (Check out the thread about the up and coming artist if you don't know what the heck I'm talking about there.)
