Pocahontas

Nobody’s perfect of course, everyone makes mistakes. And sometimes those mistakes can turn out to be pretty valuable. We’ve all heard about postage stamps that were printed upside down and are now worth a fortune. Or there’s the double eagle gold coin that only has one eagle. It’s worth a thousand times the face value! They’re quirky and different and rare and become valuable for that reason alone. It’s an interesting state of affairs when your mistakes are worth more than the things you do right! But that’s the way it goes sometimes.

I don’t really know if it’s that way with my work, I’m certainly not in the same category as the U.S. Mint or the Post Office. But I’ve made some mistakes, doozies in fact, that people in the know have been quick to point out. One that comes to mind is the Angel Playing the Flute piece with the flute on the wrong side. Now I knew better, but somehow didn’t catch that in development.  And I was really embarrassed when that nice lady at a signing outside of Cleveland brought it up. Another was a Beagle design I did a few years back, with a dark tail. Apparently all Beagles have white tips on their tails. Who knew? Now I’d like to cover myself and say I did all this intentionally to increase the value of these pieces. But they were just silly mistakes!

More recently I made a mistake on my new Pocahontas design. Everybody knows (at least everybody but me) that her tattoo is on her right arm. But as you can see here I’ve drawn it on her left! Lucky for me a lot of people pointed out my error when I posted her on Facebook. So this will be corrected long before she goes into production. Or maybe I’ll make just a few with it on her left, my version of the upside down postage stamp. It might be worth a fortune! Or not…

God Bless,

Jim