we need to talk...

Hi guys, it's TJB. There's been some significant updates that we need to chat about. This is going to be an interesting video because this is actually happening in real time. So this is current day. I'm filming this on a Tuesday. I have the rest of the day to edit and then it will be released tomorrow on Wednesday. YouTube is a little chaotic that way sometimes because I feel like the uploads are a little bit scattered. Like I definitely am posting content from a long time ago recently, to everywhere in between. All my posts are scheduled, generally speaking, and I don't always have the capacity to edit in real time, but this one I feel like needs to come out now for a variety of reasons. I don't want to bring negative energy to this channel in any way, but I've been struggling a little bit. There's been some developments recently in terms of my actual business that are... Making it difficult to continue the studio. If you don't already know or you're not already aware, there has been a lot of changes between the way Canada and U.S. are working together in trade. Prior to everything that's happened over the last several months, shipping to the U.S. was no problem. Majority of my sales are into the U.S. and... That's how I've run my studio. I do rely heavily on the sale of custom artwork, custom models, and a plethora of other items that I was shipping from my in-home studio here in Canada. About a year ago, there was kind of the tariff war that began, and luckily it didn't really affect. Anything that I was doing personally, art was labeled as a 0% tariff. And essentially that was okay for the past, I believe it's been like a year. It's felt like a year. Essentially overnight, the government decided to implement a 50% tariff. And that applies to All Canadian made goods. So therefore all of my artwork, everything I make here in house is now under a 50% tariff. On top of that, there's a bunch of paperwork and different hoops that I have to jump through to be able to send anything. And it's becoming very overwhelming and very difficult to do so. So I've quietly kind of halted shipping. My sticker club is still happening, that's fine and unaffected currently, but I did intend on selling a bunch of unrevealed artwork that I have ready to go and was ready to publish and share and sell to all of you, but obviously I don't feel like I can do that right now. 50% tariff essentially means that anything that I send to the US is an additional 50%. So if I'm selling an item for a hundred dollars. Half of its value is added on top, so it would be an additional $50, making that a total of $150. And so I can either absorb the fee or charge the client the fee. I am not in a place to be able to do that. Absorbing 50% of my income is kind of a tall ask. And additionally, charging you, the customer, 50% more. Also doesn't feel super fair. And the part about this that I really am frustrated by is that living in Canada, I have always paid tax and fees when parcels come into the country. All of those fees, though, are collected and dealt with through the border. Everything that's in relation to this new tariff protocol is on the seller. So I have to find the proper codes. I have to find the proper fee set up. Calculate it all, charge it all correctly and cross my fingers and hope that they don't flag it when it gets there. It's a chaotic admin mess. And I feel like the last little while of Being a business owner has been very chaotic in that sense, where there's been so many hoops to jump through. It's constantly changing and evolving, and I'm having to troubleshoot all the time. This studio is obviously my biggest dream. It's my life's work, and it's very disappointing to have something out of my control potentially take that away from me. And a lot of us are in the same boat. Perhaps this means I have to put a focus on other things, such as this YouTube channel such as teaching, such as digital content. I've been working on a lot of things behind the scenes that will hopefully do well but there are ways out and I don't like making grandiose promises either. I don't want to promise a bunch of tutorials and then not come through with those in the end. So for that reason I have decided that I am going to set up a YouTube membership page. That's a new program that YouTube is offering and at this time I'm not going to be offering anything additional because I'm already kind of maxed with the workload that I have but potentially that could mean like some specific members only content or live streams or reviews. I'm not exactly sure. For now I'm going to kind of leave it like low tier. I haven't fully set that up yet at the time of filming so by the time you see this it should be live. That is a way to support The studio, if you want to see more art from me, I do have means to still make sculpture and a lot of that was being produced and distributed within the U.S. for the U.S. customers. So that still is an option, but I haven't been sculpting because I was anticipating selling more painted artwork. So that aspect of the business is kind of the one at. Threat at the moment. But that's very unfortunate because I wanted to kind of purge off some of my pieces going forward so that they could be in the hands of other collectors and be on the show circuit. Now, who knows? They might be stuck in Canada forever. We're not going to use those ambiguous terms and we're not going to give you a Debbie Downer about this. Liking these videos, subscribing to this channel is the best way to help me out. Engaging with my content in any way helps me out and sharing it with your friends and all of those things. That's the like best thing that you can do. Additionally, my Patreon is a a huge reason as to why I'm still okay currently and I appreciate you guys so much that are a part of that and I know that that's kind of a separate little community. I'm realizing that that is strictly written tutorial so if you want to know how I paint, how I sculpt, how I'm working on things and you get like everything. You get to know everything behind the scenes and all of that and you're also helping support the studio and I know not everybody can do that. That is a more more benefit to you. In my opinion, because there's lots of really helpful. I haven't spoken about AI anywhere. It makes me honestly just very sad. I just, I feel sad. I think art is such an integral part of humanity and it gives us so much joy and escapism and a reason to exist sometimes for some of us. It's so important to have art in our lives. It just feels like we've lost the plot. Somewhere along the lines, in terms of the Facebook page, a bunch of artists that I really admire are deleting their Facebook pages and converting them to personal pages and not posting any art anywhere on Facebook. If I could never log into Facebook again, that would be my ideal universe. But I understand that. A lot of my following is also on that platform, just as much as Instagram, just as much as TikTok, just as much as YouTube. So I am on the internet, whether I like it or not. I don't know that I have the means to completely delete my social media platforms and retain a business that I can sustain. I genuinely don't know if that's possible. The only thing that I can say about that, I haven't made a decision. I don't know what I'm going to do. Definitely follow my mailing list. Yes, just... www.djb.com slash news and that's kind of where everyone's going is towards mailing lists. We're kind of reverting to those old ways like pre-technology ways with emails and physical products and people are kind of realizing like even 3D sculpting and 3D printing isn't the way and we should be going back to clay and like making tangible art and I genuinely do feel Like as crappy as this is and as sucky as this has been and depressing and all of the things to like get us down in the pits. I do feel like there's a silver lining here and I think the silver lining is that tangible handmade art is going to become more and more popular. Hopefully we can still ship that art. I don't think art is going anywhere, and I don't believe that we're going to wipe out all artists just because a computer can create imagery and graphics. I genuinely don't. Human-made art is something that will always be around, and it is something that is so integral to our civilization and is important to so many of us. And so the fact that you are sitting here watching this video, that is proof of that, and that means so, so much to me and to artists everywhere. Follow as many artists as you can, support their content in the ways that you can because we are fighting an uphill battle out here and I'm thankful that the art that I do is very physical. That being said, I want to give a unsponsored, unrelated shout out to something that I think is very imperative to this current time of life and very important. I want to like just talk about it because I think it's so incredible. I had the privilege of attending the not premiere, but the day after the premiere of Laika Studios. Wildwood. I have no affiliation with the studio. I have no connection. I watch a lot of YouTube content. So I've been watching a bunch of behind the scenes about this movie and I need you to go to that movie and buy a ticket. Genuinely. It was a very interesting movie. It's very intense. It Definitely was doing what it felt it needed to do. It did not hold back. Laika Studios has been around for many years now, and they are most known for their movie Coraline. That is notoriously one of the best stop-motion films that has existed. So Laika has mastered this, and they now make these extreme puppets with articulation and different faces. The mastery behind it is insane. I don't even fully understand. Genuinely watched this movie, and all I could think was, how in the world did they do that? Like, I spent more time trying to decipher how in the world they made that work with puppets. With handmade puppets. It's still, like, it's baffling. It's absolutely mind-blowing. And so in the modern age of 3D printing, they now have the capability to do so much more. And the beauty behind this studio is that they put... An emphasis on human-made art and creation, and they deliver. The stories are unique, one-of-a-kind stories. They're not spinoffs. They're not sequels. They are completely their own thing. Additionally, all of the puppetry, all of the design, all of the painting, there's obviously slight visual effects in some of the shots, but for the most part, they do They built these sets and for Wildwood it takes place in a forest which has so many trees, vines, leaves, like hundreds of thousands of details in each of these shots. The forest has to be grand and massive for a puppet that's About yay big, like the size of a briar. You just have to see it. You just have to see it to believe it. And you won't believe it. And like some of the shots and scenes within that movie definitely take stop motion to a place that it has never been before. That movie was definitely heavily marketed as A stop-motion film, originally, and that's kind of where I saw it and heard about it. I think some people went into it knowing that it was a puppet movie, but I don't know that everybody does. And it was the entire two-hour feature-length film, this credit sequence that was absolutely beautiful, at the end of the credit sequence, which, like, how many people actually sit through the credits? Only, like, movie nerds. Like I like to watch the credits, but my family would be like, let's go. The fact that they like put at the very end of the credits, this film was handmade in Portland, Oregon. And then they put a little behind the scenes of like the people drawing the character, digitizing the character, sculpting the character, printing the character, crafting the clothes, putting it on a rig and then animating it in this set. Like they put that at the end of the film. If that doesn't say something about artists that care about their craft, I don't know what does. Because that should be at the very forefront of this film, in my opinion. And a lot of the marketing was, but the actual film, they saved it to the end. I also noticed that none of the credits are at the beginning. There's no acknowledgement to any of the people. It's all at the end. So they are genuinely letting the art speak for itself. And you can tell that this was just infused with passion. And like human. made creativity. Genuinely. I told my mom the other day, I feel like we're in an AI tornado. In this AI tornado, if you can do anything, buy a ticket and go to that movie. Because that is as anti-AI and as pro-art as you can be. And I'm so excited that something like that exists. And apparently it took 16 years to make it. It cost a lot of money. They're probably not going to make back the money that they put into it. But I think we need to like let them know that that we care. Looping back around to DJB Studios. I did release something a couple months back that hasn't been doing super well and I do want to mention it in this video because I do think that it could appeal to some of you guys and I think you may have just not have heard about it because I haven't done correct marketing for it. At the beginning of the year I did teach a couple of courses on painting Appaloosa. Prior to that I did teach at Briarfest in person twice in a row painting course and I kind of have curated it now into a online video course. And essentially you work through the course at your own pace, but it gives you exactly the color recipes, exactly the tools that I use and the exact process of how to achieve the Appaloosa pattern. If you want to paint that like hair texture growth looking style, this course is available to you. I released it in an email a couple months ago. I haven't really pushed it since, but it does exist. I need to talk about it a little bit more because that also supports So anything that I'm offering you... But I'd like to bring more of that kind of to you guys. And hopefully maybe that's a way to potentially fund the studio. I'm not exactly sure. I did want to like relaunch some like live in-person sessions. And those were good because you're getting actual live feedback as you're working through the videos. So you're not so on your own. Those have been a little bit difficult to schedule just with my own personal life and then everybody else's life. Kind of pre all of this, I did make the decision that I... Want to attend Briarfest 2027. Hopefully that is still a go because I really do want to attend again. And this year is looking really exciting in terms of the theme and everything. And there is a strong possibility that my mom will also be able to attend. I don't cross my fingers too much anymore because life can change suddenly and quickly. So it's very hard to plan this far in advance for me personally. But I do intend on participating. I almost forgot the biggest positive of them all. I can't believe I forgot this. I have a Breyer. What? Okay. Yes. The world just learned a couple weeks back that I have my very first production line Breyer. So last summer you may remember that I did an auction model. So this was a one-of-a-kind intricately designed model for the Briarfest live auction and he sold for $9,500 that was donated to charity. Super cool opportunity like I was like thrilled to be able to work for Breyer on like not just like video content but like actual production design and like coat pattern design Which is like something I'm figuring. Very passionate about. Very, very cool. Very, very fun. Unfortunately, I didn't get to like attend in person last year to see that all unfold. I had people like send me clips and videos and I watched it on the live stream and that was very, very cool and very gratifying. So now we are October and my first Breyer came out. This is... Kind of the biggest deal. So essentially, Breyer asked me to paint for their Premier Club line in 2027. Crazy, I know. I can't believe it myself. It was such a unique experience to work for Breyer. So this is Fresco. Fresco is a Western Pleasure Arabian Cross type horse. And he is painted to this Bay Tobiano color. I really, really tried to design the... color to fit manufacturing restraints. So like I was studying a briar and like picking the coat color to make sure that like it would turn out good. And I'm very, very Very curious to see what it turns out as. So all of the pictures on the Breyer site are actually the painted prototype that I did. So that is my actual paintwork. It's a little bit different than my normal style because I have to dumb it down for the factory and it has to be like airbrushed and stuff. I'm very curious how the masking in the hair goes. I really wanted it to be masked and not like the faded shade. Hopefully that turns out good. But the Bay Pinto is like very sentimental to myself Because my very first custom at DG DG Studios in 2017 was a little bay pinto stablemate. this is like an homage to that because like what? it was almost 10 years but i made it guys. i made it. like mom i made it. and so fresco was born and that's really cool because the name fresco is kind of like means like Paint, but also my like very first resin sculpture was an F name. That was Fable. So I am very, very, very excited and very thankful and privileged for this opportunity. Like I genuinely cannot believe it. I did not sculpt this either. So some people could get confused by that and being like, oh, it's DJ B's Breyer. It's not my full Breyer. I didn't sculpt it. The sculpt is done by Raven Maddock and I did the paint job. Kind of cool that it was like a Canadian collaboration, which Which doesn't happen very often. My next goal obviously is. to sculpt for them. It's going to happen, guys. It's got to happen. And that is the day that DJB Studios will close its doors. That is the day that I have made it and I can retire. If you want a fresco of your own, listen carefully. All of this information is on the Breyer website as well, www.breyerhorses.com. He is part of the Breyer 2027 Premier Club line. So that is a special exclusive line of models that are painted and produced at a little bit higher quality. They are the three new mold releases for the year. So these will be brand new sculptures and they are collaborations or painted by the artist who sculpts them. So there's a plethora of artists that can be a part of the club. We haven't seen any of the other ones yet. The last few years they did post those in advance. Not sure what their plan is this year. I also don't know when Fresco will come out. So there's three releases throughout the year. It's usually around May, August-ish. October? I'm not sure. We should be getting the last one here soon, actually, now that I think of it. They kind of come out sporadically. It really depends on the production. So you need to be a part of the... collector club which is like that club has like varying tiers of like how many perks you get so the collector club and then you have to pay a deposit into the premier club so that's a hundred dollar deposit you need to do that before december 31st to get into the club then within 2027 you're going to have three releases those releases are going to be the cost of the model so they like deduct the deposit off of each model and the models Vary from 195 to 215 US dollars. Three times throughout the year, you have to buy all three of them. If you don't buy them, you're kicked out of the club. So you can't just get fresco and be done. You have to get all three. If you want to get a fresco, that's how you get him. Or you can find him secondhand. That's also an option. But that is very, very exciting that I'm able to give you a DJB Studios art piece in this way. So maybe like if I can never ship anything again with the tariff situation, then you guys can just have Briar paint jobs from now on. Hear me out, Briar. Send them emails. Let them know. And to be fair, it's not like I can't ever, ever ship. It's obviously there's just like a lot of loopholes and a lot of people have paused their businesses because it's just so complicated. But yeah, I totally forgot about Fresco. How do I forget about that? So it's not all sadness and blues for sure. It's definitely, there's been like a lot going on. So this was a well needed update and I'm curious to see what you have to say in the comments below. So I don't want this to be the end of DJB Studios. I don't know. Just need to pivot a little bit, I think. I wouldn't be here without any of you. And truly, I think that YouTube is like a big component of my studio. So I just wanted to let you know what was happening and let you know that I am still here and I hope to still continue to be here. And I don't want to let this go just yet. And I want to find a way to work through this because now more than ever. Art is so, so important to so many of us. Thank you for liking and subscribing and following and commenting and engaging with anything and everything. That means the world. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you guys in the next one. Bye.