During the COVID-19 pandemic, we were home watching the Mandalorian and obviously like everyone else in America, we fell in love with Baby Yoda (he had not been named Grogu yet). Those days the kids were bored out of their minds so we decided on painting as a good way to keep them entertained. They had received oil painting lessons before and both of them were pretty good at it.
I decided to try my hand at it, and figured, “why not paint something that a hardcore Star Wars fan might want to own?” So the idea to paint something featuring Baby Yoda and the Mandalorian came to mind.
I had never painted with oil before, but found that with patience and judgement I could do a fairly decent job at it. I got some reference photos and a few weeks later, my first Star Wars-themed piece was done. I then figured I could sell it on Etsy, and decided to do another one, this time inspired on an iconic scene from Rogue One, probably one of the better Star Wars movies of the last 40 years.
Once I finished it, I set up an Etsy store, priced them somewhat ridiculously around $300 each, and then went about my life.
What I didn’t figure out until much later was that the emails from Etsy were automatically going to spam. A year or so later I was wondering why no one seemed to be interested in the paintings. I logged in and looked at my account…and I had three potential buyers that I never replied to.
At that point I closed the Etsy store and put these in storage. I’m going to give them to a friend’s kid or my nephew if they ever get into Star Wars.