Kickstarter

Many of you have been writing to me asking for updates and I’ve tried to respond to as many inquiries as possible in personal emails, but it’s way past due to update you all in an official capacity. Basically, I just want to let you all know that we’re still here!

One friend in particular wrote to tell me that every time she goes to our website and Matt Tyson’s Kylie & Kip music starts playing, her 3-year old comes running into the room to see what’s going on! Letters like that make me want to get this completed as quickly as possible. It’s wonderful to know that we already have little fans out there anxiously awaiting the release of the book and CD.

Between hockey season, and my travel schedule, I was pretty much forced shelf the project in late November. This week I dusted it off and got back to work on the colors. As is always with the case when you return to a project after time, I have also opted to go back and rework some of the pages from top to bottom.

Look for more updates in the coming summer months as we ride this wave all the way to shore!

Thanks for your continued support and patience!

Randy

Kylie & Kip were invited to make their first public appearance this past weekend at, of all places, the Oklahoma City Ballet! Sometimes in life a group of seemingly unrelated circumstances come together by pure luck, and things just work out perfectly. This was one such situation.

Any of you who know me personally, or are familiar with much of my artwork know that I am, and have been since the age of nine, a HUGE fan of Gaston Leroux’s romance / horror novel, The Phantom of the Opera. Well, a few months ago I was approached by the Oklahoma City Ballet to do artwork for their upcoming season of shows, to be displayed in the lobby during performances. As luck would have it, their first show was Phantom, so I was able to jump right into the project, excited about the possibilities.

In a completely unrelated idea, I had decided to start doing sketches of Kylie & Kip for the various holidays, and my love of Phantom lead me to draw them in their Halloween costumes as The Phantom & Christine.

In yet another unrelated twist, somebody at the OKC Ballet had decided to have a Children’s Halloween Party in the Civic Center following the Sunday matinee. Kids were invited to come see the show in their costumes, and then stick around after the show to Trick Or Treat, and play games in the lobby. One such game they had in mind was “Pin The Mask On The Phantom”, and I was approached to design the game for them (with only about 72 hours to get it completed). Since I already had a drawing of Kylie & Kip, I asked if we could use it, and in turn, advertise the upcoming book at the same time. I was granted permission, and last week I spent an entire day drawing a three-foot by four-foot stand-up poster of Kylie & Kip riding the boat across the Phantom’s underground lake. In addition to candy prizes, each participant also received a Kylie & Kip coloring page on which we had a small advertisement for the book and our website.

About 300 kids showed up at the sold-out (2,500 seat) show, and many of them stayed for the festivities. Below are a couple of pictures of the artwork and one from the event.

I know we've been out of touch for a while here, so we thought that the coming of Halloween would be a good excuse for a new update. Our hopeful timeline with the publishing company was getting a little tight for the Christmas release of the book, so we've slowed down our production pace and we're now gearing more towards a spring release. We really felt it would be wiser to get the book done right, the way we wanted it done, than to rush the process and have to cut corners just to get it completed by a certain date. After all, it's a summer book, about kids having summer fun, right? Somehow, releasing it just in time for summer actually seems to make more sense anyway!

So, until next time, Happy Halloween from Kylie & Kip!

Thanks to all of you, we have successfully reached our funding goal, and we can now move forward to the next step of the publishing process! I can’t believe it’s been two months already – it seems like just yesterday I was sitting here typing my Kickstarter proposal hoping that we would get accepted to raise funds here.

To ALL of our backers, thank you so much for giving us this opportunity to begin publishing our Kylie & Kip stories. This has been a long road for Cara & I personally. My sincerest thanks to all of you for believing in the project, and making a dream come true! Cara, Lexi, & I would like to personally thank all of you for your help, your encouragement, your donations, and your pre-orders of books and merchandise to help us achieve our goal! We would especially like extend our gratitude to the great folks at Kickstarter - not only for making their fundraising process available to us, but also for making it such a great experience, and simple to use process, on our end.

Three months ago, our last fundraising effort failed when we lost two different investors due to the current economic woes. At the time we were concerned that it might be another a year or so before we would get the chance to try again, but a close friend (you know who you are) brought Kickstarter to my attention, and it has proven to be the best decision we’ve made so far!

Management at Kickstarter also recently informed me that we’ll be able to continue posting updates even though the fundraising deadline has passed. They won’t be weekly, but I will let you know as we make major strides toward completing and publishing the book.

In addition, we’ll still be accepting pre-orders of the book through our website www.KylieAndKip.com.

Again, thanks to you all!

-Randy

Well, it looks like we’re almost there! We raised about $300 in the last week, but we still have a couple of hundred dollars to raise in the last few days, and it appears that it will come right down to the wire. I haven’t gotten any work done on the project in the last week or so because most of my attention has been focused on trying to help raise the last bit of money we need to get to our funding goal. I’m really confident that we’ll get there, we just a need a little extra push in the next four days to secure the funding for the book. Hopefully we’ll get there sooner rather than later, otherwise the stress from all of this is going to keep me awake all week!

Surf's Up!
Randy