AI Shirt

I had so much success with AI images that I figured I should do a t-shirt! This has two distinct patterns on front and back, both made with Midjourney. I like how they are not exactly patterns, because they don't repeat, but feel like patterns because you kind of get the idea. They also let me explore the orange and blue of Ratlantis.

This was a great shirt for normal life and I wore it many times.

Horse Heads

We threw a party with a horse theme, so I made these horse heads in a hurry based on what I'd learned from making pinatas. They were fine. In this case, I made the substance of the head with paper and tape, then added the final crepe paper layer like a pinata.

Ratlantis Banners

We decided on Ratlantis as a theme and I started exploring logos. This part of the ideation process is fun, but many people get their feelings hurt as almost none of the early ideas will make it to be the final pick!

The Disney movie Atlantis had some visual style ideas we borrowed from (ancient tattoos), though the movie itself used a kind of inverted V for their Atlantis A. I also made the Rat Trap banner, but it's just wordmark no logo. Rat Trap had less people involved, so I could just pick things I like and do them instantly.

Cardboard Rat Heads

I learned from the Goblins project that a few cardboard heads of your totem character can go a long way. Those heads went to many events and kept getting fixed up and doing work to establish the idea that "there are goblins here."

I tried to recreate this with rats, making a dozen heads instead of just a few, and settling on a single repeatable formula. Sadly, this formula wasn't really cute enough so these heads never really made an impression. They did let me practice the "ancient tattoo" and orange and blue color scheme.

Air Dry Clay Rat Heads

For Ratlantis, I wanted to use the air dry clay to make many rat heads I could mount in different ways. Because the clay dries so strong, these rats lasted for a long time, a cute reminder of our project together. The first rat heads were made in early January!

Rat Water Bottles

In this experiment, we made merchandise! Taking the discarded water bottles from last year's event, we dressed them up as merch for the next year's event! I decorated most of them, and Renee applied coatings to make them survive the indignities of regular life. We sold a few, but it didn't justify the process given that we weren't very passionate.

Fake Aquarium

Ratlantis is an undersea civilization, so I was excited to recreate the kind of aquarium nightlight I had when I was younger. This project was all fun until we got into calibrating the rollers. We got this to run, but it ultimately died during the event and we never fixed it. I understand now why there is only one model anyone sells; making a new one is super annoying.

Paper and Tape Rats

I made two of these a few years before, and now had a new rat project! In this case, I made lots of them and gave them fur in our theme colors. This took a lot of time, but the very lovely rats were durable and most of them ended up in someone's house, which is good.

Simplified Lego Spaceships

I wanted to tell the story that Ratlantis has underwater ships and that we teach young rats to engineer these. I tried two approaches. One was a dumb kit from the web. The other was a Lego spaceship I superglued together into larger parts to simplify building. These turned out to be very unpopular and a fail.

Orange Lantern

Failed experiment, but you technically can use an orange rind as a diffuser. I had the idea that Rats love oranges, but it didn't have legs. I blame oranges for being fairly boring, visually. We did, eventually, play croquet with oranges around an event, which was a blast and a fun aromatic mess.

The Heist

This was a short-form role-playing game concept wherein you play with cars and trucks and wood blocks to stage a heist, such as robbing a bank. The box is great, the cards are lovely, the blocks are fine, and the gameplay is ok. But it turns out the game has a very high barrier to entry!

To play, you have to be willing to negotiate for your cut in the heist, explain on your turn what you did, and then accept when your actions failed. Some people take to this naturally and had great heists, complete with backstabbing and plot twists. But most people are just too scared to even play, so then we ended up playing the game with them technically on the team but mostly they are just confused. In that case, we are just performing for them and it's not fun any more.

You Wouldn't Posters

I discovered I could legal size paper mostly covered in black ink for the standard "black and white" print price at Kinko's, then trim the margins and laminate. This final poster is very durable and went up many times.

The "You Wouldn't" theme, a reference to the old anti-piracy advertisement of the 90s, corroborated the Ratlantis concept that civilized rats do crime (we called this area Rat Trap) and gave us a number of edgy one-liners.

Hot Pizza Fantasy

This must have started in Q4-2023 because the book arrived in 2024 and was beautiful! I still have adoring fans just from this book, which has a pretty good foreword about how and why we love pizza, then just a lot of pictures of pizza. It turns out the fans love the foreword, and most people just see the pizza pictures.