Mike Wohlwend

I love stories and characters and am investing in alternative methods of telling and animating them.

I grow tropical fruit, two boys, and a life with my partner, Chelsea.

I enjoy stone carving, metal smithing, reading, and drawing.

I am professionally oriented toward technology, seo, social media, and marketing management.

I believe in the power of collaboration, hard work, and imagination.

Photos

My Flickr Photos

Updates

working late evenings on Your Santa Story. Some good design is coming of it. The website and Santa experience is supposed to ready for this Christmas—parents with youngsters should take a look!

7 months ago
soldering not working with this concrete-support wire mesh—too heavy gauge. Should have gotten the welding torch http://ow.ly/i/pIpD

17 months ago
Snow Leopard came in the mail today. time to upgrade cats

17 months ago
There's André Breton, too: onwithyourhead.com/famous/ http://ow.ly/i/lSsK

19 months ago
René Magritte, first Surrealist paper toy up on site http://ow.ly/i/lSsv

19 months ago
"Dueling Banjos" is playing in my chemistry class. I am drawing the Surrealists. Got a Dali and a Yves Tanguy and working on Magritte

19 months ago
We had a fire job ,a stove turned on by itself! PLEASE check your smoke detectors. Even if you do everything safely fire can still happen.

19 months ago
Finished today's Art in the Square show and extra promotion for On With Your Tale books. May have a chance now to get a new head up online soon.

21 months ago
Entered OWYH plaques into "A Show of Heads" http://ow.ly/6hNbC http://ow.ly/i/gyOq

21 months ago
On With Your Woolf: http://www.onwithyourhead.com/famous/

2 years ago
Brand New Winklevoss Paper Portraits

2 years ago

On with Your Head

Posts

March 22, 08:21 AM

Kickstarter Dream Cave

Ovi is up on Kickstarter: Dreamscape Memory Cave

Kickstarter is a crowd-funding platform for creatives to propel their projects and for patrons to secure a nice, shiny piece of the process. Below is perhaps the shiniest piece of the Rainbowlightning’s Dreamscape Memory Cave, an installation environment coming soon to Spaces Gallery, Cleveland. The $35 pledge level awards:

your name and link on the Rainbowlightning Blog
a postcard from the exhibition
admission to a slumber party in the installation
an illustratively embroidered T-Shirt
and a piece of jewelry made from recycled materials

Take a look and see some other slick projects on Kickstarter.

February 18, 06:23 AM

I just purchased the onwithyourtale.com domain. Here is the working logo for it. I am not sure of the text, I had tried to integrate one word into each tail, but they did not fit so well. Also need to decide if the duck tale is working, and the unicorn could be many other creatures, and any of those could still have the horn.

February 17, 11:07 PM

Our collaborative T-Shirt design for The Shivering Timbers. Unfortunately, the text and colors proved too taxing for the embroidery machine, making lots of little holes in the shirts. We’ll be taking another crack at it this weekend.

February 15, 08:13 PM

Ovi’s Plans

Ovi used this map and visual aid to expound a system for courting Groupon and Living Social. She is so helpful and brilliant and clear.

February 11, 01:11 PM

Introduction to a Print-Your-Own Storybook Marketplace

I thought of this publication model in light of four factors:

The general, difficult time traditional publishing houses are having with the market forces of iPads and e-readers.
The tightness of the children’s book industry; how that creates superior books through sheer selectivity, and as-best-as-possible sales through precision of marketing vision

February 01, 08:31 PM

I Will Make More Stories

I am excited to share more and be more the things of my making. I am excited to to be putting more time into this real work. My stories. I will be showing them in polish and imperfection, as often as possible to grow a practice as rigorous as I can muster to push toward creating stories that I soak in and press out, looking at the colored waters and taking new ideas from the findings.

My goals:

to share a new story weekly
to invent visual environments with Ovi
to make children’s books for adults
to share my life. it could be an artist’s life. to make it one worth sharing
to leverage technologies for the presentation of plot and embodiment of character
to blend the visual, textual, and auditory
to write through and develop my notions of certain aspects of Things
to quicken the flow of ideas
to entertain genuinely: to quicken the flow of ideas in others

Bear with me!

February 01, 03:30 AM

Egg Up

I recently removed the feeding tube from a venture called called Egg Up. It had a great logo. It took me three years to get here. It was my first business and it did not survive.

It was originally called The Coffee companion and started by my business partner and friend Rick.

My email notification to the great sales reps we had engaged (we called them Incubators) was a thorough presentation of the options I saw and the values that helped me pick one:

Hi everyone,
you each deserve personal phone calls, but I don’t want to interrupt your weekend. I will be calling to thank you in the coming week.

Rick and Kevin and I have decided to stop Egg Up operations. We have come to the conclusion that while the Egghacks might sell with a perfected website, the hacks themselves would only infrequently inspire someone to go out the door and cash in on a relatively minor discount, or trouble a busy person to recall and bother with writing up a code. Thus, the returns for businesses would be slim and constitute a very treacherous beginning of which you three would have borne, as you had already begun to, the brunt of the difficulties.

The coupon system was designed, at root, not to benefit a participating business but to pay for the content and the content distribution method. Prior to that, our pre-website pre-coupon ad-based system was designed for the sellers of the adspace to make money. It is a parasitic relationship that may reflect old media models but cannot likely be the shape of the future. Occurring advances and increasing world openness and competition suggest that honesty, effectiveness, and bottom-up creation methods will define the relevant institutions of the future. We had on our hands a pair of loosely-related services rendered inefficient and confusing by their combination.

I believe that over the course of a few challenging years

Ovi and Mike