Love that smirk...I can just see the wheels turning in that fuzzy head.
And you totally should try making up some masks and barrettes and plaques for dog shows, I bet they'd go over great because NOBODY is doing doggy stuff like yours. And if you make sure to do some of the more obscure breeds like elkies, that's pretty much bound to be money in the bank from all the obsessive breed fans who are always hunting for anything new with their guys on it! Just take a look at eBay to see how bad it is -- right now there are a measly TWO PAGES' worth of elkie items, compared to over thirty pages for a popular breed like goldens. And that's not even mentioning how often what little stuff you can find is semi-generic and used for multiple breeds -- you might have seen that yourself if you've ever looked for sibe stuff, I've seen an awful lot of merch with silhouettes or figurines where they're using the same damn thing with just a different paint job, or a tweak in the ad copy, for sibes, mals, elkies, keeshonden, akitas, pretty much anything with prick ears and a curly or sickle tail!
Foreshortening or no, a bit of an akita resemblance isn't that far off the mark, really -- these guys do have some of that same blocky, bearish quality to their faces. I remember there was a discussion on the Moosedog list a year or two back of how folks try to explain these dogs to folks who don't know the breed, and one of the funniest and truest quips was "a cross between an akita and a pot-bellied pig".
The only suggestion I'd make if you were going to make the elkie a production item, aside from doing a few subtly different paint jobs to offer a range of darker-to-lighter dogs, is to maybe shorten the back just a wee bit. It's not that it's too long currently, since with the position of the hind legs and tail it really does seem to capture the dog in mid-stretch; but this is in general a very squarely built cobby sort of breed, so if you're going to have them on display with a bunch of other dogs then playing up the shortness of the back will help to set apart the elkies from the GSDs or Sibes, and make it clear that you're more aware of breed differences than all those one-size-fits-all folks. ;)
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Date: 2007-05-09 12:26 am (UTC)Love that smirk...I can just see the wheels turning in that fuzzy head.
And you totally should try making up some masks and barrettes and plaques for dog shows, I bet they'd go over great because NOBODY is doing doggy stuff like yours. And if you make sure to do some of the more obscure breeds like elkies, that's pretty much bound to be money in the bank from all the obsessive breed fans who are always hunting for anything new with their guys on it! Just take a look at eBay to see how bad it is -- right now there are a measly TWO PAGES' worth of elkie items, compared to over thirty pages for a popular breed like goldens. And that's not even mentioning how often what little stuff you can find is semi-generic and used for multiple breeds -- you might have seen that yourself if you've ever looked for sibe stuff, I've seen an awful lot of merch with silhouettes or figurines where they're using the same damn thing with just a different paint job, or a tweak in the ad copy, for sibes, mals, elkies, keeshonden, akitas, pretty much anything with prick ears and a curly or sickle tail!
Foreshortening or no, a bit of an akita resemblance isn't that far off the mark, really -- these guys do have some of that same blocky, bearish quality to their faces. I remember there was a discussion on the Moosedog list a year or two back of how folks try to explain these dogs to folks who don't know the breed, and one of the funniest and truest quips was "a cross between an akita and a pot-bellied pig".
The only suggestion I'd make if you were going to make the elkie a production item, aside from doing a few subtly different paint jobs to offer a range of darker-to-lighter dogs, is to maybe shorten the back just a wee bit. It's not that it's too long currently, since with the position of the hind legs and tail it really does seem to capture the dog in mid-stretch; but this is in general a very squarely built cobby sort of breed, so if you're going to have them on display with a bunch of other dogs then playing up the shortness of the back will help to set apart the elkies from the GSDs or Sibes, and make it clear that you're more aware of breed differences than all those one-size-fits-all folks. ;)