So I had that “fountain pens are neat; let me try a bunch!” phase a few months ago.

Pilot Plumix light blue body, medium flat italic nib

I think, for the most part, I’ve decided that they aren’t for me, but I still made a few nice discoveries. One of the pens I tried and liked a fair bit was the Pilot Plumix with medium flat italic nib. Since I figured out pretty fast that most fountain pens weren’t very conducive to drawing, I wanted to try a pen with a calligraphy nib so there would a more obvious performance difference from the other writing pens I have.

Pilot Plumix, initial test.

Above is the initial page I did back in…September or October. My first impressions of the pen were good, and my biggest complaint was the fact that the cap had to be screwed off. This wastes me precious seconds any time I want to use the pen and I found it kind of maddening. I had an incident, too, where I screwed the cap on too tight and had to use pliers to unscrew it again because I’m a weakling. On the bright side, despite the weird screw cap and the oddly shaped body, the cap still posts nicely on the end of the pen. The pen itself is also very comfortable. I’ve had issues with pen grips and such in the past that were intended to be ergonomic, but the Pilot Plumix naturally encourages an ergonomic grip and didn’t bother me at all.

I used the pen on and off for a few months. The skipping gets worse with irregular use, and the nib is a bit finicky on grainier paper surfaces. Writing with the thin edge of the nib cuts into the paper, and if the paper grain is too textured or rough, then the nib will slice into it instead of across it, getting paper between the tines. Writing on anything other than a flat surface also increases the chance of issues.

Black ink test.

When I used up the initial cartridge, I refilled it with a black ink. A thing I learned about fountain pens is that you should definitely wash out and clean your nibs, at the very least, every time you change the cartridge. Failure to do so clogs up the nib, causes serious ink flow issues, and increases the frequency of skips. If I’d cleaned the nib before using the pen again after a break, I would have probably had fewer skipping issues between uses.

Then again, another cause of line skips could be just that I’m not very heavy handed. I don’t like to press hard on my pens, and pressing too hard will increase the chances of tearing paper, but pressing too lightly increases line skips because some strokes may not actually make long enough contact with the paper, depending on how fast I’m writing, and how I’m writing (more skips in cursive than print).

The Pilot Plumix takes standard Pilot pen refills, which are not waterproof, but mostly alcohol-proof. For the above, I just spritzed water on the writing and it immediately pooled into a puddle of ink, which I dabbed off with a tissue. Note that even though I’ve got black ink in the pen now, it’s still blue under water. The reddish color is Copic marker, and you can see that the “triumph” ran a little, as that ink was a bit fresher than the lines up top. So if you’re using alcohol-based markers with Pilot pens, make sure you give the ink time to dry.

The Plumix is also compatible with the Pilot ink converter, but I don’t own one to test with. Ink quality matters a lot less to me for pens that are mostly for writing anyway.

It’s not impossible to sketch with this pen, but it feels pretty weird! And it’s a bit difficult since I like to sketch with my sketckbook at an angle.

I wish that the Plumix had options had larger italic nibs — I want that slant to be big and obvious! But the medium slant is nice and subtle for everyday use, so your writing isn’t too fancy, I suppose. It’s already a bit weird to write mundane to do lists with a nice pen, and for $7.25 especially, the Plumix is a really nice pen with a really nice nib.

Idly, I wonder how the Plumix’s nib holds up to the Pilot Prera’s nib? They’re both medium italic nibs, and both of the pens are cartridge and converter-compatible, so is the 800% price increase between the Plumix and the Prera just for the body fanciness and materials? Yeah, the Plumix is all cheap plastic, but it still feels nice, and if they write about the same, well…. In any case, I’m curious, but not that curious. ;)

For the most part, fountain pens seem more geared towards pen aficionados and calligraphers than artists that draw a lot of figures. Notably, almost none of the fountain pens I’ve played with have demonstrated much line width variation, which I think is one of the most important things artists look for in non-tech pens.

Pilot Penmanship, extra fine nib

So I’ve been using all of my fountain pens to write to-do lists, more or less. The exception is the Pilot Penmanship, which I will sketch with occasionally…because it writes like a fine point gel ink pen. Neat!

Pilot Penmanship initial test page.

The Penmanship’s body is pretty similar to the Plumix’s: nice clear plastic, very comfortable ergonomic grip, and weird twisty screw cap. I still don’t like the screw cap. It slows me down and annoys me enough that I don’t re-cap the pen every time I set it down, which means I end up losing the cap a lot… the cap does have little plastic nubs on its sides to prevent it from rolling off tables, but especially because mine is a clear cap, I forget where I set it down and I knock it off the desk and then who knows where it goes from there.

The pen writes wonderfully for the most part. I didn’t have any ink flow issues at first, but again, like the Plumix, you have to clean out the nib every time you replace the ink cartridge or it will start clogging weird. Even before I swapped out the ink though, I started having a small problem where ink would collect at the nib’s breather hole, which inevitably stained my fingers and sometimes led to smudges. It’s been a little better since I cleaned out the nib, but yeah.

Doodles with the Penmanship. Lines! So thin!

One of the things I really like about the Penmanship is that you can push on the nib to write in addition to pulling on it, as long as you aren’t too heavy-handed. The nib is very sharp, so too much pressure will tear and scratch paper in either direction, but this is the first nib pen of any sort where I could really push on the nib to write and not have an issue. (I vaguely recall the Tachikawa G nib having this ability to a lesser extent, but it’s been a while…)

Pilot Penmanship VS Hi-Tech-C. Blue is watercolor; orange is Copic marker.

The Penmanship writes a tad thinner than a 0.4 mm Hi-Tec-C, so I think it’s safe to say it’s probably around 0.3mm, which is damn fine for a fountain pen. Since it also takes standard Pilot refill inks, it isn’t waterproof by default, but it’s compatible with the Pilot converter, so you can use whatever ink you want. Pilot standard inks are alcohol-proof, but make sure you let the ink dry a few minutes first. (The same goes for the Hi-Tec-C, I guess!)

To be honest, I don’t actually care much for pens that write thin anymore. Since I don’t do a lot of technical-type drawings, I prefer lines that are more organic and which have variation and weight to them. This is pretty much why I went from using tech pens primarily to using brush pens primarily. I love brush pens. Still, the Pilot Penmanship stands out to me because it’s a fountain pen that has all the “I feel fancy” benefits of a fountain pen, but is still usable to me as an artist, even if thin pens aren’t usually my pen of choice.

It’s also damn cheap for a fountain pen, but Pilot seems to have a good range of cheap fountain pens. I realized recently that almost all my fountain pens are from Pilot:

Cheap fountain pen lineup!

When I was cleaning out the Penmanship between cartridges, I wondered if I could stick one of my G nibs into the feed and have it work. It would be really cool to have a fountain pen with a nib intended for actual drawing, as one of the big deterrents for me and dip pens is that I have to dip them. Precious seconds wasted! Increased risk of drips! Just all around annoying! I doubt the nibs and the fountain pen feed/body are compatible, but I’ll report back if I can actually find my G nibs to test with, haha…

Because it was obviously meant to be, I recently won a Jetpens x Illustration Friday giveaway for six disposable brush pens: two sizes each of Zebra, Kuretake, and Tombow brush pens. I have actually bought and used every single one of these pens before, but I have never had fresh new pens of each type all at the same time, so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to properly compare them all!

Brush pen showdown time.

Zebra actually has a third size of disposable brush pen (super fine), and while the giveaway loot didn’t include it, I just happened to have several brand new pens of this type, so I included it in this comparative review as well.

Initial test page on cardstock. Brand new pens, all of these!

It makes sense that the ink flow in each pen is a little rough fresh out of the packaging, but there’s still a performance difference here. In particular, I was really displeased with the Kuretake extra fine. It was easily the finest tipped pen of the batch, but the tip was hard and scratchy. Even when I wrote slowly, the ink didn’t flow very well, and throughout the duration of the test, I never got rid of the rough, drybrushy feel. I really love drybrushing with my nylon tip brush pens, but on a felt tip, and especially on a felt tip this fine, it seemed kind of wasted.

Other than that, I think the rest of the initial test demonstrates each pen’s range and capabilities pretty well. I put the Zebra super fine at the bottom, apart from the other Zebras, because aside from being a bonus pen for this review, I really wanted to compare it directly with the Tombow Fudenosuke hard. The Tombow hard has been my inking pen of choice for several years now, and when I first played with the three Zebras, I was struck by how similar the super fine was to the Tombow.

And now I can say with confidence that the Zebra super fine is basically the perfect blend of the Tombow Fudenosuke soft and hard brush pens. The Zebra is more flexible and can get a slightly thicker line than the Tombow hard, but it isn’t as bendy or thick as the Tombow soft. I inked almost exclusively with the Zebra super fine at both IKKiCON and Chibi Chibi Con and felt that the performance difference between it and the Tombow hard was pretty negligible… I don’t usually go super thick with lines when I’m inking with felt tip, but it’s nice to know that the Zebra can get a slightly thicker line without compromising control over its thin lines at all!

Brush pen showdown continued!

I tried to get an even better demonstration of each pen’s full line weight capabilities above. I also wrote all the words with the side of the pen instead of the tip (I kinda alternated in that initial page). I didn’t bother running a Copic marker or a watercolor brush over these test pages this time — I already know that all of these pens are both waterproof and alcohol-proof.

Interestingly, the Zebra fine can get a thicker line than the Zebra medium…while still being able to get the thinner line as well. The Kuretake fine is pretty similar to the Tombow soft. Boy, wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow consolidate all these pretty meaningless pen descriptors?

Pen tip comparison. The pens are in the same order as they are in the test sheets, so Zebra medium at top and Zebra super fine at bottom.

As you can see, all these pens are felt tips and most of them are really pretty similar looking. Jetpens actually took some better photos themselves, haha. You see more black on the tips of the Zebra medium and the Kuretake fine, but it’s just that the material at the base of the felt tip is also black instead of clear — that whole black part isn’t inked, which is why the Zebra fine can still manage a thicker line than the Zebra medium.

Honestly, all of these pens perform well (since I didn’t seem to have the scratchy drybrush problem with the last Kuretake extra fine I had, I’m gonna chalk it up to a bad individual pen), and they all cost $2.50 each on Jetpens, so choosing between them is just a matter of personal preference as far as line width and tip flexibility.

Wanted to demonstrate casual hanzi/kanji writing with these pens, even if my handwriting is awful! (Sure hope I didn’t mess up stroke order anywhere ’cause brush pens sure make it obvious!)

The negligible difference between the Tombow hard and the Zebra super fine tie them for me. While the Zebra super fine technically has a wider line weight range, I get sentimental about dumb things and I’ve been using the Tombow hard for a really long time, so they’re even, dammit! The other pens are all swell, but aside from the Kuretake extra fine, they’re all larger, looser, and wider, and I, personally, just don’t want or need my lines to be that big most of the time.

The Kuretake extra fine, meanwhile, draws such a fine line, that unless you draw with the side of the tip, you’re always gonna get that same line…and I don’t like inking with the side of the tip. It’s okay for sketching, maybe, but not for inking. Because of that, the Kuretake extra fine is almost like a tech pen to me, and that totally defeats the purpose!

Brush pensssss.

Kuretake actually makes two other disposable brush pens. They’re called Kuretake Fudegokochi pens, which I find really maddening because they’re still disposable brush pens, but Kuretake having both those and named disposable brush pens kind of implies they aren’t. At $3.50, they’re also a dollar more than “normal” Kuretake disposable brush pens — even though they don’t perform all that differently, I guess the pen bodies are kind of nicer? I had good initial impressions of them, but later found that the ink in the Fudegokochis were wetter than the normal disposables. Because I tend to ink pretty quickly, that meant I ended up smearing the ink a lot, so I never got them again!

There are a few other disposable felt tip brush pens of short-ish length, like the Pilot pocket brush, which comes in both soft and hard. I got the hard a while back, but never got around to reviewing it. It’s fun to write with, but the ink is, again, too wet for me to ink with, so it’s a sketching only pen. Maybe this wetter ink is what causes the price increase? The Pilot pocket brushes are $5/each.

There’s also the Pilot Petit3 mini fude, which is cute and refillable, but I found the brush tips to be really unimpressive for fine lines. I wasn’t really fond of the fatter and shorter pen either, even if it’s kind of normal length with the cap posted. Also, Pilot standard inks are not waterproof.

BRUSH PENS.

Other felt tip brush pens of longer length include the Kuretake #33 and the brush tip side of the Tombow dual brush series. I like those pens for sketching, but while you can get pretty fine lines with them, they’re really hard to control, so I don’t think they’re great for precise ink work. That said, Mad Rupert (who draws the excellent webcomic Sakana) famously inks exclusively with Kuretake #33s.

And there are still a lot of brush pens I haven’t tried, too, like the Zebra Brush Pen FD-303, Platinum Souhitsu Hanekofude, Platinum pocket brush, Uni Mitsubishi double-sided brush pen, and Pilot Fude-Makase, but all of them are more expensive than the ones included in this review, and I kind of doubt they add much new to the mix. (That said, I’d still love to test them out, and if anyone wants to buy me some pens…)

This is the Zebra super fine with a Tombow dual brush for greys.

Somehow I think this turned into less of a comparative review and more of a I LOVE BRUSH PENS EVERYONE GO BUY BRUSH PENS THEY ARE GREAT post.

Oh well!

I finally caved on a proper calligraphy pen.

The Pilot Parallel was the obvious choice. Like many of Pilot’s beginner fountain pens, the Parallel is very affordable, though this is one instance where it’s actually cheaper at Blick than at Jetpens. It’s $8 at the former and $12 at the latter, which is a pretty significant jump. There are four sizes available, the 1.5mm, 2.4mm, 3.8mm, and the gigantic 6.0mm, and each pen comes with two ink cartridges, a “converter” cleaner, a nib cleaning thingamajig, and a nice information sheet about the pen and calligraphy in general.

Pilot Parallel 3.8mm (photo by Jetpens).

I went for the 3.8mm partially because, after using the Pilot Plumix, I wanted a pen that was really obviously intended for calligraphy purposes. None of this medium italic nib that can still be used for normal writing stuff! I want a big nib! But 6.0mm seemed monstrous, so I went a size down. (The other partial reason is that the 3.8mm is the green one, and green is my favourite color.)

Getting a proper calligraphy pen was a plunge off the deep end though, lemme tell ya what. (omg, this review is 1500+ words long. How. WHY.)

Help. I’m drowning in random pages of calligraphy.

I’ve basically not set the pen down since I got it.

I went through five ink cartridges the first week. Five! A little over two weeks later, I’ve lost track of the refills, but I’ve filled up an entire 40 page sketchbook and have a huge stack of loose sheets all filled with nothing but calligraphy doodles.

One side of the two-sided info sheet.

I’m a complete newb at calligraphy, but I think one of the reasons I went completely nuts with this pen is because the included info sheet is actually really, really useful. It describes the pen’s various features, including the ability to gradate inks if you’ve got two pens, but the two-sided sheet also includes everything you need in a crash course for calligraphy.

In particular, stroke-by-stroke references for how to form letters in italic, Roman, and Gothic styles were fantastic to have. I was surprised at how easy and intuitive it was to form some of the letters, so off I went on a crazy calligraphic rampage.

My pen, some letters, and one of many empty ink cartridges.

For the most part, the pen performs perfectly.

The ink flows very generously, ensuring very saturated and rich letters when you’re writing with the whole nib. It’s a lot rougher though, when you’re doing small, thin, decorative strokes with the corner of the nib. In those instances, the Parallel is pretty random about when it wants to drop ink, and there were a lot of times where I was scratching up my paper for a while trying to add decorative doodads to my letters before the ink finally flowed again. The effect is kind of charming when you’re straight-up doing letters with the nib corner, but for decorative marks, it’s pretty frustrating.

The nib of the pen is two parallel plates squished together with ink flowing between them, hence the pen’s name. I don’t know anything about calligraphy nibs, but I do think that this design helps minimize ink splotches. The Parallel is well-marked with the size — it’s on the end of the cap and on…whatever that part is called that’s between the nib and the cartridge. Most of the pen body is grey, but there’s a small demonstrator section where you can see the bottom third of the ink cartridge. Helpful, though to be honest I’m really not used to checking ink levels and am usually caught my surprise when I run out of ink. On the other hand, I’ve gone through so many ink cartridges in the Parallel that I can almost guess about when they’ll run out now…

I love this pen so much.

Paper will get caught between the nib plates if you’re rough with the nib and/or using rough paper. I haven’t had too much of an issue since I got the hang of the nib, but if paper does get stuck in there, the nib cleaner thingy the pen comes with is basically a thin piece of plastic that you can wedge in between the nib plates. You’re basically flossing your nib? Super basic, but it gets the job done, and it’s neat that it’s included.

The “converter” cleaner the Parallel comes with is intended to clean the nib but flushing it with water. I put converter in quotes because while that’s what the instructions call it, “converter” is usually understood to mean a means of using different inks with a pen that takes a specific refill cartridge, and that’s not what this thing does. Instead, it’s a sponge thing that you can soak up water with and then squeeze it through the nib? I’m not really sure what the benefit of using it is over just running the whole thing under the faucet, but I haven’t actually used it! Cleaning out the nib between ink refills is useful if you’re changing ink colors and don’t want them to mix, but if you do want them to mix…

Red to blue-black gradation.

Since I had just one pen, I only got to see ink gradation when I changed out ink cartridges. The pen came with a black and a red cartridge, and I had a bunch of black-blues on hand. The transition between colors is really nice! I’ve never really been big on color transitions (or colors in general) in my lettering work, but the smoothness of the gradations allowed by the Parallel and the ease by which it’s achieved makes me want to play with it more.

And I think that’s what I like best about this pen. It makes me want to explore by making it so easy for me to do so. Have no idea how to calligraphy? Bam, here’s a guide! How do form letters? Bam, here’s a stroke-by-stroke reference! Colors?? Bam, you just have to swap out your inks.  So easy! It’s the perfect beginner’s pen.

Naturally, I bought a second one at the first opportunity.

Pilot Parallels & Plumix comparison. Test strokes are the full width of the nib, the thin length of the nib, and the corner of the nib.

I went with the 2.4mm pen next, and I think these might be the only two I need, actually.

3.8mm was a good starting pen for me because it made obvious the angles of my strokes and the way I was forming my letters. It was the big, obvious calligraphy pen I wanted. It did definitely get hard fitting things on pages sometimes because of the size though, so I went the size down for my second pen. The 2.4mm is still obviously a calligraphy pen, but it’s not as in-your-face as the 3.8mm. Especially now that I’ve gotten some mileage in with my 3.8mm, I’m more familiar with how letter shapes are formed, etc, so even if certain shapes aren’t as obvious with the 2.4mm, I still know they’re there, if that makes sense.

I threw in the Pilot Plumix for comparison. I don’t know the actual size of the nib, but I’ll guess around 1.0mm? Now that I know how to make letters in certain styles, the italic nib is a bit more interesting, but it still frustrates me that the resulting lettering isn’t as obvious. That’s why I probably don’t need the 1.5mm Pilot Parallel. If I’m gonna do calligraphy, I want it to be obvious! And if I’m just gonna write todo lists, then I don’t need fancy. The Plumix is a good pen, but it’s kind of in a frustrating in-between spot.

As for the 6.0mm Pilot Parallel…well, I don’t really like to work big, so that seems pretty pretty unnecessary, haha.

Incomplete pink to blue-black gradation.

Now that I have two pens though, I can do gradation the way it was intended! And that’s by vertically holding one pen’s nib against the other’s, haha. Very basic! The ink flows down from the first pen and into the nib of the second, so when you write with that second pen, it starts off with the other pen’s ink color, then gradually goes back to its original color.

The Blick store only had pink ink in stock when I went, so unfortunately pink to blue-black (and vice versa) gradations is all I can do for a while. I think the gradation is a lot less smooth done this nib-to-nib way, but it’s a helluva lot easier to do (and less messy) than swapping ink cartridges. It could also just be the paper I was using for this test though, which is a cheap scratchpad I have. The rate of gradation seems like it’ll be a hard thing to control, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to figure out a workable correlation between the number of seconds I hold the nibs together and how quickly the inks gradate.

Once I get some different colored inks, I also want to play with subtler gradations like between green and blue or something…and maybe three-way gradations? Shoot, I’d need to get another pen to do that… Maybe I’ll pick up the 6.0mm Parallel after all…

YOU SEE HOW THIS WAS A PLUNGE OFF THE DEEP END?

 tl;dr: This is a great intro-to-calligraphy pen. It makes you really want to explore both the many capabilities of the pen and calligraphy as an art. I love this pen a lot.

Easter came late this year, so Sakura-Con was April 18th-20th here in Seattle.

I was actually waitlisted for a table, but thankfully Tori managed to snag one and offered to share it with me. I’m really grateful because it would have really sucked to miss out on what is now my “home” con, and it was especially generous of her to offer to share since I have (more than?) twice as much stuff as she does, and we both knew I’d end up taking up a majority of the table…

Fake Lemonade Stand @ Sakura-Con 2014.

This report is 6,261 words long.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Overall.

THURSDAY

Helping Kara out at Emerald City Comic Con this year gave me the idea of building PVC wings/arms on the sides of the table starting from way higher up than I usually do. It’s been a while now since I’ve been able to hang up all of my prints at the table, but I’d been kind of inconsistent and lazy about building up the side wings. But since I was sharing a table this con, having the extra hanging space that the taller wings provided would really help. I wasn’t sure how the surface of the table was going to be arranged, because I wasn’t sure how Tori was going to have her button display arranged (she’d made a few dozen more designs since I last saw her at IKKiCON…), so I was focusing on the vertical, especially since I knew Tori didn’t have very many prints.

I picked up some more PVC pipes Thursday morning and went home to cut up the 10′ pipes into more usable pieces before heading out around 11am to Westlake Station to meet Tori, who was flying in now that she doesn’t live in Washington anymore. Setup in the Exhibits Hall didn’t officially start until noon, but while we were sure they’d have let us in anyway, we took our time getting lunch instead. Setup ran until 6pm, so there wasn’t a huge rush, even though there was plenty we needed to do in that time.

I think I take a photo of this particular Lacus every year?? But there are never any SEED cosplayers, so I’ll take what I can get! ;__;

As with previous years, check-in for Artist Alley was very painless, though we checked in at the control booth that was inside the Exhibits Hall, rather than the one that’s usually out on the skybridge. Because all of the things we were going to use to set up the table are mine, we just dumped Tori’s stuff at the table before heading back to my apartment.

Since Sakura-Con provides 8′ tables, since I still wasn’t sure how we were going to set up the table, and since I was so close by and didn’t need to worry about a weight limit flying, I wasn’t at all conservative about what I packed, which meant that one of my suitcases was probably 100 lbs and the other was 50. And I was even leaving behind my entire button stock for Thursday afternoon because I intended to print and punch a few more that night and haul the buttons in separately Friday morning. It was a good thing Tori was there to help me haul the stuff uphill to the convention center. <_<

Rarity.

I had two packages that were supposed to come in by the end of the day Thursday. The first was a big box of business cards, which I realized after I placed the order that I didn’t actually need yet because I found a stash of ~800 cards I forgot I had. This box was there when we arrived at my apartment to grab my stuff. The other box was a prints order, which was really important because I had several new pieces that would be debuting at Sakura-Con. Since both boxes were supposed to be delivered by UPS, I was confused as to why one was there, but not the other. I pulled up the tracking for the prints, and… that particular box would be late because of “a delayed delivery.”

Tracking had my prints stuck in Illinois. I almost always get my packages between noon and 4pm, so those prints definitely weren’t arriving my the end of the day. I was really pissed about it because I didn’t want to get prints from FedEx Office. Their best paper stock isn’t very good, and colors always turn out too dark. And they’re way more expensive. I thought about maybe just getting a few copies so I could at least have them on display, but I held off on making a decision for the time being.

Fake Lemonade Stand @ Sakura-Con 2014

Artist Alley was still very empty when we got back to the convention center. The PVC structure I’d planned worked out better than I thought it would (and used a lot less PVC somehow??). Tori’s button display was massive and sit kind of awkwardly on end though, so she had to play around with it a lot to get to clamp stably to the front of the table. The table was roughly split half and half as far as the table surface went, though I did awkwardly take up some of the hanging space across the top on Tori’s side. Tori doesn’t have any sort of banner, so we decided to keep my Fake Lemonade banner. It’s always been a good way for people to recognize and find me, and it did help that Tori was next to me last year too, albeit at a separate table.

The inside part of the PVC wing on Tori’s side was made useless because of the way her buttons were displayed, and the outside part of my PVC wing was blocked by the table next to ours (which was Xib and his friend Bryan — a huge coincidence because I don’t think any of us bothered to explicitly request to be near each other, haha). I’ve been trying to phase out bookmarks for the better part of a year, but I still have a handful of them. This was the first con where I just didn’t even bother putting them out anymore, so I didn’t build the larger of my two wooden stands. Instead, I used the space for grab bags and grab eggs, which I always want to do, but never have the space for!

It took me forever to figure out how I was going to display my zipper bags though. Tori had hers hanging kind of above her and on the out-facing side of her PVC wing, but I had prints covering all of my vertical space. In the end, I tied and safety pinned them to a length of string which hung down from the top of my PVC wing. It wasn’t super visible, but I don’t think any one thing on the table is particularly visible because there is so much stuff. There are so many options these days for merchandise that it’s getting a bit hard to focus, I think. I’ve tested and phased out a lot of products over the years, but there’s always new stuff I want to try!

My half of the table top.

Since very few artists were setting up Thursday, we made a quick pass through the Dealer’s side of the Exhibits Hall after we finished at our table. After that, we headed down to the Art Show!

Though basically everyone, including Art Show staff, agrees that Art Show would do better if they weren’t tucked away in a hidden, low-traffic corner on the second floor, they weren’t able to get the show moved this year, and so we were back in that same room. Oh well. Panel space is still really cheap, and staff is still very nice, sympathetic, and incredibly accommodating.

Setup and check-in was easy, though I realized that I forgot to bring two of my pieces and that I needed to install a sawtooth hanger on the back of my canvas piece to be able to hang it. I also realized that I had a lot more space than I thought I did, so I planned to bring in a few older pieces the next morning, along with the stuff I forgot. Technically Art Show setup started at the same time that the Exhibits Hall opened Friday morning, but staff said it was fine for me to come in early, as they’d be around anyway.

This photo is from Friday, after I got everything set up.

It was past six by the time I finished checking in what I could at the Art Show. Tori and I bailed, stopped by Daiso for a few last minute supplies, dropped stuff off at my apartment, then stopped by FedEx near me so I could print some button designs (still no home printer, sigh) before getting delicious Thai dinner. I decided I’d print display copies, and maybe a few extra, of the missing prints at the FedEx at the convention center Friday morning. That way, I didn’t have too much extra to carry to the convention center in the morning.

After we got back to my apartment, I punched some buttons, verified inventory, and did more packing. I’d emptied out the smaller of my two suitcases at the convention center and brought it back to my apartment so I had something to transport my buttons in the next day.

Dealer’s Room setting up Thursday.

FRIDAY

Hi, this is me cosplaying Rin. Also that’s my cat Rin. Yes, my cat’s name is Rin. Shh.

My alarm was set up for 5:45am Friday. It’s a good thing Tori doesn’t mind my need to be up stupidly early so we have the maximum amount of time to do everything. I was cosplaying Rin again, but since I’ve done it a few times now, it doesn’t take me as much time to get the wig on right anymore.

UPS tracking had my delayed prints marked as “out for delivery” as of 4am or something, but I knew there was no way they were getting there before noon, and I wasn’t going to double back to my apartment in the middle of the day after the Exhibits Hall opened, so I still planned to get some prints done at FedEx. It was really frustrating knowing that they’d get there and be ten minutes away from me for all of Friday, but that’s how things go, I guess.

We headed out a little past 7am. Exhibits was supposed to be open for vendors at eight, but they let us in when we got there early anyway. I dropped my buttons off at the table, then realized that I’d left my USB drive with all my print files at home. Having to double back to the apartment put me in a really bad mood, but when I finally got back to the FedEx at the Washington State Convention Center… they informed me that there was a two-hour wait on getting prints.

I was kinda shocked… I’d gotten last minute prints at that FedEx before! And at that time, I had explicitly asked if they were normally very busy on convention weekends. They’d said no, and so I had been feeling pretty confident about my ability to get those last minute prints. A two hour wait would put me right at when the Exhibits Hall opened. No way. I got my inventory sheets printed, went back upstairs to seethe for a while, then decided that I REALLY wanted to at least have display copies, and so I headed out to Office Depot.

Office Depot also had a two-hour wait. Did everyone just forget to make prints this weekend??

It would have been in character of me to kick over some trash cans, and I really wanted to, but.

Good thing it’s kinda hard to kick over these things.

There was some comfort in completely giving up on having those prints Friday though.

I went back to the table to help Tori finalize the setup, filling the gaps I’d left in my print wall for the new stuff. It wasn’t like I didn’t have enough to fill the table. The Exhibits Hall opened at 10am, so around 9:30, I went down to Art Show to finish setting up there. It was a mad rush down there, but I got everything settled there in just enough time to run back upstairs before we opened for the day.

Chiho and Maou-sama. :o

Friday traffic was casual. There was a decent flow of people in the room, through the aisles, but I don’t think all that many people stopped to browse in depth. Sales were very, very slow. As always, everyone expects things Friday to be slow, but there’s an expected level of slow, and there’s a point where you can tell it’s even slower than that. It hadn’t been this slow at Sakura-Con last year, at least. I only had three commissions to do the entire day, and while they were all middle-tier commissions, they didn’t keep me occupied for very long. I had a lot of time to doodle and draw and take pictures of cosplayers.

I was really relieved that Tori’s stuff was getting equal attention to mine though. My prints take up a lot of vertical space, but her gigantic button board was very prominent at the front, and her side of the table opened out to one of the cross aisles, so the coin purses and zipper bags she had on the side of the table were very visible. Her commission information was also displayed more prominently than mine, as it was sitting on the table itself instead of hanging above, so she was actually getting way more commission work than me!

Jack and Sandy! This is only the second Sandman cosplayer I’ve ever seen?

There were bouts of confusion here and there when people realized that both of us took commissions and when they realized they couldn’t mix and match buttons between the two of us, but no one minded. Our stuff is priced fairly similarly, so cost wasn’t driving anyone from one side of the table to the other, and our styles, while both obviously anime-influenced, are different enough that people seemed able to tell us apart easily. We also weren’t competing much in terms of fandom, which was really convenient, but also kind of funny ’cause we are in a lot of the same fandoms!

Sometimes people would approach me about buying buttons from Tori’s side when she was occupied with another customer, working on commissions, or punching buttons at the table, but I didn’t mind since most of the time, I didn’t have anything better to do. Might as well help! Since Tori has like three hundred button designs now and since she flew in, she was punching her buttons on-demand at the table. This was mostly fine…though at some point someone bought all ~50 of her MLP buttons, so she was busy punching buttons a while, haha. Our buttons and button punches are different sizes (1.25″ VS 1.5″), otherwise I’d  have helped with that too! XD

Mirai and Akihito!

Things didn’t really pick up at any point during the day, unfortunately. Tori had been busier than me all day, but this was half because of the button punching, and she agreed that things were definitely much slower compared to last year. As we were packing up for the day, I chatted briefly with a few other artists. Everyone was agreement: this was slow, even for a Friday.

After Exhibits closed at 6pm, we circled through maybe a third of the Artist Alley to browse before heading down to the Art Show to check stuff out. I also confirmed that things were going about as expected (slowish traffic all day, no bids on my stuff).

I talked to the Art Show head, Jeff, about the Art Show print shop though, and he encouraged me to bring in some prints the next day since they had room, and since I had given them a lot of suggestions last year (a few of which were implemented, such as a place to indicate open VS limited edition for prints in the show). I agreed, ’cause why not. I’d had prints in the Art Show the first year I did it in 2012, but I didn’t bother with them last year since very few sold in 2012. Art Show is so cheap overall though, that it really couldn’t have hurt even if Jeff hadn’t offered me the space for free.

One of the few commissions I did Friday. Interestingly, this had nothing to do with Twitch Plays Pokemon.

Tori and I got Chinese got dinner, then went back to the apartment to play with cats and run numbers.

Friday this year at Sakura-Con was down almost 50% from last year. I was too tired and stressed out to think too much about it that night though. On the up side, UPS did deliver my prints sometime during the day, so I would finally have the new stuff available for Saturday. A small victory. I also got Tori to watch two episodes of Mushishi before we went to bed, so that made me feel a lot better too.

Some sketch card examples I doodled while bored at the table.

SATURDAY

We slept in a teeny bit and got up around 7:15am Saturday (okay, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t actually count as sleeping in at all). Since my wig didn’t bother me very much Friday, I decided to go ahead and cosplay again, this time as thug gambler!Rin, because I have all of those clothes in the closet anyway. Doing an alternate costume would make me way less recognizable, but I’m 100% okay with that! Tori said that someone would probably mistake me for Grell (despite the fact that Grell has butt-length hair…?).

It was a pain carrying a 18 pound box of prints up to the convention center.  At the table, I took down a few prints from the display to make room for the new stuff. I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to take down, but that’s always how it is. Thankfully, I’ll have an 8′ table all to myself at the next con (ACen!), so hopefully it will be less of an issue there….though the con after (MomoCon) that I’ll be back at a 6′ table. Saaad.

Xerneas gijinka!

I walked through a few of the Alley aisles after finalizing the table for the day, but very few artists were around to chat. Around 9am, I headed down to drop off prints at the Art Show, then beelined to Good Smile Company in the Dealer’s side of the Exhibits Hall to pick up the Snow Miku nendoroid for a friend. (It was really lucky I went when I did, and that I had early access to them because I was a vendor, because they sold out very shortly after we opened for the day.) I’m actually really glad I got sent on such an errand because I probably wouldn’t have realized that Good Smile was even at the con otherwise.

I’ve been whining about the fact that they have yet announced any Free! nendoroids for months. I AM SO FRUSTRATED that Good Smile is making figmas of Free! characters before touching nendos!! Action figures of swimmers aren’t going to be terribly interesting, I’m sorry. There aren’t many action poses you can put them in, and swimmers have pretty damn boring costumes. (And I mean, Haruka’s figma is coming with an apron and a plate of mackerel as props, so they’re obviously not very invested in the sports side of the series either.) Nendoroids make so much more sense? They’re cute and adorable, like virtually all of Free!’s other merchandise? There are so many alternate costumes for these characters, too! Ugh! Why!

There have been a variety of small chibi figure releases by other companies, but adding to the frustration is the fact that so far, the only ones that are even close to a nendoroid in quality are lotto figures…making them hard to get and expensive. There’s another lotto set of figures coming out soon, too, but no word on nendos. Free! is still kind of surprising everyone with its commercial success, but I do not understand how Good Smile hasn’t figured out that making nendos would be like printing money. How can you not see how great this would be. Maybe once the second season kicks off, they’ll figure it out…

ANYWAY, the point of this toy collector tirade was to mention that I got to whine and spazz about lack of Free! nendoroids with the US rep for Good Smile at their booth. She agreed with me and encouraged me to keep whining directly at them so she can report back to base that lots of people want this thing! Make it happen, Good Smile!

The Kinokuniya booth had all of the swimming anime art books I wanted, but I told myself I wasn’t allowed to get them unless I did at least as well as I did last year at Sakura…

Traffic and sales naturally increased Saturday, but not by as much as I would have liked.

Despite inexplicably having single-day passes available last year, Sakura-Con returned to only offering full weekend passes this year, so that probably affected attendance. I understand why they do it, but it really frustrates me because it keeps out the more casual folks who might have enjoyed just dropping in for a day, but don’t have the interest to stick around for three, or even two of the days. And who wants to pay full price when they’re only gonna be there for a short while?

Aiko and Punpun ;___;

On the up side, I was surprised and really, really pleased to see the above cosplayers! I’ve only read Solanin and Oyasumi, Punpun, but Inio Asano might be one of my favourite mangaka anyway. There are a lot of things to like about both those series.

One of the best things that happened Saturday was this commission I got though. Or these eight commissions, I suppose. I spent most of Friday keeping myself busy by drawing a lot of Winter Soldiers, and here and there, people would fantard with me about the movie. Saturday, one of these people returned, appearing suddenly before me to announce: “I need you to draw me Bucky Barnes.” Yes, very good. I like this plan. And specifically? She needed me to draw him with seven different hair styles. Behold:

7x sketch card commissions! Bucky, do you need help with your hair, buddy. The 8th commission was a sketch of Steve reacting.

There was also another amazing commissioner who requested sixteen full color sketch cards. Sixteen! This was easily the most any single person has requested of me at a con, and I could have probably done them at the con if I really tried, but the commissioner made it clear from the start that it was okay for me to take my time.

Since I would be working from text descriptions, I took him up on that and opted to do that entire set after the convention. Working from text is already much harder for a visual person like me, and trying to process words in a meaningful manner while sitting at an artist table is doubly difficult. I didn’t wanna blotch it since it sounded really fun! This was my first time actually taking an after-con commission though, and I didn’t count it towards my totals for the weekend. It seemed like a crazy outlier anyway.

Another Rin-chan-san.

Aside from the big batch of Buckys though, I didn’t have a lot of commissions to do at the convention. I didn’t have all that many at Sakura-Con last year either, and overall, my percentage revenue in commissions has decreased over the last two years (from an average of 32% in 2010-11 to an average of 23% in 2012-13). This isn’t all that surprising since 1) I have a lot more prints and actual merchandise now, and 2) I’ve increased commission prices significantly since 2011. But I’m also better and faster, so it isn’t like the price increases aren’t totally justified. I think I just need to make it more obvious I take commissions. I’m definitely going to take a leaf out of Tori’s book and have my sign on the table at ACen, rather than hanging over my head.

Full page color commission, my only homework for Saturday night because it was commissioned right before closing, ha.

Near the end of the day, a customer buying Tori’s Grell button mistook me for Grell, and thus her prophecy came true. I suppose it isn’t that surprising since, with my display blocking most of me from view, it might been easy to overlook the fact that my hair was really, really short, and yeah, the rest of his outfit is pretty much what I was wearing. I should really get around to reading and watching Kuroshitsuji…

As we packed up, Tori’s friend Bobbi joined us and we headed down to Art Show again.

The prints I’d dropped off at Art Show had been doing well! Having prints of the original pieces I had in the show available at the show was working out great, and Jeff actually had to send a few people up to find me during the day because they wanted to buy prints that were sold out at the show, but which I had more of at my table. And at some point in the mid-afternoon, Jeff himself swung by my table to pick up more prints to bring downstairs. Still no bids on anything I had hanging when we stopped by though.

Afterwards, Bobbi led the way to delicious Italian food, then we all went back to my apartment. Tori and I worked on commissions while Bobbi played with my cats. Cats are a nice thing to come home to. Saturday was down 20% from last year. Not as bad as Friday, but still not great.

Rei-chan~.

SUNDAY

We were up again around 7:15am Sunday morning. I didn’t cosplay because I knew we were going to be hauling a lot of stuff at the end of the day, and that’s bad enough without doing it with a wig on. We actually stopped for coffee and breakfast this time though.

When we got to the convention center, I finally wandered around the rest of the Alley to look at things. As is always the case though, very few people were around, so I couldn’t really say hi to people. I’m bad enough about approaching people who’s work I admire without them not being there 99% of the time I have time to go talk to them, haha. Everyone takes off so fast at the end of the day, and they don’t show up until right at, if not after, we open. I guess everyone else is better at not working too hard. Tori and I did get to chat a fair bit with Lynn (Complex Wish), the artist at the table behind us, though!

A very classy fem!Loki.

Sunday went by at a pretty brisk pace as things finally picked up noticeably, though there no way for it to make up for the sales gap of the previous two days. Commissions took even more of a dive on Sunday, and I only got two very small ones over the course of the day — one of which I kind of stole from Tori, though she said she didn’t mind. <_< It was near the end of the afternoon; Tori was pretty full up and wouldn’t have been able to finish it before the end of the con; the commissioner didn’t seem like they were interested in a mail-in, so I kinda pointed out that I also took commissions and could do it. u_u;

Not much else to really say about Sunday, honestly.

Dude Kyoko.

After Exhibits closed at 4pm, I ran down to Art Show to grab my stuff.

I ended up selling two things in the show — two open edition framed prints. I’d never hung prints in a show before and felt kinda weird about it, but ultimately prints are just more affordable for people. I really like having originals in the show, and people tell me they like seeing them and think my prices for them are perfectly reasonable — it’s just that they can’t afford that, and there’s really not much to be done about it, I suppose. But that’s why having prints at the Art Show print shop worked so well for me.

I spoke to Jeff hurriedly about further improvements for Art Show. He said that they’re going to make a big push to move to change rooms for next year, which is really encouraging. Everyone was busy at closing time though, and I still needed to pack up at the table, so I didn’t stick around for long — I didn’t even get a chance to check my sheets there, so I won’t know how much I actually made until they send me a check. I know I  sold a decent number of prints though, and so this ended up being the first year I actually made money at the Sakura-Con Art Show. Third time’s the charm after all?!

Ryoko!

Packing up took a while. Since I brought in more stuff Friday and Saturday in addition to what I dragged in Thursday, a lot of things didn’t fit in the suitcases. Thankfully, Bobbi and her daughter were around to help Tori and me drag things back to my apartment. Having two extra pairs of hands to hold miscellaneous bags and such while we hauled the big suitcases was really invaluable, and the way home was all downhill, so hallelujah.

I really need to get a suitcase with four wheels. Having to support the weight of the suitcase on my wrist while I drag it is killer, and I felt phantom backpack straps on my shoulders all weekend because I got so used to the weight of my heavyass backpack on me going back and forth from the con. I need to be less abusive to my body. ;/

After I lay down for an hour to pacify my aching back and shoulders, the four of us got delicious Thai food and called it a weekend.

Glorious post-con meal. Bless this soup.

OVERALL

Sakura-Con itself wasn’t bad, and I don’t take issue with much in regards to how the show is run, but sales were a bit disappointing.

After Exhibits closed Sunday and before I ran down to Art Show, I speculated and theorized at length with another artist about why things were so slow compared to last year. We think a big part of it is oversaturation. There are a lot of geek cons in the Seattle area, and as we’re both local, we both attend as many of them as we can. A lot of people here have seen us before. A lot of people here already have our stuff. If most of the people who like and want our stuff already have our stuff, then there’s not much to be done, is there?

The artist I spoke to has more stuff now, and the stuff is so much better, but sales were still down, and I’m very much the same position. We always have new things, sure, but somehow it’s not enough. Plenty of folks will stop by again and look again and tell me they’ve seen me at other cons, but I’m sure there are plenty, too, that will skip my table entirely because they’ve seen it before, even if they like my stuff.

That’s why I really wish Sakura-Con did single-day passes, and why I wish ECCC would reserve a number of day passes for the weekend of instead of allowing themselves to sell out weeks in advance. We need the casual people who didn’t know they were coming to the con until they walked past the convention center. We’ve already sold to everyone else. o_o

Sakura-Con 2014.

Overall, I was down 20% from last year. I made more at IKKiCON, which has less than half the attendance, than I did at Sakura-Con this year. Commissions were also down by about 25%, not including my one big after-con commission. Tori thought I should have included the outlier though, since I wouldn’t have gotten it if I hadn’t been at the con. If I did include it, I would have been basically dead even with last year in terms of gross sales (down 1.4%, seriously) and up 56% in commissions, lol. One commission making up such a significant percentage of sales means those final numbers aren’t a good indicator of the con overall though, which is why I omitted it.

My prints being delayed a day really gave me a bad start to the weekend and stressed me a lot. I’m glad they at least arrived for Saturday and Sunday though, as the new prints I had made up a significant portion of overall, non-commission sales (~40%) while making up a small percentage of overall inventory. This goes right in line with the “oversaturation” theory.

The most impressive Mikasa.

Most other aspects of the show went well though.

I’m always really worried about sharing a table since I have so much stuff, but I’m honestly really pleased at how well sharing with Tori went. We didn’t get in each other’s way, and we didn’t have a lot of competing items, so I really don’t think my sharing a table contributed at all to the drop in sales. It would have been about the same if I’d had the table to myself.

I was also happy with the overall stability of my PVC setup. Tori’s side did have a loose pipe at some point, since she had was backing her coin purses with some pretty heavy cloth, but we fixed it without much trouble. I’m pretty excited about reusing the setup while flying solo at ACen (though Tori will be at the table next to me!).

One thing I forgot to mention earlier was that the PVC was built up to 5′ from the table surface. You might recall that Sakura-Con has/had a 4′ height limit on Artist Alley tables and I think this makes no sense whatsoever because Dealers have no such height limit and we’re in the exact same space. The fire marshal does come every year to check displays, but stability and safety aren’t wholly dependent on height, and every year we see plenty of tables that are set up past the 4′ limit. Last year I tried to bring it up with staff after the con, but I never got a response. The 4′ limit is still mentioned on their website, but yeah this year we built to 5′ and no one cared. u_u;

Table height nonsense aside though, my interactions with staff was agreeable for the most part. I had some weird questions about my tableshare issue with Tori in December, and those emails were responded to in a pretty timely manner. I know some other folks had some issues communicating with staff and/or having staff sending them necessary information in a timely manner, but it sounds like hearsay when it isn’t my story.

Merida and Astrid.

And as far as Art Show goes, I’ve always been really happy with how receptive staff is to feedback and suggestions, and that hasn’t changed. They’re accommodating and understanding, sympathetic to artist needs — just really great people to work with. I don’t think I made enough in the show this year to make up for my deficits in Artist Alley, but I can’t complain! It was my first time actually making money in Art Show, and I’m pretty excited about doing the show again next year. I’m definitely planning to have a print shop table in the show from the get-go, so hopefully it’ll turn out even better than this year, especially if they do manage to get the show moved to a room with better traffic.

Apparently, Art Show used to be on the fourth floor, but the Blood Drive got moved into the room they used to occupy, so they can’t have it back now. Yes, it’s important for Blood Drive to be in a prominent location too, but… there’s gotta be a better way! Jeff seemed fairly optimistic about their prospects this time, though he was vague on the details, but here’s to hoping!

Here’s another photo from Art Show.

I’ll keep hoping Sakura-Con brings back single-day passes, but other than that, I suppose there’s not much to be done. If new things are going to make up 40% of sales while making up 10% of stock, then the only answer is to make evem more new things!

As always, thanks for reading. Here are the rest of the pictures!

Anime Central took place May 16-18th in Rosemont, Illinois, about half an hour outside of Chicago proper, at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare and the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center.

It was my first time flying out for a convention in a city where I didn’t know anyone, and my first time to Illinois ever, but I was pretty excited about ACen because it’s the third biggest anime con in North America, right after Otakon. Since, for the time being and for various reasons, I have low interest in attending AX, AN, or Fanime, and since Anime Boston is never not going to conflict with another more convenient show ever again, ACen is the only con left on that top ten list I haven’t already done!

The Donald E. Stephens Convention Center.

This report is 8,731 words long.

Thursday, Friday (angela concert), Saturday, Sunday, Overall.

THURSDAY

Tori‘s parting gift before leaving after Sakura-Con was to watch the first two episodes of Yowamushi Pedal — bicycling anime! — with me. In it, the character Sakamichi Onoda regularly bikes 40 km to Akihabara instead of taking the damn train so he can use fare he saves to buy gashapon… I can relate a lot to Onoda because I will drag 140+ pounds of luggage down uneven sidewalks to the lightrail and through the airport instead of taking a damn taxi because do you know how much coffee I can buy with taxi fare? (Nine venti lattes, thanks.)

And so that’s what I was doing at 5:30am Thursday morning. I resigned to having two checked bags for this trip because I had a 8′ table to fill, and since I’d never been to ACen before, I wanted to be sure I had enough stuff. The first bag weighed in at 49.0 lbs and the second at 54.3 lbs. I tried to repack the second bag to meet the limit, but everything in that suitcase was hard and rigid and it was basically impossible. Fortunately, the attendant felt sorry for me and just let it go at 51.8 lbs without charging me overweight fees. D;

Sakamichi Onoda! The only Yowapeda cosplayer I saw all con!

My flight delayed boarding an hour for the wonderful reason of “too many planes flying into Chicago O’Hare,” so I got breakfast at the elusive Seatac Chili’s while I waited.

Recently my phone’s battery started having problems with holding a charge and would randomly shut off for no reason, despite having sufficient battery. I’d ordered a new battery, but it didn’t arrive in time for ACen, so I was going to spend the weekend wrestling with the problematic one, which was worsening to the point where I couldn’t use it actively for more than 30 seconds at a time without it shutting off, though it seemed able to stay on stand-by for longer. The phone was only fully usable when plugged in, but for some reason the phone doesn’t like the micro USB connector to my portable external battery, and would only draw power from it if it was held at a particular angle. Maddening.

We were delayed another half hour or so after we finally boarded, but I hadn’t slept the night before, so even though it was one of the most cramped and uncomfortable planes I’d been on in recent memory, I was basically passed out from the moment I sat down in the plane till we landed in Chicago finally.

Exhibit Hall setup.

O’Hare was a crowded mess, but I didn’t have all that much trouble going where I needed to go. My two checked bags and one gate-checked carry-on (because I don’t even wanna try lifting 50+ lb carry-ons into the overhead bins anymore, hahahaha) all got there fine. The shuttle pickup was an annoyingly long distance away from baggage claim and the shuttle to the Hyatt was just pulling away when I got there, but it was only a ten minute wait to the next one. It was a really nice, free, convenient way to get to the hotel.

When we got there, I started in towards the hotel lobby, but I saw a bunch of artists rolling handtrucks full of boxes out of the lobby, so I just turned around and followed them instead. We crossed the street, went through the loading dock of the convention center and straight into the Exhibits Hall. The dock opened right into the space between Artist Alley and Dealer’s Room, so it was easy to figure out where everything was from there. I dumped my luggage off at my table and then headed out the front entrance of the Hall to where Registration was.

The line for Exhibits check-in wasn’t long, but while there were four or five people staffing the booth, it seemed very disorganized. No one seemed very aware of what their colleagues were doing, and they weren’t really helping people in order because one staffer would start to look for person A’s badge while another staffer started to look for person B’s badge, but then they’d converse with and distract each other and then both of them would be looking for person B’s badge and person A would be forgotten for a while. It was really frustrating. Badges must not have been sorted in any logical manner because it took a really long time to find anything…

Artist Alley setup.

Since there weren’t that many people in line, I still got my badge fairly quickly, but I was put off by staff’s disorganization, especially since all of my dealings with ACen’s Exhibits head ahead of the show had gone very smoothly, with questions answered quickly and professionally. It was great that ACen seemed to have plenty of on-site manpower, but not it isn’t actually useful if no one knows how to do their job… <_<

Meanwhile, my hotelmates Amanda (Cinnamoron) and Cari (blix-it)’s flight was being delayed forever (also for the awesome reason of “too many planes trying to fly into O’Hare!!”). I’d gotten to the convention center around 4pm CDT, but they hadn’t even taken off yet. Thursday Exhibits setup supposedly ended at 6pm, so there was no way they were going to make it. :( Tori was driving up from Texas for the con, so she had traffic to contend with once she got into the city, but she wouldn’t be staying with us for Thursday night anyway and probably wouldn’t be setting up until Friday morning.

3″ clamp! Nearly 3″ thick table! Ugh!

It was kind of weird setting up alone — I guess it’s been a while since I have? I was sharing with Tori at Sakura; Xib and I had gone to Chibi Chibi Con together, even though we weren’t tabling anywhere near each other; Jorge had been my helper at IKKiCON; I was splitting a table with Xib at both Jet City and Geek Girl Con, etc.

The tables provided by the convention center were 8′ long, as promised, but they were only about 2′ wide. This felt thinner than usual, but I think the 2’6″ wide tables are the abnormal ones after all? The table themselves were also really unpleasant and gross-looking under the provided blue table covers (which were annoying, because they wrapped all tables in a row together, making it hard to tell where one person’s table ended and another’s began), but the biggest issue I found was the fact that the tables were almost 3″ thick on the edges. The clamps I use to secure the base pieces for my PVC are three inch clamps; this is different from most others that use PVC, and for several minutes I was really terrified that the table was too thick for me to fit the clamps around them. 8|

Thankfully, fury and brute force solved this issue for me and the clamps just baaaarely fit. U_U

Fake Lemonade Stand skeleton.

Since I had nothing to do afterwards, I took my time setting up. Shockingly, having an eight foot table to myself with two nearly full-height PVC wings meant that I…actually had extra vertical space? Since neither Tori, who was on one side of me, nor the other person next to me were there yet, I didn’t bother putting up prints on the out-facing sides of the wings because I didn’t know whether their setups would block it, but even without using that space, I managed to put up basically everything I wanted to! Whoa!

The tabletop and horizontal space was more of an issue since the tables were skinnier than I expected. I adjusted and rearranged stuff a lot. No one kicked us out when setup supposedly closed at 6pm, so ultimately I spent about three hours meticulously setting up, hahaha. AND LOOK! LOOK AT HOW BIG MY WINDOW IS! It hasn’t been this big in years!

Fake Lemonade Stand @ Anime Central 2014.

It was past seven by the time I finished, but it felt much later for some reason. I wasn’t sure of the status of Amanda and Cari’s flight because my phone kept dying, and while Amanda had added my name to the hotel reservation, I didn’t really feel like trekking out to the hotel yet.

So I wandered through the Alley, which was a lot more cramped than it looked on the map — the aisles were pretty narrow and there wasn’t much space between tables. There were only two or three openings per island and most were very, very small. I liked the space in general though — the Dealer’s Room was nearby and was much roomier, and they had Industry booths up front by the entrance.

There weren’t many artists around and very few tables were set up, but I did get to talk shop a bit with Kevin (Yanimator) before we unexpectedly got onto the topic of Yowapeda! That was exciting. I’d marathoned through the series between Sakura-Con and ACen, and as it’s still airing, it was definitely my fandom for the weekend (and probably will be for subsequent weekends until summer season swimming starts again…).

Weird convention center vestibule.

After that, I sat out in the weird, spacious convention center vestibule for twenty minutes or so, charging my phone at a wall outlet and checking up on Twitter. Seemed like everyone flying into O’Hare had been delayed. Boo.

There was a Starbucks in the corner of the empty space, so after my phone was charged most of the way (not that it really mattered), I went over to get their hours for the weekend (very important data, this) and to grab a panini and hot chocolate before heading out to the hotel.

We were staying at the InterContinental two blocks over from the convention center. Check-in went without an issue, thankfully, and I went up to roll around on the hotel beds and press all the buttons in the room. It was a pretty fancy hotel?? They had metal birds sitting on the clothes hanging thingy…and a really, really cute framed picture in the room. Unfortunately, I had zero reception in the hotel, so despite finally having a dedicated wall outlet by which to use my phone, I couldn’t do anything on it. Frustrating!

Fancy metal birds??

When it hit 9pm, I was starting to worry that I would be alone in the hotel for the night and that Amanda and Cari wouldn’t be able to get there until the next day. At half past though, they and a poor bellhop with all of their convention luggage showed up. Finally!

It was a huge relief that they made it, even though they would have to do all their setting up the next day in the two hour setup window we had — 8am to 10am; Exhibits opened to the public at ten. After some brief settling, we went out and walked about ten blocks to Denny’s, which seemed to be one of the nearest options for affordable dining, though we were actually looking for an Italian place when we headed that way. The InterContinental had several restaurants on the ground floor, but all of them were fancy schmancy and overpriced. There was a McDonald’s on the other side of the Hyatt and convention center, but it would have probably been more crowded than the Denny’s anyway.

A 10pm pre-con meal.

FRIDAY

I couldn’t really sleep Thursday night because of some combination of nerves and a completely messed up sleep schedule (we went to bed around midnight, which is 10pm PDT, which is about 8 hours before my normal bedtime…), but we were up at 6:30am and it was a very hectic morning.

Cari and Amanda each had two huge checked bags and one fat carry-on full of con stuff, and they’d also had two large boxes of art show pieces shipped to the hotel. With the three of us, we managed to get all the suitcases down to the lobby in one trip, and the boxes were brought down to us by hotel staff, but it would have definitely been an ordeal trying to transport the boxes to the convention center, even if it was just two blocks away. So we got a taxi van…and even then, everything barely fit!

There was a long attendee registration line snaking around the side of the convention center when we got there, along with a small cluster of artists near the door. It was about 7:30am, and the staff guarding the door weren’t letting exhibitors in until 8am…except they were very inconsistent about this. We saw random people get let in and random others get refused; it depended on who exactly they asked? Eventually, it was clarified that people who already had their badges could go in, but exhibitors who hadn’t been able to pick up their badges Thursday couldn’t go in yet, and Exhibitor badge pick-up wasn’t actually open.

Artist Alley.

When 8am rolled around, they still weren’t letting badgeless exhibitors in, and I was getting antsy and irritated because the main staff person guarding the door seemed to be really confused. Since I did have my badge though, I started to haul in Cari and Amanda’s stuff by myself while they were forced to hang back and wait for staff to figure out whether they were allowed in yet. By the time I returned for the third set of suitcases, badgeless exhibitors had finally been let in to queue up for their badges, so after I finished dropping off all of the suitcases at Cari’s table, I went for a coffee run. The Starbucks wouldn’t stay not-crowded for long!

Since I was pretty much good to go at my own table, I spent most of the morning running around helping Cari and Amanda with theirs. Cari’s table was at the end of same aisle mine was in, but unfortunately, Amanda’s was on the opposite end of the Alley. I went back and forth a bit helping with one thing or another, then got sent on a quest to pickup the paperwork for Art Show so they could check in their pieces…

Art Show was in a corner of the Exhibits Hall. It wasn’t a very attractive corner, and all the panels not facing out towards the rest of the hall were very hidden and made uninviting by the narrow space between the panels. There was one staff person there and they didn’t seem to know what to do when I asked them for paperwork. So we walked out to Exhibits check-in, where there were maybe ten staff people rummaging through badges and getting into each other’s way. There seemed to be one person among this lot who knew what to do about Art Show, but he was busy and couldn’t get to us right away, so me and the Art Show staff guy stood around for a good five minutes not knowing what we were waiting for because Knowledgable Guy seemed to keep forgetting we were there. It was really frustrating.

Eventually, Knowledgable Guy passed us off to another person, who led us back to Art Show and handed me control sheets and art tags that had already been sitting on the table in plain sight. .___. Why was that so hard.

Coffee never lasts long enough.

As it got closer to 10am, there was less I could do for Cari and Amanda, but I was too caffeinated and full of adrenaline to sit down yet, so I kept wandering through the hall. Tori had been at her table since we got there, but didn’t need much help. I went to say hi to a few dealer friends, including Sanshee and Pawstar, then spotted Enduro actually at her Artist Alley table and went over to awkwardly introduce myself. I am, as ever, bad at approaching artists I like, though it helped that we’d spoken on Twitter before. Endy was really nice and I’m glad our convention paths finally crossed! ;___;

Sylveon~.

Staff didn’t announce when doors finally opened, so I was caught a bit off-guard by attendees suddenly being in the room, even though I was already back at my table by then.

Traffic was substantial all morning, but most people were beelining for the Dealer’s Room and snaking through Artist Alley without giving anyone more than a cursory glance. In order to save on weight, I had split my one main binder, which contained all my letter-sized prints, postcards, ACEOs, and original drawings, into two smaller, lighter-weight ones. One had all the prints, and the other had all the ACEOs and originals. Normally, even at smaller cons, I’d get at least a dozen or so people to flip through the entire fat binder just looking at stuff. Friday at ACen, only one person made it through the entirety of the prints binder. No one made it through the entire originals binder. Saaad.

My phone constantly dying kept me in a pretty antsy and irritated mood, in addition to distracting me a lot as I tried to hook it up to my portable battery. I haven’t even had this phone for two years! Smart phones are frustratingly expensive and fragile. Why is a $400+ item not even meant to last longer than two years? Not being able to complain to Twitter frustrated me. Not being able to take pictures of cosplayers frustrated me. Not being able to keep the phone on long enough to run Square really frustrated me.

Eugene and Rapunzel.

Thankfully, I was able to swap to using Tori’s phone for Square. Since she uses Paypal to run her credit cards, we could both be logged into our respective accounts on our respective apps on the same phone, and we’d just swap card readers between uses. I’m so, so grateful that Tori was tabling next to me and willing to let me use for phone for that. ;___; She also let me borrow the phone for photos now and again, but for the most part, I just used it for Square since I didn’t want to inconvenience her further. Most of the photos I managed to take over the weekend I took with my phone plugged into my portable battery and my fingers crossed.

Since it was my first time in Illinois, basically all the cosplayers were new to me. After hitting so many shows in Washington over the last two years, I feel like I’ve seen most of the cosplayers cosplaying characters I like and care about. I probably have photos of all of the Loki cosplayers in the Pacific Northwest, lol. But Illinois! I hadn’t seen these Lokis before! And it was really aggravating that I couldn’t get pictures of most of them! #CONGOERPROBLEMS

Here is one I did get though!

I had a few fun commissions in the morning, including a batch of six of the commissioner’s OCs (because neither of us could decide which one of the six to do — they were all neat looking!), but the afternoon was a long stretch of me fighting with my phone and not having much else to do. I drew bike anime commission examples to keep myself from going crazy, but yeah… traffic slowed as the afternoon wore on, and there were very long stretches between sales.

It was just as well though, since I was planning to take off early that afternoon anyway. One of ACen’s musical guests was angela, which is actually one of my favourite bands, and their only performance was Friday night. The concert was at 7pm, but doors to the Rosemont Ballroom, where the concert was taking place, opened at 6:30pm — which was also when the Exhibits Hall was set to close. For better or worse, I don’t think angela is a very well-known or popular band amongst Western fandom, but I wasn’t sure about how the lines and crowds would be, so I decided to play it safe-ish and started packing up at the table around 5:45pm so I could be out of the Exhibits Hall by 6pm.

Line for angela outside the Rosemont Ballroom.

angela Concert

Since I hadn’t acquainted myself with the rest of the convention space at all, and since the ballroom was in the Hyatt and not the convention center, it took me a good ten minutes to figure out where it was. The line for the concert snaked awkwardly down the middle of a main hallway, but it wasn’t long before they wrapped it back and forth in front of the actual ballroom. It wasn’t a long line at all though — I was probably 50-60 people from the front? It was a fraction of the number of people in front of me when I went to see Stereopony at Sakura-Con in 2012.

Oddly, as with Stereopony and Sakura-Con, there was a group of Japanese fans in front of me. They didn’t seem very fluent in English, so I wondered if they’d really come all the way from Japan to see angela in the US. o_o My phone was dead again, so I didn’t know when exactly they let us into the ballroom, but I was really surprised to see that there was…seating. As a ballroom, the stage they’d set up for the concert was temporary and not very spacious or high up. There were six sections of seats with aisles in between and a couple of feet between the first row and the foot of the stage. I was seated in the middle-left section, about six rows back, and I spent a stupid amount of time trying to get my phone to revive long enough to take a single picture of the stage:

angela concert stage.

The MC was a personable and completely out of character Gendo Ikari cosplayer, which I found funnier than it probably was. He mostly just emphasized that photography and video was not allowed, and the band appeared very shortly afterwards, launching right into “To be with U,” one of the ending themes to K.

If you didn’t already know, I am typically awful with setlists. I hallucinate songs being played all the time and the order of songs is always a hot mess in my head. It doesn’t help that I’m more familiar with angela’s first two albums than their more recent stuff (isn’t that always the case with me?), and it doesn’t help that I don’t actually like/haven’t seen most of the anime they’ve done music for — I just happen to like their music!

I’m still positive they opened with “To be with U” though. I think this lead into “Spiral,” the Asura Cryin’ OP, but don’t quote me on that. Atsuko, the vocalist of angela, greeted the audience after the second song and formally introduced the third song, which was “Boku Janai” from Kakumeiki Valvrave (the music for which was easily the best part of the show). This was a fun song since Katsu and the support band chanted the backup parts. :o

Here’s a Nana Osaki cosplayer to break up text, since I couldn’t take photos of the actual concert.

There were maybe a dozen Japanese fans in the audience, and all of them were standing and waving LED-powered glowsticks throughout all of this. There were an additional dozen or so people standing, including myself, but a majority of the audience remained seated. This seemed amazingly rude to me, and I felt really, really bad for angela… the ballroom was barely a third filled, and most of the people there wouldn’t even stand up while they played? Hella rude!

I yelled and fist-pumped a lot to try and make up for most of the audience’s lack of enthusiasm. I’m really glad that there had been the group of Japanese fans in front of me in line, as they were now next to me, and I felt slightly less awkward standing and yelling with them standing and yelling next to me, especially as the person on my other side remained seated the entire show.

After “Boku Janai,” Atsuko-san did a lengthier introduction of the band, which includes guitarrist Katsu, and their two support members, the drummer and bassist, whose names I’ve sadly forgotten. ACen was angela’s first time back in the United States since they performed at Sakura-Con in 2005? Atsuko-san’s English was decent, though she also mimed out a lot of things, including her desire to try Chicago’s deep dish pizza… XD Though he obviously knew some other basics, Katsu boasted that he only knew three words of English: “What a babe!”

I don’t remember what the fourth song was, but it was a fast-paced one. The fifth was the Coppelion ED, “Tookumade.” The next few songs were more of a blur, but it was one fast and one slow. Aside from the ones I’ll mention after this, I think other songs in the set included “Alternative” (Asura Cryin’ 2 OP), “Kanata no Delight” (Asura Cryin’ 2 ED), “My Story” (Corpse Princess: Aka ED), “Beginning” (Corpse Princess: Kuro ED) and “Kings” (K OP).

Here is an Anya for further breaking up of text walls.

A little more than halfway through the set, Atsuko-san announced that they’ll be playing their debut song, “Asu e no Brilliant Road,” the OP for Stellvia of the Universe, a series basically no one has seen, but I got REALLY, REALLY excited because I hadn’t thought to hope they might play some of their older songs. It made sense though — even though they have plenty of newer songs, they were at an anime convention, and if they only played songs that were used in anime, that narrows the selection a fair bit!

Before they launched into “Brilliant Road” though, Atsuko and Katsu spent a few minutes teaching the audience arm motions to accompany the chorus. It was basic and kind of silly, but it was clear they really wanted to get more audience interaction going. Gradually throughout the set, more and more people had gotten to their feet, mostly on my side of the audience (maybe because most of the very enthusiastic Japanese fans were on our side?). The right side of the ballroom remained stubbornly seated for the most part. >:(

“Brilliant Road” did get a fair bit of people waving their arms, but a lot of people did it while still seated. I really enjoyed the song though, as it’s one of the ones that really demonstrates Atsuko’s fucking amazing vocal work. ;___;

There was another song after that, and then…and then the intro to the piano version of “Separation” started playing and I almost cried. ಥ_ಥ I still haven’t actually gotten around to finishing Soukyuu no Fafner, but “Separation” and “Shangri-La” (the ED and OP) are still my absolute favourite angela songs. The piano version of “Separation” is especially amazing, though I am admittedly just the biggest sucker for piano versions of songs. I really wish they could have had room for an actual piano on stage, but sadly, it was a pre-recorded part. Still, the vocals were moving and amazing, and the band joined in after the intro and stayed through until the outro, which was again just piano.

There were a few songs after “Separation,” then they played “Soukyuu” from the Fafner movie, which I haven’t seen yet (since I haven’t finished the series), but which is a song I also love. “Soukyuu” was also a really fun song because in addition to being another shining example of Atsuko’s amazing vocals, the audience seemed to finally get into things and we got a lasting clapping accompaniment going — and even with all the parts where the musical accompaniment cuts out suddenly, there were no awkward bits where the audience ran over. Hurray! I had been yelling out “Shangri-La” randomly in the spaces between songs, and as it turned out, they ended their set with “Shangri-La.” It was perfect. ;____;

The band was off the stage for less than two minutes before a rousing chant of “en-co-re” brought them back to play a beautiful cover of “Cruel Angel’s Thesis” and finally, finally the rudeass right side of the room all got to their feet to yell and jump and scream. I was happy. (They covered “Cruel Angel’s Thesis” at their Otakon 2004 show too, though not as the encore.)

MUSIC IS GREAT. I LOVE MUSIC.

It was amazing that I still had enough voice to speak with after the show because I really did yell a lot. x_x Cari and Amanda had taken off after Exhibits closed to have dinner with friends, but Tori had apparently been hanging out right outside the ballroom listening to a majority of the concert, and I ran into her almost as soon as I got out of the room — lucky, since there weren’t any wall outlets in the area that were free for me to plug my phone into.

I really wish more people had come to the concert! It was really frustrating to see the mostly-empty room and a mostly-seated audience for the show. At the end of the show, angela promised that they would return to the United States again, but I wonder if the low turnout at ACen was discouraging at all. :( I also wish that ACen had scheduled a signing/panel/whatever sooner than the next day — if there were people in the audience who weren’t already fans, they’d be most pumped up to buy things right after the concert, right?

Ah, well. I’m really glad I got to see them perform. I just wish everyone else had been as excited as I had been. :’c

The batch of six OC commissions I did Friday. Characters belong to Danielle!

Afterwards, Tori and I walked back to the hotel to rest a bit, run numbers and drop off our stuff before walking over to Denny’s for dinner. We had very good timing because we walked in at the same time as another party and there were only two booths left in the restaurant. We filled Denny’s to capacity! And I drained four glasses of lemonade to soothe my aching throat. x_x

Numberswise, Friday was a bit disappointing. It wasn’t as slow as Friday at Sakura-Con this year, but it wasn’t as good as Friday at Sakura-Con last year, or as good as Fridays I’ve had at every other anime con in its size bracket (Otakon, A-Kon). And since I’d never been to Illinois before, the oversaturation problem from Sakura this year shouldn’t have been an issue at all… I’m not really sure what it was.

Traffic was fine. The aisles were narrow, but I don’t think they ever got overbearingly crowded. Even though lots of attendees breezed through the Alley to get to Dealers at the beginning of the day, they all had to come back eventually (the hall’s entrance was also its only exit), and having concessions and lots of other things in the Exhibits Hall really helped keep people in the room just milling around. Sure, lots of people browse Friday and buy Saturday, but there were plenty of Friday-only badges in the crowd too.

It was puzzling and a little discouraging, but getting to go to the concert really put me in good spirits and I didn’t have any trouble sleeping Friday.

This is the cute picture that was in our hotel room, haha.

SATURDAY

We went to bed at midnight and didn’t have to get up until past 8am, as setup was again from 8-10am, but eight hours is just way too long for me to sleep during a convention. I slept fine, but I was still full of adrenaline and nervous convention energy, so I rolled out of bed right before eight. Tori had actually gotten up even earlier than that! For some reason, I was feeling really impatient that morning, so I skipped on getting coffee at both the hotel Starbucks, where there were three people in line, and at the convention center Starbucks, which had about twenty. It was probably for the better though; I didn’t need the caffeine at all.

As usual, I spent the time we had before opening wandering through the Exhibits Hall, seeing who was around and noting everyone who had Yowapeda art, even though I really don’t know what to do with prints anymore. I wanna support fellow artists, but I don’t need or don’t have space for anything that Artist Alley has to offer for the most part… I suppose this is a problem that a lot of regular con-goers have. As more and more conventions crop up, they are more social events than anything else, and those who attend cons often just can’t keep justifying buying from artists all the time. It’s different with Dealer’s Room. It’s different when you’re a collector of official goods — even if there end up being a lot of official goods of a thing, you know there’s a natural limit to it. It’s harder to collect from artists because there would absolutely never be any end to it.

Dealer’s Room, before opening. I keep seeing silly idol versions of Code Geass characters and being pointlessly tempted, lol.

There really weren’t many people around Saturday morning, but at the far end of the Alley, I got to talk some with Pepper (Pepperonccini) about sales and bike anime. She had these really adorable winners’ rosettes that I regret not buying, haha. I also really wanted to commission her too, but I didn’t have any printed references handy and I didn’t want to make her sift through my mess of online ones. Ah well. That’s what picking up business cards is for!

We opened Saturday morning to heavier traffic, but while sales picked up, I was never as busy as I wanted to be.

Commissions trickled in slowly, and most were quick pencil or ink sketches. I had very few colored commissions, which was sad because, man, my markers take up way too much valuable luggage space to sit there unused! I was even working on commissions more slowly than usual because it was such an ordeal every time I had to look up reference. In addition to my phone just not working without the portable battery hooked up and the micro USB being connected at just the right angle, 4G was spotty and Internet was slow. Tori had a personal wifi hotspot though, so I ended up looking up refs on her phone, then taking a photo from my phone, then hoping the battery doesn’t randomly die while I was using the reference.

Rin, Gou, and a perfect Haru.

It was aggravating, but I was trying really hard not to let my endless phone issues get to me… ~_~ I was still grateful that Tori was letting me use her phone to run Square, but I did also notice that the number of people wanting to pay with card was lower than usual. When all other factors say that sales should be going well, I suppose the down economy is always there to blame?

A fair number of the commissioners I had were really fun, at least! One couple commissioned me for a pet portrait of their dog and another artist gave me free reign in a sketchbook with the theme “teddy bears VS monsters.” (Naturally, I drew a poor teddy bear getting torn up by a cerberus…) I also had two people bring me coffee in exchange for commissions, which was lovely because 1) coffee makes me feel better, even if I don’t need the caffeine, and 2) now I have more stuff to do!

I had a surprising number of people recognize my Chihayafuru print and spaz to me about the show. I’m a year late on finishing that piece and have only ever had like two people to flail at about the show, so it was really nice to finally get to talk to other fans about the series. Even though karuta is a weird and esoteric “sport,” I’m pretty sure that it’s Chihaya’s fault that I sucked into the black abyss that is sports anime. Karuta was followed by swimming and now bikes, and I know when I get a chance I will probably get really into volleyball (Haikyuu!!) and basketball (Kuroko’s Basketball) too — not to mention I’ve had baseball (Big Windup) sitting on my shelf a while, lent by a friend, still waiting for me to get around to it too. SIGH.

HEY! LISTEN!

The Exhibits Hall closed suddenly and unceremoniously at 6:30pm. It annoyed me that staff didn’t give us a head’s up, say, half an hour or fifteen minutes or even five minutes ahead of close. There also weren’t really staff actively ushering attendees out. Sure, lots of people left when they dimmed the lights, but it was fifteen minutes after close and we’d still have a random attendee here and there wandering around. Not great for security, y’know?

Tori and I dawdled at our tables for a while after close, taking our time packing up while Cari went to verify details for our dinner plan. We all ended up going to dinner with Savannah and Andrew of Amya — they had their car with them, so Cari, Amanda, Tori, and I, all piled into the back seat of their hatchback and we drove a fair distance away from the convention center to the friends’ house Savannah and Andrew were staying at. From there, we all walked to a nice, mostly Chinese, dumpling house. I say “mostly Chinese” only because I ended up getting bibimbap, which is decidedly not a Chinese dish, but I picked off dumplings from everyone else’s dishes and it was all really good! I’m glad we got to go to a restaurant outside of hotel-land. :3

Afterwards, we walked back to the house and Cari, Amanda, Savannah, and I played two hilarious games of Love Letter while Andrew played dealer and Tori worked on commissions. What a nice way to wind down after a long day. :O

The pet portrait commission I had. The commissioners provided the little square piece of paper!

Numbers for Saturday were better and closer to what I would expect for a convention of ACen’s size, but they didn’t make up for Friday’s deficits, and I wasn’t feeling confident that Sunday bridge the gap either. Commissions have been consistently down for the last few cons, and I think this is still the thing that bothers me the most. Not having as many sales wouldn’t be as noticeable to me if I had something to work on behind the table, at least. I’m not really sure there’s much to be done about this though — I had my commission sign on the table this con, and while I do think that more people noticed it, it didn’t seem to change the actual number of commissions I got.

At the end of Saturday, I wasn’t really sure if ACen would be a convention worth returning to because of travel costs. I wasn’t losing money on the trip, but I wasn’t making much either. Though ACen has about 7,000 people over Sakura-Con, they weren’t making a significant difference in returns, and as Sakura is local for me, the cost differences in attending Sakura and ACen are substantial.

A trainer and her Flareon.

SUNDAY

We’d stayed up a bit late Saturday night swapping con stories, so I didn’t roll out of bed until a bit past 8am. This time, I did pick up coffee at the hotel Starbucks before walking over to the convention center.

Keri (Alicechan) and her table partner Centi stopped by Tori’s and my table and we talked about sales a bit. Centi was the only one of us to have done ACen before, so it was insightful getting her take on things. Seemed like everyone was doing not as well as expected, but no one was sure why! I also got to chat with Enduro a fair bit Sunday morning, which was super nice, and I traded her one of my Slytherin zipper bags for her gorgeous, gorgeous Mushishi print. She’d mentioned the Slytherin bag specifically on Friday, so I brought it over Sunday. I was honestly not expecting her to know what I even had at the table. o_o Aaaaa, senpai noticed me….I hope I get to see her again at another con. ;3;

Fifteen minutes to opening, I ran over to the angela table mixed in with the Industry exhibitors at the front of the hall. I’d meant to stop by all weekend, but for some reason I hadn’t been able to find it before then. I was somewhat surprised to see that a fair bit of their merchandise had sold out, but I guess that meant they were doing okay after all. I hope lots of people showed up to their Saturday panels and autograph sessions…!

I picked up a CD (it was a weird con exclusive that only had anime songs on it, haha; the CD is literally called “anime songs”/anime no uta!) and was given a ticket to attend an autograph session, and it was only then that I realized that the autographs took place at their booth there, which meant I didn’t have to go far to get there. Hm! The Sunday session was from 11am-noon, so it was pretty soon, and I told myself that I’d go ahead and get the CD signed if the line wasn’t long…

Ink commission for Cari of her and Amanda’s characters!

10am Sunday opened with a very hectic first twenty minutes or so of sales. :O It was almost overwhelming!

This gradually wound back down to a less crazy level, but while there were weird lulls here and there where the aisles were completely empty of attendees, things finally picked up to a very noticeable degree in terms of sales. Commissions remained down though — one of the few commissions I had was from Cari (above), which I took my damn sweet time on because I could.

Around 11:30am, I did run over to the angela booth to check how busy things were. The autograph line only had about five people and was moving at a fair pace, so I stuck around to get my CD book signed and to stutter out some horribly uncomfortable 楽しかったs and ありがとうs to Atsuko and Katsu. :’D Atsuko seemed to understand a most of my English fine and told me she had had fun at the concert as well, though when Katsu asked whether I’d be attending their panel, he had to refer to his translator to understand my response — “sorry, I’ll be working. I’m an artist. ;3;”

And then I ran back to the table cackling madly. (This only the second time I’ve ever gotten anything signed by a band okay.)

Signed angela CD. ;3;

Sunday afternoon maintained a weird pattern of really busy periods interspersed with completely dead periods, but overall, it seemed clear that there were lots of people out spending the remainder of their budgets Sunday. It was a relief to finally be busy with something, even if commissions were still down.

I actually did get one two character color commission near the end of the day. That was a bit hectic since I needed reference for both characters, but the references I was finding were really inconsistent. My phone had also decided at that point to just not charge from the portable battery no matter what angle I held it at, so I was forced to continually swipe Tori’s phone to check stuff. >:(

Judy Funni and Patti Mayonnaise!

As with the other days, staff did not give a heads up about closing and Sunday ended very abruptly at 4pm.

My flight wasn’t until 8:40pm, so I had plenty of time to break down and pack up and run around saying bye to people. I managed to get my main checked bag down to 51 lbs (I’d finally gotten a luggage scale) and just hoped that the attendant would be lenient. Tori and her mom helped me drag stuff across the street back to the Hyatt, where there was a shuttle just about to leave. Perfect timing, this time around!

On the shuttle, I overheard some of the other passengers talking about cities to live in, and it turned out that one of them was from Houston — and from the same area I grew up in. :o We were both flying out on the same airline (albeit to different destinations) and both our flights were pretty late, so we ended up hanging out through check-in (didn’t charge me overweight, HA!) and security and dinner (another airport Chili’s, score!) and it was really nice and random way to wrap up the weekend? :O My flight wasn’t delayed on the way home either, so bonus hurray!

Genderbent Avengers group!

OVERALL

Anime Central was okay?

Numbers-wise, it was a little disappointing, yeah. I didn’t make my goal amount, which was around what I made at A-Kon last year. Friday was very slow and Saturday wasn’t amazing, but Sunday really picked up — I ended up making almost as much Sunday as I did Saturday, which helped bring totals up. Commissions made up only 16% of total revenue, which is even with Sakura-Con this year’s 17%… I’m not sure if I should be happy merchandise is making up a bigger percentage or if I should be worried fewer people seem interested in commissions these days?

So even though I didn’t make my goal, I think the trip was probably still worth it. If I can cut back down to one checked bag and manage a cheaper hotel split next time, that would help a lot. :>

And sales aside, I did like many other aspects of the convention, including where it was located. Yeah, flying into Chicago O’Hare kind of sucked, but the Hyatt and convention center are easy to get to from the airport; that free shuttle from the Hyatt is really, really great, and several of the other hotels have airport shuttles as well, including the InterContinental. I really didn’t get to explore much, but the space seems substantial and well-suited for the convention. The venue didn’t seem especially crowded, so it feels like there’s still room to grow. The area could stand to have more food options, but what’s there isn’t bad.

Timing-wise, ACen is smack in the middle of a very busy convention time, but it doesn’t typically conflict with another major con and there isn’t anything local for me in May either.

I’m pretty sure angela was announced as a guest after I had already decided to go, but I know ACen had Kalafina last year (and rented out the Rosemont Theatre for her concert), and having excellent musical guests sure doesn’t hurt! I was especially happy that angela’s performance didn’t end up crossing into Artist Alley hours much at all (though honestly I would have probably ditched AA to go to the concert regardless of when it was).

My teeny but amazing ACen haul!

ACen’s Artist Alley is on a first come, first serve system that’s heavily integrated into their in-house attendee registration, which meant AA registration was a stressful nightmare of server time-outs because ACen is forced to handle everything on their own host.

After registering though, the rest of my dealings with ACen ahead of the show were pretty pleasant. The Exhibits head, Philip Ward-Schmidt, seemed very aware of artist concerns and issues and did well to address questions and problems as they came up. He was prompt in responding to emails and when one artist asks about something relevant to everyone (like Illinois sales tax), he sent out a mass email informing everyone of the answer, which was very nice. Directly after the show, he sent out a survey soliciting feedback, something I always appreciate.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see Philip himself at any point at the convention itself, and his various on-site staff were not nearly as helpful, organized, or professional. I definitely textwalled about everything in that feedback survey though, so here’s to hoping things improve for next year!

Here is another shot of my loot because I love it.

 Cons

• On-site staff organization. There were lots of on-site staff at Exhibits check-in, but very few seemed to know what they were doing and they didn’t have time in the thick of things to teach their underlings the proper way to deal with whatever. Everyone was nice enough, but sadly, nice doesn’t get stuff done. <_< More pre-con training is definitely required, but this should be a relatively easy thing to fix, right?
• On-site staff attentiveness. No one ever came around to check on artists, etc. It wasn’t a huge deal, but I would have probably cared more if I hadn’t been tabling right next to Tori. I also really, really wished that staff had given exhibitors (and attendees!) a ten minutes’ heads up or something before opening and closing the hall every day. It always seemed that things started and ended abruptly, and staff wasn’t especially effective at getting stragglers out of the hall after close either.
• Flying into Chicago O’Hare International Airport sucks. Even in May. Basically everyone I knew flying in experienced some kind of delay, and while there had been storms the day before, the weather was fine Thursday? “Too many planes!!” is not a good reason for delays, okay.

Pros

• Pre-con staff communication and attentiveness. Philip is pretty on top of things and that is great.
• Artist Alley location in the Exhibits Hall. The aisles between islands could stand to be a bit wider, but overall I think the placement worked out well, with Artist Alley sitting in between Dealers and Industry exhibitors and guests. Attendees had to go past us to get to Dealers and then pass us again on the way out. There were also concessions in the Exhibits Hall and a lounge area where people could sit and eat — great for keeping attendees around in between shopping trips!
• Overall convention space. I really like the convention center, and though I was only in the Hyatt for the concert, I really appreciate their free airport shuttle!

Hm. Honestly, I don’t feel too strongly about most aspects of this convention. As always it was nice to hang out with friends I don’t see often, meet new people, and fantard about stuff all weekend, but ACen-specific things didn’t stand out all that much (concert aside, perhaps). Things were just okay. The listed cons were annoyances that didn’t affect all that much ultimately, and the pros are things that are kind of subjective and hard to measure, at least as far as space and location goes — Philip’s proactiveness is a rare and shining quality amongst Exhibits/Artist Alley heads and shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Anyway! Unless a more convenient convention ends up on the same dates, and assuming I’m lucky enough to score a table again next year, I’ll probably return to Anime Central. :O

For the last couple of years, Comicpalooza in Houston was my Memorial Day weekend show, but this year, I decided to return instead to Atlanta, Georgia, for MomoCon.

MomoCon’s changed a lot since the last time I went — four years ago! In 2010, MomoCon was a two-day, free convention held on Georgia Tech’s campus. In 2012, MomoCon became a three-day, paid convention at the downtown Marriott Marquis. In 2013, they jumped across the street to the Hilton Atlanta, and this year, they occupied both hotels. Additionally, MomoCon was previously always over spring break in March; this year was their first time on Memorial Day weekend, joining nine other anime conventions (this link doesn’t even list non-anime cons like Comicpalooza), including Fanime and Animazement.

Bye, beautiful Washington. Back to the obnoxiously hot and humid south we go…!

This report is 7,151 words long.

Jump to: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Overall.

THURSDAY

Since MomoCon was the weekend after Anime Central, I had three whole days in between conventions. I’ve done my share of back-to-back cons, but this was my first time doing back-to-back, out-of-state conventions. I think I managed the time between shows really well though and was pretty much all packed and ready to go by Wednesday afternoon. I wrote a majority of my ACen report Wednesday night, and while I was really tempted to power through, finish, edit, and publish it in the wee hours of Thursday morning, but I actually decided to sleep a few hours instead. I know. Crazy.

And at 5:30am, I was once again dragging my weight in luggage to the lightrail. Since Momo’s a much smaller con compared to ACen, I decided to shed some materials and stock for the trip and went back to one checked bag. Unfortunately, despite weighing in at just about 50 pounds the night before with my new luggage scale, I came in at 8 pounds overweight on the airport’s scale. :| I spent ten minutes trying to repack, but there was really nothing to be done and I ended up just paying the overweight fee. There goes the amount I saved in taxi fare. D;

SIGH.

One downside of actually sleeping before my flight is that I wasn’t tired enough to sleep through my entire flight like usual. I ended up doodling to pass the time, but while I don’t mind friends or con-goers watching me draw, for some reason it’s always really awkward when my neighbours on planes watch me draw. <_< But the flight was uneventful and, in contrast to the flight to Chicago, perfectly on time. I landed in Atlanta right around 4pm EDT, grabbed my stuff from baggage claim, and got picked up by Shirly (S-girl / Tales of the Big Bad Wolf) — it was probably just past five when we parked at the lot across the street from the Marriott.

I haven’t been to the last three years of MomoCon, but Shirly has. Since the con has had a change or expansion of venue every year, Artist Alley hasn’t ever been in the same place twice in a row, and every location it ended up in was hard to find (one year they were in the basement??). This year, the Alley was on the second floor of the Marriott Marquis. The Dealer’s Room was in the main ballroom on the same floor, but the Artist Alley was…tucked under the escalators and two turns down an easy-to-overlook hallway from the FedEx Office that was in the building. Even having seen maps beforehand, it was very hard to find.

This outfit isn’t revealing enough, dude!Ryuko.

I really should have taken pictures of the space leading up to the Artist Alley entrance, but take my word for it. There was no way anyone was going to 1) get there without already knowing where it was, 2) wander through accidentally. The Artist Alley itself was three meeting rooms with the walls between them taken down, making for a kind of awkward space which was way more cramped than expected. When we got there, there were only a couple of other artists around, along with Shannon, the Artist Alley head, and an assistant (or two?).

Check-in was easy, but space was a huge concern. Tables in the main islands were cramped together with hardly any space behind them and two of the main aisles were ridiculously narrow as well. It was hard to imagine that anyone actually took measurements of the room (and of the tables) before deciding to squeeze in as many tables as they did. :/ Shirly and I ended up helping Shannon push some tables around and adjust things slightly, but there was no changing the fact that there wasn’t enough room there at all.

This photo’s from Sunday, but it shows the barely 5 feet of space in this aisle for two way traffic + actual browsers. :/

My table was against the wall, so I didn’t have to worry about potentially getting in the way of people behind me, but Shirly was in the first of two islands, and her chairs basically backed right into the chairs of the table behind her. Thankfully, almost the artists that were also setting up at the time were at other ends of the room, so we both had enough space to work with while we set up our displays.

Shirly’s table!

I had a hard time adjusting back down to a six foot table after having an eight foot one at ACen. Shirly had a ton of random extra display materials though, so I played around with some of her things to see if they would work for me. I ended up clipping my buttons to some backing board she had, leaning them against my postcard stand, and then laying my postcards flat. I also used her thinnest plywood stand thing to prop up my mini artbook, my commission sign, and a single postcard pack.

I’m not sure it was the best use of space, but I’ve been moving stuff around a lot the last few cons trying to figure out what works… 6′ tables are still more common than 8′ ones, so I really need to prioritize display items. The opening I left myself in my print wall shrank again, but it’s still better than it’s been at some shows.

Photo from Friday. Fake Lemonade Stand @ MomoCon 2014.

Since my brother currently lives in Atlanta, I texted him to see if he could make it out for dinner. We’d taken our time setting up (though Shirly finished long, long before me, haha), and my brother got to the Marriott right around when I was finishing up.

We headed out to Shoya Izakaya, though we stopped at H Mart first to pick up some snacks for the weekend. I actually don’t like snacking much behind the table because I’m a messy eater and it doesn’t matter how portable or clean the food is — I will make a mess. I also really dislike being stuck with food in my mouth when people come up to the table. I picked up some nuts and banana chips anyway though. Those are relatively safe and mess-free, right.

CHICKEN HEART YAKITORI.

At Shoya, I got an udon bowl… and also chicken heart yakitori because I’m a weirdo and gravitated towards the weirdest thing on the menu, but also because I love chicken hearts; chicken hearts are delicious. (❀◦‿◦)

My brother got a way spicier udon bowl and a more normal yakitori, and Shirly enjoyed some onigiri, ramen, and our endless banter. Dinner was really good! We even got dessert! It’s fairly rare that I eat at nice places during conventions, so it was kinda splurgy, but man, it was worth it. A+ restaurant, would go again.

Thursday night dessert for me. My brother got taiyaki.

After dinner, we dropped my brother off at his apartment, then headed over to Shirly’s place, where I was staying for the weekend.

If you happen to follow both Shirly and me on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that 90% of our conversations on the subject of Artist Alley and related topics and issues, so it shouldn’t be hard to guess what we warbled on and on about in the time before bed. 8D Aaaa, it’s so nice to hang out with friends in person now and again!

Oh, here’s a picture of dinner’s main course too. ;)

FRIDAY

Set-up Friday was from 9am to noon, at which point we opened to the public.

Since we’d both finish setting up Thursday though, we slept in a bit and were up around 8:30am. It was a very leisurely morning! We made coffee and sat around the apartment talking more about Artist Alley, then we went out to Panera for breakfast (Shirly was kind of insistent on this whole “eating food” thing.), more coffee, and more shop talk.

Friday breakfast! Egg sandwiches are the best.

After breakfast, we got gas and picked up Shirly’s friend Hart, who was at the table next to hers. It was a bit past ten when we showed up at the Marriott.

There were now various banner signs and display boards on the second floor pointing towards Artist Alley and noting the public hours. This was a relief, though I had mixed feelings about the placement of the banners and how effective they would be. One of my biggest concerns was the fact that the sign at the near-entrance of the Alley wasn’t too visible from outside the hallway it was in — you had to almost completely turn that corner or be right in front of it to see it. The small lounge area outside the FedEx Office meant that people would probably congregate there, too, which would block that final sign from view.

Senpai to kouhai.

I rearranged some things on my table, but spent most of the time before opening wandering around the Alley to browse and say hi to people. Tori was in the far corner of the room, and I was surprised and very pleased to find that there was a former ‘Soulster at one table: Alex was sharing a table with A Fox & Wolf, and that makes four (I think?) ‘Soulsters I’ve met on the con circuit. :)

Billie (Dragonbeak) had the table to my left, but she had to work Friday and her friend Janelle was tabling in her stead. Greg Carter, another one of Shirly’s friends, had the table to my right. With 55 tables, MomoCon’s Alley is probably on the smaller side for a convention of its size, though the room was definitely very cramped. Though there were a handful of obvious Alley veterans and a few tables I recognized from ACen the weekend prior, there were a lot of first time Alley artists in the mix too.

Momo obviously had a very local Alley make up last I went — it was still a free, college con then, though they drew a respectable 7,800 attendees in 2010 — but this still seems to be case, which is maybe a bit odd, given that they’ve doubled their attendance since then. But with Fanime and Animazement the same weekend, many artists went for those more established shows, and I know more than one Atlanta local that went to one or the other and skipped on home town MomoCon because MomoCon has been unpredictable, changing dramatically every year for the last several.

E’erbody’s excited about upcoming Sailor Moon Crystal.

A huge crowd burst through the doors when we opened at noon, though being right at the entrance of the room meant that a lot of the initial attendees pushed past us to make room for the people behind them. The room emptied of the crowd fairly quickly, but the traffic evened out nicely and the attendees that remained were interested, engaged, in-depth browsers and shoppers.

Being at the entrance of the room also meant that we had the only reasonably-sized aisle in the Alley — there was a whole eight or nine feet of space between the front of my table and the front of Shirly’s, and it never got so crowded that it was uncomfortable. I never visited other tables during active hours, but I can imagine that 4-5 feet of aisle space between tables elsewhere in the Alley made for poor experiences all around. We really lucked out with placement.

The entrance and exit of the room was supposed to be one-way, forcing attendees to filter through most of the Alley once they got in, but the one-way entrance wasn’t well guarded, and attendees flitted out the in-door all weekend rather than face the crowded aisles to the actual exit. (Artists closer to the entrance, including myself, also snuck out the entrance to go to the bathroom for the same reason. <_<)

Shinx family sketch card commissions!

Cell phone reception inside the Alley was also a huge issue.

Even on Thursday, when there had been few people around, I had a hard time sending texts and would sometimes need to try five or six times before they went through. Friday, this got worse, and trying to do anything on 4G was basically impossible…at least for Sprint and T-Mobile. Artists using Verizon and AT&T seemed to be doing okay.

In emails ahead of the con, Shannon, the Artist Alley head, had mentioned providing a wifi hotspot so people could run Square and other card readers, and there was indeed a locked Artist Alley wifi network that artists could ask for the password to. This was a really, really nice amenity, but there were many limitations, as it seemed to be provided by Shannon herself, rather than MomoCon. The wifi’s range did not cover the entire room, so artists on the far fringes, like Tori, could not connect. Shannon also had a limited data plan and thus requested that artists connect to the wifi only for credit transactions, so the wifi wasn’t supposed to be used for reference lookups, etc.

Still, the wifi hotspot was the only reason I could run credit transactions Friday. I was stupid and didn’t ask for the wifi password until halfway through the day though, and I lost several would-be buyers because I couldn’t run their cards at the time. :( Square Offline mode did work for one of them, but Offline mode wouldn’t even accept cards until it could at least connect long enough to initialize it or something?

Black Widow!

Traffic remained steady throughout the day, and it was a very “high quality” crowd. That is, there were a lot of in-depth and repeat browsers — lots of folks made multiple passes through the Alley and stopped by several times, sometimes making multiple purchases, or bringing back friends to make purchases. More people made it through the entirety of my prints binder Friday at MomoCon than all weekend at ACen. There were also a fair number of commissioners, and while I still had time to draw random commission examples here and there, I did have paid work to work on for most of the day.

The people that found Artist Alley had clearly been looking for Artist Alley, and that really showed, I think.

Awyiss, my first Yowapeda commission. 8D

There were only a few Yowamushi Pedal fans in the crowd, unsurprisingly — both Shirly and I think the Atlanta anime crowd has a heavy bias for TV broadcast and dubs, and that the number of people following simulcasted and streaming series is fewer than in other regions — but one that was there returned to my table a lot to blab to me about the series, which was really fun! She reported that there was zero Yowapeda merch to be found in Dealer’s, and I knew there were exactly three artists, including myself, with Yowapeda stuff, so we were a rare breed indeed!

She commissioned me for an inked sketch of her ship (above), and it was fun even though I have no idea what’s driving the popularity of this particular pairing right now, hahaha. She’s following the manga, and I’m only following the anime at the moment, so I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually. ^^; As a side note, no one needs to be self-conscious commissioning me for weird (or totally vanilla) ships because I really don’t mind and ain’t here to judge. ;) I mean come on, I have a print of Loki x Elsa because I do what I want. ^___^

My friend Brandy (right) and some of her lolita friends! :)

A few SCAD and Atlanta-area friends stopped by to say hello throughout the day, including Brandy and Tigsie. I hadn’t seen either since I graduated, so that was super nice! Harper of Hatcore (I did their logo art, don’tcha know) also stopped by, though she hadn’t realized I was going to be there until she saw me, haha. Michael was working Animazement, so unfortunately, I didn’t get to see him.

Though there weren’t too many Yowapeda fans around, there did seem to be plenty of Free! fans, which was equally nice. Lots of excited jabbering about the upcoming season was had. :D

Tigsie cosplaying Turbo!

We closed at 8pm, making Friday a full eight hour workday. There was a bump in traffic at the end of the day, since we were open after the Dealer’s Room had closed, but like the opening rush (we’d apparently opened before DR as well), this traffic wasn’t of the same quality as what we had for most of the day.

Shirly and I were able to pack up pretty quickly. We dropped Hart off at her house, then headed out to a most excellent Thai place near Shirly’s apartment. After that, we…went to Target and got…stickers. We were there for something else, too, I think, but the best purchases made were definitely the stickers. U_U

What’s the point of going to a Thai place if you don’t get Thai iced tea.

When we got back to the apartment, we dug through Shirly’s ridiculous cache of random con supplies and I made notes to buy a couple of useful things I hadn’t thought of before, or didn’t know where to get, such as backing boards and sleeves for letter-sized prints or commissions. We also swapped references for original characters we intended to draw for each other the next day, and Shirly imparted knowledge of this freakin’ weird-looking back massage tool that was really kind of amazing. o_o

The numbers for Friday were strong — they were a fair percentage higher than Friday at ACen, and Momo is just about half the size. Commissions Friday made up 20% of the total, which is probably the strongest I’ve seen in a while. It was very encouraging, and I looked forward to Saturday.

Very important purchases: stickers! (That shark, you guys.)

SATURDAY

Artist Alley opened to the public at 10am Saturday, so we were up a bit earlier at 7:15. It was still a pretty leisurely morning though — we had coffee at the apartment and I ate my leftovers from dinner. We didn’t need to pick up Hart this time, and so we got to the hotel a bit past eight.

Aside from Shannon, there was no one else around. I helped Shirly rearrange a few things on her display, then wandered through the Alley again. When I got back, Shirly was selling a dealer that’d wandered in on commissioning me. o_o The three of us chatted for a bit and hashed out the details of what he wanted. He was starting a themed sketchbook and wanted a sketch representative of both the artist and the convention the sketch was done at. This was a bit daunting, I think, because it gave me just enough creative freedom that I worried about delivering something the commissioner actually wanted. x_x I took down the info though and resumed wandering the Alley.

A really neat take on Jack Skellington.

When Tori arrived, she reported that traffic and sales in her far corner of the room had been pretty abysmal Friday. I was kind of surprised by this, but I probably shouldn’t have been — I know I really lucked out on table placement. Tori was in the far back corner, and she was on the wider/outside end of the corner — attendees would clip the corner on the inner side, bypassing her table entirely. And since the exit had been in the middle of the room instead of the far end originally, a lot of attendees never made it there at all. Even her tablemate, Alex (Metal Artisan), who had been the only person at Aki Con 2012 to do well, was doing poorly.

There were two tables in the Alley that were empty/unclaimed, including one near me, directly across from the entrance, so I encouraged Tori to ask Shannon if she could move out of the corner. Tori did so and reported back that Shannon was open to the idea, but needed to first verify that the artists at those tables were definitely not coming. While we waited, we wandered over to the Dealer’s Room.

Just look at this cute Venusaur.

Though we were in separate rooms, artists and dealers both had “exhibitor” badges, so we were able to get into DR during setup hours. I went intending to visit Harper, since she was the only person I knew in there, but she was on the phone and walked out of the room just as we were walking in, haha.

Tori and I did randomly meet up with my brother in the DR though! Since AA tables came with two badges, I’d given him my extra. Actually, my brother has been attending MomoCon free every year he’s lived in Atlanta on my badges — even when I didn’t attend myself! I’ve submitted and had art accepted for MomoCon’s use every year (except this year!!) since 2009, which gets me some swag and a free badge (after Momo went paid), but since I couldn’t attend 2011-2013, I always passed that free badge off to my brother, haha.

Lt. Surge!

We made a circuit of the Dealer’s Room, but none of us were looking for anything in particular, and we all distracted each other from actually browsing. There were a couple of artists in the DR as well, including Omi, the artist who does all of MomoCon’s official art. I actually didn’t know this until Tori mentioned it. Though she’s a paid staff artist doing work-for-hire art (I hope!), I’d always wished that MomoCon would mention and link to her now and again when posting promotion materials with her art; I’d always been curious, but didn’t know who the artist was until now!

At 9:30am or so, Tori and I went back to AA and my brother wandered off to go to a trivia panel. Shannon approved Tori’s request to change tables, and so the half hour to opening ended up being a bit frantic as Tori schlepped all of her stuff from one end of the room to the other.

Let me further illustrate how hella cramped this room was. Awkward pillar and four feet of turning space in the aisle.

There was no big rush with Saturday’s opening because we opened at the same time as the DR, and there had been a line formed outside already when Tori and I left half an hour earlier. Folks trickled into the Alley gradually and while traffic was still pretty steady throughout the day, but there were a few noticeable lulls.

There weren’t as many repeat browsers and sales slowed substantially. Commission interest also dropped off a cliff, and of the commissions I did get, two were from friends (though I’m dumb and didn’t realize it was Alex (the ‘Soulster, not Tori’s tablemate) commissioning me for a thing until the next day; I didn’t recognize them because we’d just met and I’m bad with faces and also they were cosplaying Saturday!).

I did sketch cards of two of Shirly’s characters though, and she drew me one of mine. (She’d also doodled me a Loki on Friday. ♥) I also drew a couple of new ACEOs and some commission examples, but I had a hard time thinking of things I wanted to draw for myself for some reason.

Shirly’s snooty elf king character.

On the up side, there were plenty of nice cosplayers to keep me entertained, and the phone issues I had at ACen had been fixed completely, so I could actually take photos. New phone battery works like a charm, and there was also a (free!) wall outlet right behind me, so I could charge my phone as needed.

My brother did a coffee run for me in the early afternoon, but by 4pm, I was getting really tired and sleepy again. Not having a lot to do always makes me more tired, and the number of engaging conversations I was having with attendees had also dropped.

I did chat on and off with Billie and Greg, but it’s always hard to hold a conversation with neighbours when we all need to break away mid-sentence anytime someone shows up at our table. I ended up spending a lot of time trying to get tweets to go through, since it didn’t really matter if I wasted phone battery doing so. u_u;

Elsa and Lady Loki crossover oddness I WAS SO EXCITED TO SEE THIS. Do you see the bleached strand of Loki’s hair aaa.

It was a pretty weird day, but comparable to IKKiCON this past year, where we had a very busy Friday and a very lackluster Saturday.We closed again at 8pm, making it a ten hour workday, but man, I was crazy exhausted. Ten hours really isn’t that bad, and I usually enjoy having longer hours, but it was still one of the longest days I’ve done in a while — both ACen and Sakura-Con topped out at eight hours a day.

Shirly and I made arrangements to meet Billie at a Korean restaurant, then headed out. For once, I was actually feeling a bit off instead of totally ravenous, so I got a light bone soup for dinner… but I still ate the crap out of the banchan!

Various eats. My soup didn’t look cool until I dumped all the onions in sorry.

It was more of the same when we got back to Shirly’s apartment. Lots of discussion of Artist Alley, MomoCon’s weirdness that day, MomoCon in previous years, and other such things. We caught up with our Twitter feeds, where friends were reporting good days at Fanime and Animazement, and I flipped through Shirly’s collection of art purchased and commissioned from Alley artists throughout the years.

Saturday’s numbers were just baaaarely better than Friday’s, though there were a lot more Square transactions? I think more shared hours with DR and lots more main events going on probably cut into the time attendees left for Artist Alley, but I also thought that maybe all the dedicated Alley browsers did their bit Friday? Who knows!

Hella good Touhou cosplayers!

SUNDAY

Sunday was another lazy morning. It was pretty weird for me to head to bed on the East coast while there were still tons of people tweeting about Fanime on the West coast (then again, I usually go to bed in Pacific time when East coasters are tweeting good morning, so I’m missing stuff either way…), and I spent some more time catching up with my timeline before actually getting out of bed around 7:30.

We had coffee at the apartment like usual, then headed to Einstein Brother’s Bagels for breakfast (and more coffee for me; Shirly was good and got orange juice). I’m happy to report that Einstein Brothers coupons sent to me in Washington totally worked at this Atlanta location!

Still not over how pretty and creative these ‘vees were. :O

When we got to the Alley around 8:45, there were several other artists camped outside the entrance. The room was locked and there was no staff around — apparently someone had already contacted staff, but there was no one available to man the Alley, and no one was sure who had the keys?

This was pretty frustrating as many artists had a fair bit of resetting to do at their tables before we opened at ten. When Shirly and I had arrived on Saturday, Shannon had been the only person around, so it seems that a shortage in Alley-specific staffers may be an issue. In the end, a staff person finally showed up around 9:10, and a hotel employee unlocked the door, apologizing and saying that she misunderstood and thought that the doors weren’t supposed to be unlocked until 9:30… hm.

A commission example with subject matter requested by @giapet. ;)

Since we got in later, there were many more artists around when I did my morning circuit of the Alley. I chatted with a few artists in the middle aisle, who reported poor sales both Friday and Saturday, though things did get a little better Saturday. Because of the four feet aisles, attendees were shuffling sideways as they went by, viewing the art, but having no room to properly browse. :(

Alex wasn’t at their table, but I chatted with their tablemate and helper. A Fox and Wolf had sold out of quite a few things, so it definitely sounded like they were doing okay! In addition to having great stuff, their table also had a lucky location — they were right in front of the original Alley exit (they moved the exit to the far end of the room at some point, as people in the back weren’t getting any traffic), which meant they didn’t face any other tables and had actual space in front of them for people to look and browse without being pushed or pulled along by the crowd.

Location is always an important thing, but in a room that was obviously too small for intended purposes, location was really making or breaking people’s weekends…

Petra!

I rounded out the morning chatting with Mika (Tetsumiro), who was hanging out at her friends Mittie and Arekay‘s table. All of them are SCADlanta students (recent grads?), so we talked mostly about college. Along with me and Tori, Mittie was the third artist that had Yowapeda stuff at her table, and as Tori was staying with Mika for the weekend, Mika had recently been roped into bike anime hell as well, so we geeked out about that some too. ;)

Sunday morning’s crowd trickled in very slowly, and it wasn’t until about five past ten that I actually returned to my table because there just weren’t many people around. I busied myself doing a art trade commission for Billie and a request sketch for my brother, but there was otherwise not much to do. I overheard several attendees say that they had no idea Artist Alley was there and one person was even asking if Artist Alley had always been a thing! It seemed that the Sunday crowd was full of attendees that had busied themselves elseplace all weekend and were just now stumbling in to our hidden corner of the Marriott. This was a stark contrast to the Friday crowd, which seemed full of folks who looked for us specifically.

It’s a Rei-nbow!

There are basically two kinds of Sundays at cons — the slow kind when everyone’s either already spent all their money or when they all take off early, and the really, really busy kind where everyone’s looking to spend the last of their budgets. In the two hours before noon, it was feeling like the former. But then noon hit and suddenly it got busy in weird waves. Sales felt like Saturday — not especially strong, but not bad. There was no commission interest whatsoever, but this was probably for the best.

It was very poor planning on my part, but my flight out of Atlanta was at 6:50pm Sunday evening. I think I actually forgot that it was Memorial Day weekend when I booked the flight, or I would have probably chosen to fly out Monday instead. I had written down that I should probably start breaking down around 3:30pm, but I also overlooked and forgot this and was feeling panicked about being able to break down in time…so I actually started breaking down around 2pm.

Nagisaaaa.

I intended to break down very slowly and gradually, but again, that panicky feeling spurred me to go faster than intended. It took me a while to break down at ACen, but I definitely had time before my flight then, and it was also an eight foot table. At MomoCon, I also had my brother helping me, so that made things go a lot faster as well. There were a good handful of last minute sales as I packed things up though, so I feel strongly that it could have been a good-to-great Sunday if I’d actually stayed through to closing (5pm).

As it was though, the car was loaded up by 3:30 and Shirly dropped me off at the airport right around 4:15, haha. We’re too type A and paranoid to not show up at the airport two hours early! Weh!

Look at the glowing stars on that dress, dang.

It actually ended up being a really, really good thing I was there so early though, because I forgot to take my backpack with me after going through airport security. I’d left it in the bin after it went through the x-ray…. and I didn’t realize until a good half hour later when I’d settled in at a sports bar for a cheesesteak and some sweet tea. I’d been looking for my wallet, which was in my backpack, when I realized I didn’t have it.

Lots of panicking ensued because I could have sworn that I’d walked into the bar with it, but it was no where to be found and no one could have walked off with it because there was no one at the tables beside me when I was seated and the couple that was seated next to me afterwards didn’t see anything. I think because I felt phantom straps on my shoulders the whole time because that backpack is so heavy, I honestly thought I had it with me. The restaurant manager called airport security, which sent a cop over, who basically told me to just double back to the security checkpoint.

Sweet tea might be the only thing I miss about the south.

Long story short, my backpack was at the security desk of the checkpoint I’d left it at. I was lucky that I had my boarding pass and ID in my pocket (and not in my wallet) since I’d taken them out to go through security in the first place. I described the backpack to the TSA person at the desk and they handed it over without a problem. They hadn’t even opened it. (It’d already gone through the x-ray, after all). Wee. x_x

I’d left my suitcases under the watch of the the restaurant staff while I ran back to security for my backpack. When I got back, I found that the couple at the table next to mine had paid my bill — they told me to pay it forward, and so I tipped the waitress a twenty before shuffling off. x_x I still had about 20 minutes before I needed to board my plane.

Just take me home already adsghadasghdsadgh.

OVERALL

MomoCon’s a weird show.

It’s different every year; a lot of things change every year, so it’s difficult to use past experiences to predict future ones. Next year, things change again. In 2015, MomoCon is moving to the Georgia World Congress Center, one of the biggest convention centers in the country. This is a huge move, especially considering Momo has only been a paid convention for three years, and considering larger Atlanta shows like Anime Weekend Atlanta and Dragon*Con haven’t made such the move (though plenty of people agree that D*C should).

It’s impossible to guess how things might go their first year at the GWCC. A lot of this year’s problems will be moot, but there will for sure be new problems to replace them.

Pika pika pika pika pika.

The only thing that stays the same with MomoCon is its staff, but that’s actually saying a lot. Plenty of other conventions have very high staff turnover rates, especially amongst Artist Alley heads. Next year will be Shannon’s tenth year with the con, which means she only missed its debut year. That’s really something!

A lot of things factored into my decision to go back to MomoCon this year: timing convenience, being able to see my Atlanta friends and my brother, nostalgia… and staff awareness of AA issues and their receptiveness to feedback. I haven’t actually spoken to Shannon all that much personally, but I’ve exchanged a few words here and there with Jess and Chris, the con’s co-chairs, and they’ve always seemed very open to suggestions. Chris actually made time to come see me early Sunday afternoon because he saw me tweet about leaving early. It was the first time we’d met in person, and I was really surprised he took the time to say hello — as the showrunner, I’m sure the weekend was crazy hectic for him from beginning to end.

He invited me to send him feedback after the show, and that willingness to reach out and listen to potential criticism means a lot more to me than the convention going perfectly or my numbers at the end of the weekend.

The only wide aisle, the aisle at the entrance of the Alley.

There are a lot of problems that I think MomoCon is very aware of, but which they’ve been unable to provide satisfactory solutions to for whatever reason.

Artist Alley location is one of them. I think they’ve really struggled to find balance between having the AA in a decent spot and fitting in as many artists as possible and appropriate for a con their size. I think last year their Alley was significantly smaller, though still very cramped, and the location was lacking… but the year before that they were in a basement (or something), so 2013 was an improvement from 2012, probably. And 2014 was an improvement from 2013.

Even though I was iffy on the placement of some of the signs this year though, there were a good number of them, and Shirly says that traffic was way up from last year. She saw a 50% increase in sales — that’s huge! (I saw a 252% increase from MomoCon 2010, lol, but this statistic is not at all helpful. XD)

Different artists will have different opinions about what to prioritize in this situation — room location and space or number of artists? For me, it’ll always be room location and comfort, especially as a smaller Alley typically means less on-site competition. However, MomoCon’s AA registration is first come, first serve, and I think this year they sold out in less than a minute, so artists who are less confident in FCFS situations may want more tables over a more accessible or roomier location.

The tightness of the space this year made things really hit or miss for artists though, which really bothered me. Location within an Alley matters, but it shouldn’t completely make or break your weekend. I felt like more than half the Alley was a “bad spot” because of the narrow aisles, and that only about a dozen table locations were “good.” Less than eight feet of space in aisles is ridiculous, and less than four feet of space behind each table is equally ridiculous.

This will probably not be a problem moving forward, as I’m sure the GWCC has plenty of appropriate spaces for an Artist Alley, but I do kind of wonder where in the process someone went into that room and thought “yes, we can definitely fit fifty tables in here…” <_<

MomoCon loot! I traded Chihaya prints with Shirly; in hindsight, I should’ve given one of my Chihaya prints to Chris to give to Jess, since she and Shirly are the only Chihaya fans I know???

To be honest, I’m pretty iffy about MomoCon’s decision to jump to such a huge venue just four years after they became a paid convention… they’re also becoming a four-day convention at the same time. That’s another big jump! They were just a two-day con a few years ago! There are many, many conventions older than MomoCon that would probably never consider jumping to four days, especially since MomoCon isn’t actually over Memorial Day weekend next year. They’re the weekend after Memorial and their four days are Thursday through Sunday. Weird!

Will they have the attendance to justify the space? Will they have the programming to justify the four days?

Momo’s always had a strong game-related programming and a lot of American animation guests (Cartoon Network is right there in Atlanta, after all), but if they didn’t already tote themselves as one, they definitely can’t be mistaken as anything but a multi-genre convention in 2015. Being multi-genre will give them more options for related programming, but it also moves them out of my “home” genre con. I’ll probably never do as well at a comic or multi-genre con as I do at an anime con, and I know lots of other artists feel the same way.

Coronation gown Elsa! As rare as a shiny Pokemon!

Still, of the three big shows in Atlanta, MomoCon will probably always be my favourite. I got my real start in Artist Alley there; I like the staff; I like the attendees. I hope their move to the bigger space goes well for them, but whatever the problems that may arise, I’m confident they’ll make adjustments and accommodations as needed. If they’re staying at the GWCC for the long haul, then they’ll figure out how to make it work.

This year, I had a really great time hanging out with Shirly, and it was good to see my brother and my Atlanta friends as well. I did better than I thought I would, and I would’ve done better if I’d stayed all Sunday. I’ll give them a year or two to settle into the GWCC and their four day track, but I definitely would like to come back again someyear. :o

You know, I’d never been particularly interested in attending Anime Expo, which is over July 4th weekend every summer. AX is the largest anime convention in North America, but it seems like it’s always a mess with lots of management drama, especially where Artist Alley is concerned, which is why I’d never really wanted to deal with it.

But this year, it seemed like everyone I knew was going, including most of my friends and tons of artists I admire, and the big kicker was that almost all of these people are currently riding the high of the same fandom(s) as me, which is fairly rare.  Listening to everyone babble about AX prep and AX meetup plans and AX, AX, AX on Twitter all through June made me really sad about not being able to go…

Everfree Northwest was the same weekend though. And in addition to being local and convenient for me, Everfree was my favourite convention last year. So as long as it’s around, I’ll always choose Everfree over AX (and AnthroCon, that other big July 4th convention), even if makes for kind of a lonely convention for me.

AT LEAST I HAD ENDLESS COMMISSIONS TO KEEP ME BUSY.

This report is 4,326 words long.

Jump to: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Overall.

Pre-Con & THURSDAY

The vendor’s head for Everfree changed this year from Morgan (who’s now “Assistant Director of Business”) to Jer Flores, though Morgan still handled most communications regarding Vendor’s Hall up through April. Communications were about as frequent as they were last year, but a bit more organized. The operation’s smoothed out some!

Vendor registration was also a bit later this year, happening in mid-March, and this year they were juried. We got notifications about a month later in mid-April, and were asked to properly register for the convention at that point. Everfree has apparently adopted the same custom-built registration system that Rainfurrest uses… I don’t like it because it’s clunky and feels sloppily put together, but it gets the job done, I guess. We’re asked to send in the same info as last year for the website and social media (vendor display name, description of goods, any other interesting facts, etc) around early May, and we got an email about table assignments three weeks out, and another email about setup times about a week and a half out.

The Vendor’s Hall was running a scavenger hunt again this year, but I wish they’d given more of a head’s up about it. It was mentioned offhandedly in the table assignment email, and it was assumed that vendors knew about it from last year. Asking about it got a quick reply back, but it always annoys me when cons assume people know how things went “last year.” I did know about the scavenger hunt last year, but ultimately didn’t participate, so I didn’t remember anything about it. But even if I had participated, a year’s long enough forget the details. (The scavenger hunt basically gathered questions about various vendor tables/displays for attendees to answer, encouraging traffic to participating vendor tables. Completed questionnaires were then entered into a raffle for donated vendor goods.)

Overall though, pre-con communications were stellar. I decided to donate some postcards to the Charity Auction this year, and their staff was good about prompting me for info and giving me instructions for drop off, etc. All emails from all departments were informative and useful, and all emails to them were replied to promptly and professionally. I can’t sing enough praises for Everfree staff. ;3;

The Fake Lemonade Stand @ Everfree NW 2014.

Setup Thursday was from noonish through 6pm, though the Vendor’s head noted that the end time was very flexible, depending on how things went. The setup start time for Friday morning was also flexible.

I rolled into the Seatac Hilton around 3pm. The Vendor’s Hall was in the same room, right near one of the main entrances of the hotel. There were vendors and staff everywhere, but security was very lax — I walked into the room without being stopped. A map of the room was provided beforehand, but I had interpreted it backwards… the tables weren’t labeled, and so it took a few minutes to figure stuff out with the Vendor’s head.

Setup went smoothly. Despite the low ceilings, I built up to five feet this time, and so I had plenty of room. With bookmarks retired and the discovery that I actually moved more postcard sets with them lying flat on the table, I ditched the larger of my two plywood stands and stuck a pair of my postcards in nice frames to fill in the side. I also used the cute basket I had at Sakura-Con for Easter eggs as a $1 clearance bin, featuring the handful of bookmarks I have left and poor-performing buttons.

I finished setting up right before six, though it seemed that they were definitely going to be letting vendors stick around for longer to set up. I think there was a small bit of drama where one vendor who bought two tables had only been assigned one, but staff seemed like they were working hard to fix the mistake, and I didn’t really hear about it the rest of the weekend, so I guess they did?

Closeup of table.

After setup, I finally picked up my actual badge and program at a table outside the Vendor’s Hall. Then I wandered around a bit trying to find the Charity Auction so I could drop off my stuff. There was no map in the program guide, and I asked two staffers where it was. Neither could tell me, but one at least could point me to the display at the end of the hall that had a map. I eventually found it in a small, tucked away space in the conference center where most of the con events took place. I’d miscounted some stock and so wasn’t able to donate two postcard sets like I’d intended, but they didn’t mind me substituting one of them for a zipper bag instead.

Against my better judgment, I did a last minute print run at FedEx Office after I lightrailed back to Seattle. The miscounted inventory was for my MLP Villains postcard set, which I’d apparently sold out of somewhere between MomoCon and A-Kon, and I wanted to have more on hand for Everfree. As it always goes though, FedEx’s quality is abysmal and I wasn’t happy enough with the results to sell them full price, so I just chucked all of them in the clearance bin, haha. I keep telling myself I’m not going to do last minute print runs anymore because they’re never good, but then I KEEP DOING THEM. WHY.

When I finally got back to my apartment, I spent most of the evening cooking so I could just have leftovers all weekend and avoid going out to eat every night. I was hoping for a lot of commissions to work on over the weekend, and not eating out would save both time and money. And I mean, I had to cook my veggies before they went bad anyway. :o

My cat Rin is supremely unhelpful in all manner of things.

FRIDAY

Public hours for the Vendor’s Hall were 10am to 6pm both Friday and Saturday (and 10am to 4pm Sunday). Vendor setup started around 7am, I think, but I wasn’t in a hurry since I’d already finished.

So I got up around 8am and made myself an Actual Breakfast. This happens rarely enough that I was very proud of myself, haha.

Avocado, egg, & cheese bagel sandwich. Mmmyes.

One thing that became very obvious once I got to the con was the fact that there was no room at all behind the island tables. Last year I’d been against a wall, which meant meant there was no one behind me, and I had plenty of room. This year though…

During setup it wasn’t as noticeable because the folks at the table behind me weren’t there yet, but the chairs behind the tables were back to back with basically no wiggle room. This was frustrating because any time one of my back neighbours scooted back to get up, their chair would hit mine, and this could have potentially screwed up a lot of my inking while I worked. It was basically impossible to walk down the aisle behind the tables, and it got worse once these back neighbours set up their tall, vertical display banner, which completely blocked my exit.

None of this was my neighbour’s fault, and we did our best to adjust our things in the space to give us each more room, but ultimately there wasn’t much that could be done. There really needs to be at least, at least!, four feet of space behind each table, which means eight total feet of space in the back aisle of islands. This either means that Everfree needs to cut back on the number of vendors, or they need to move us into a different room…

Cutting the number of vendors is not ideal, so while I love the location of the current Vendor’s Hall in the hotel, it wouldn’t be horrible to move it into the adjoined conference center, to the room where Rainfurrest (which uses the same venue) has their Dealer’s Room, and where many of the convention’s panels and events take place anyway.

Large badge, pre-cutting and lamination.

The other thing was power. I didn’t pay much attention to power access for island tables last year since I was directly in front of a wall outlet, but apparently power was provided to all tables, including the islands. This is really quite nice of Everfree to provide, for free, as almost all other cons charge significant sums for access to power (to be fair, it’s usually because of the venue, not the con itself). I think, like many furry conventions, Everfree goes out of its way to provide power to its vendors because they realize that a lot of artists need it to laminate custom badges, which aren’t nearly as popular at comic or anime cons.

This year, they were supposed to provide the same, but for one reason or another, did not have it set up yet Friday. Staff mentioned some miscommunication issues with the hotel, but the bottom line was that we weren’t going to have power that day, so I would have to laminate all my badges at home that night.

Watamote pony badge, pre-lamination. Turning non-pony characters into ponies is one of my favourite things.

Friday’s crowd was mostly light and casual. I had just enough commissions to keep me busy for most of the day, but I got bored very quickly in between commissions (even if the time between finishing the last of my commissions and getting a new commission was sometimes just five minutes), and it felt like kind of a long day.

An hour before close, I had a freak out moment when I bought someone had walked off with my cashbox. This was especially terrifying because my cashbox doesn’t look like a cashbox, so someone would have had to watch me a while to know what it looked like and to specifically plan to take it. I scrambled around in the cramped space behind my table looking for it for about 45 minutes. My neighbours alerted staff for me.

In the end, I found it hidden in the thick folds of the tablecloth near the end of my table. It had fallen into a weird space where I couldn’t see it and all my scrambling around didn’t knock it back into view. It was one of the side effects of having such a cramped space, I guess. x_x It was a huge relief that no theft had happened though.

Full page commission from Friday.

Though I felt that Friday was “just okay” for most of the day, I actually ended up with a good amount of work to do that evening. Friday was the Fourth of July, so I think attendance might have been slightly down because of that. Last year, the fourth was the Wednesday before the convention. Still, I did see a couple of single-day badges, and the downtime I had during the day was fairly minimal.

I’ve mentioned before that I think I’ll always feel a con is “just okay” unless I’m completely overwhelmed, and I think that was definitely the case here. I think part of it, too, was that not very many people stopped to chat at length, so all I had was work, and if there was no work, then it was instant boredom. I didn’t have anyone except Twitter to talk to all day, and most of my Twitter feed was, of course, filled with AX tweets, which just made me feel more lonely, haha.

One of my favourite badges all weekend, because gryphon!

Since I have way easier lightrail access this year VS last year, I didn’t need Jer to chauffeur me to and from the con, and since Tori moved back to Texas, I didn’t have anyone else to do the show with. Basically everyone was at AX! On the heels of a very social A-Kon, this felt pretty jarring?

Onnanoko, my neighbour from last year, was just across the aisle from me. It was super nice to see her again, and we had nice chats before and after open hours, but we were too far apart to talk otherwise, and as we’re both local, we each headed back to our separate homes every night after the con to work and didn’t hang out all that much.

I finished all my homework commissions around 11pm, but I didn’t end up going to bed until like 2am because I got trapped scrolling through Feedly… this is the primary downside of home cons, haha.

All the laminated badges from Friday!

SATURDAY

As I was leaving Friday, staff were rolling in a cart with a ton of extension cords and outlets, and when I arrived Saturday morning, I was pleased to find that all the island tables were how wired for power.

It’s very fortunate that Everfree shares a lot of staff with Rainfurrest. This gives them both experience and resources (all the cords and outlets belonged to RF, apparently) they wouldn’t have had otherwise, and I think that’s a large part of why Everfree has been able to do so well in the time it’s had. In 2012 and 2013, a ton of My Little Pony conventions popped up, and many of them went as quickly as they came. Along with BronyCon, Everfree seems to be one of the ones with the most clout and staying power, and that’s very lucky.

Small badge for the con chair!

I wandered around a little bit Saturday morning and did a couple of trades with vendors who had approached me about it Friday. I figured it best to do trading Saturday so I could take home as much extraneous things that night as possible and not have to deal with it Sunday. Aside from doing trades though, I didn’t really talk with many other vendors at Everfree.

The vendors for Everfree were pretty diverse, but I felt a bit out of place amongst them since it was obvious that a majority of them primarily did pony conventions and were rather active in the fandom. Everfree’s my only pony con, and while I’m a fan of the series and really enjoy drawing ponies, I’ve never been particularly active in the brony fandom. There are a ton of well-known fan projects, fan personalities, in-jokes, and other things there that I’m completely unaware of, and while no one’s ever made me feel unwelcomed, I still felt kinda weird, I guess.

Another small badge commission!

Saturday was busy. Very busy.

I took on a huge number of commissions and worked nonstop the entire day. Despite finally having access to power, I only used my laminator once at the con Saturday because I didn’t end up finishing very many large badges while there. I bumped a lot of smaller commissions ahead of the badges because I could finish them more quickly, and most of the commissioners for badges said they probably wouldn’t circle back until the next day anyway.

I didn’t actually feel like I did that much work on-site Saturday, but I must have because I so tired by the late afternoon that I ended up having to completely redo a badge because I colored the character completely wrong. I also had to redo an ink sketch because the first go was sloppier than I wanted. I decided to stop working the last hour or so of the con because my brain just wasn’t working anymore… My take-home work queue at the end of the day had thirteen things on it, and all but one required color. I’d never had so many things to do overnight ever. o_o

The 45 minute lightrail commute home was a good opportunity for a nap, at least!

Saturday badge commission assembly line.

Despite knowing that I’d be up all night though, I was really pretty pleased with the amount of work I got Saturday.

I put a sign out Friday noting that laminated badges, which were by far the most popular commission type, would be +$5 of their base price Saturday and +$10 Sunday. (Later on, I also decided that all colored commissions would be +$10 Sunday.) It was my first time doing something like that, but I think it did help convince a few people to commission me Friday and it definitely convinced a few people to commission me Saturday, so I think I’ll keep doing that. :o

Saturday was a long night, but thankfully my friend Miyu stayed up with me on Skype (she’s as nocturnal as I usually am anyway) and helped keep me awake and engaged while I powered through commissions.

It was a mess in my apartment while I cut and laminated badges…

I went through everything in a very assembly line fashion, haha. I penciled everything first, then inked everything, finishing all the inks around midnight. I took a break to shower, then I colored all the badges, cut them and laminated them — the badges were all finished around 3am. Then it was just coloring all the sketch cards, which took just about an hour, so I finished up around 4am.

After that, I cleaned up and repacked everything for Sunday and managed a few hours’ sleep before getting up again at 8:30am. 8D IT WAS A GOOD NIGHT, HONESTLY.

All the colored sketch cards from Saturday night.

SUNDAY

All things considered, I was feeling pretty all right Sunday morning, if a little spacey, and my first new commission for the day was really fun! My hand was hella tired, but it wasn’t out of the game yet. It also made me happy that the commissioner was totally okay with the +$10 Sunday fee on colored commissions.

Trixie gijinka and Marisa!

Two of the commissioners picking up their Saturday commissions liked them so much that they immediately commissioned me for more stuff. More colored stuff! Both were, again, totally okay with the extra fee. I felt really appreciated. ;___;

The overall volume of commissions slowed dramatically Sunday, but instead of badges, folks were getting colored sketches and full page things, which are honestly both easier for me to do. The workload was perfect, and I had a really good time working on things.

Full page color commission.

Onna rolled in kind of late Sunday, but she was really sweet and brought me coffee (she did Saturday as well!). Jer also showed up at the con for a few hours in the early afternoon, bringing me coffee. I hadn’t seen him in a while either, so that was especially nice.

One of the biggest downsides of the Seatac Hilton is that there isn’t a proper coffee place for….miles? The hotel doesn’t have a built-in coffee place. Last year, they had the bartender brewing (not very good) coffee drinks, but this year, they just didn’t have coffee. So you had to get caffeine on the way in or not at all. D;

A little inked drawing for Onna as thanks!

I finished my last commission about 40 minutes to close and officially set down my pen for the weekend.

The total commission count for Everfree was 39, including 14 laminated badges, 6 small badges, 3 color full pages, 9 color sketches, 5 ink sketches, and 2 pencil sketches. Probably my most ever, though I know some of my commission records from previous cons are inaccurate because I worked on a lot of things on the spot while the commissioner waited (and didn’t mark down these commissions) instead of queuing everything like I do now.

This might be the weirdest commission I’ve ever gotten… “A darkened corner with eyes staring.”

Tony Fleecs, one of the artists on the My Little Pony comics, had been tabling across the aisle from me all weekend, and at the last minute, I finally got up and bought a print of his gorgeous Nightmare Rarity. I still haven’t read any of the MLP comics, though I’ve been meaning to for a long time, but Nightmare Rarity’s design just really, really appeals to me, haha.

Tear down after the show closed went smoothly and I chatted a bit with the Vendor’s head before I left. I mentioned that I was kind of sad that Everfree being on July 4th weekend means it conflicts with two other major shows and asked if the con would be the same weekend next year. He didn’t really give an answer, but said that next year’s dates would be up on the website within a week after the con. I felt kind of hopeful that they would be moving the date, but since Everfree has proven once again to be a great show for me, I honestly wasn’t too fussed…

Magritte clouds over Seatac as I catch the lightrail home.

OVERALL

Everfree Northwest was, once again, quite fabulous.

I was up 11% from last year for the weekend, though commissions made up a whooping 48% of the total this year, versus just 29% last year. I actually grossed exactly as much I did at ACEN, down to the dollar. Crazy! (For comparison’s sake, commissions made up only 16% of ACEN numbers.)

I didn’t move as much merchandise this year, though I’m sure part of that is because I didn’t have very many new pony-related items (though I did have a lot of new things in other fandoms). I didn’t speak as much with other vendors as I would have liked, but I think the general word from repeat vendors was that things were about the same as, or better than, last year. Good!

All of the badges from Saturday night.

Staff and attendees were just as great as they were last year. Everfree is still one of the few conventions I know of that provides artists with bottled water, and for the most part, staff made themselves readily available. When I had my cashbox scare Friday, it seemed that there wasn’t anyone in shouting distance and I obviously didn’t want to leave my table to go find someone, but my neighbours were all supportive and great during my freak out and all was fine in the end.

Bronies remain some of the most genuine fans I’ve had the pleasure of meeting at cons. There’s drama in every fandom, but I’ve been lucky enough to never have had any bad experiences with this lot myself. My very first customer Friday morning was a fan who’d purchased from me online several times but who’d never met me at a convention until then. That was kind of a first for me — I don’t yet make very many online sales, so a majority of my customers find me at cons and then follow me online, not the other way around — and it was really humbling to have someone so excited for me to sign my art for them.

Everfree swag! Minus a few things I traded for and didn’t remember to dig out for the photo.

A feedback survey was available online throughout the course of the con, and a link to it was also emailed out to everyone afterwards. This is such a simple thing, but I appreciate it so much since a lot of other cons still fail to do this. There was no vendor-specific feedback request this year, but I included lots of vendor-related comments in the regular survey anyway.

When I checked the website a few days after the con, the announced dates for next year were… May 29-31, 2015! Not July 4th weekend! It won’t conflict with AX! And by startling coincidence, AnthroCon is also not on July 4th weekend next year, which means I could possibly… do all three of them? I’m really excited about the possibility, but regardless, I’m happy about Everfree moving to the end of May because that means I don’t have to make any hard decisions about that weekend (which isn’t actually Memorial Day weekend, but it’s close enough that it may still be when Fanime and Animazement are happening next year; MomoCon is already confirmed for that weekend).

I’d learned a lot of things from my experiences at Everfree last year, so I think this year went especially smoothly for me, even without much extra help or company. I’m excited about next year! >:)

Xib and I both returned to KuroNekoCon this year, August 2-3, in Spokane, WA, and it roughly marked the one-year anniversary of our friendship! XD

Seattle to Spokane is a pretty nice, scenic drive.

This report is 3,733 words long.

Jump to: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Overall.

Pre-Con and FRIDAY

So after last year’s con, which was not bad by any measure, I sent a lengthy email to Makayla, KNC’s Exhibits head, with various comments and suggestions for improvement. Her response was encouraging, and I felt pretty good about the show’s prospects for 2014.

One of the things I critiqued was KNC’s website — it’s still kind of a mess, but they did parry down the number of broken links this year and they snipped some of the extraneous/outdated pages. Honestly though, I didn’t have to dig around on the site nearly as much this year because most of the information was staying the same, and they emailed previous vendors directly about registration in February. There was a minor issue getting the Google form to go live at the specified time, but otherwise the vendor registration process was painless. Google let you know your application went through, and a few days later, Makayla followed up with a Paypal payment link.

KNC is far too tiny to see the cutthroat competition for vendors’ spots that conventions like Sakura-Con see, so registration stayed open for quite a while. Indeed, come May, another email was sent out saying that there were still a few spaces available. A final email with load-in instructions, hours, map, and table assignments was sent in early July, exactly a month before the con. That’s pretty damn early for a final email, so it definitely felt like they were on top of things!

Beautiful clouds all the way to Spokane.

Since KuroNekoCon is a two-day show, Xib and I planned to leave around 1pm Friday afternoon. But minor household delays, Seattle Seafair traffic (or something… neither of us actually knew what was going on) and random construction around the stadium entrance to I-90 kept us in the city until like 2:30. We stopped for gas and snacks just before getting on the highway. The cashier asked if I was from Seattle (technically, no) and if I was in town for “the big cycling event.” I did not know about any such cycling event, and I have no idea what about me made him think I was a cyclist, but maybe the sign over my head declaring “still hopelessly obsessed with bicycling anime” is visible to laymen too…

The drive itself was uneventful and didn’t feel very long. The summer drive from Seattle to Spokane is nice and scenic, and Friday had some particularly epic cloud formations as it was supposed to storm in Spokane that night.

Okay, no cool clouds in this picture, but hey fields of gold~

We rolled into Spokane around 7:30 and after checking into our hotel, we met up with Mika (@Tetsumiro) and her mom and went to dinner at Sushi Maru.

While waiting to be seated for kaiten sushi, we hung out at the bar a bit, and Xib and I both got their DragonBall drink, mostly because it was called a DragonBall (but by great coincidence, it was also on special and cheap). We joked that they should only serve seven such drinks every night and each needed a different number of cherries in it. ;)

The one-star DragonBall.

Dinner was lovely, and it was great getting to hang out with Mika and to fantard over bike anime (which Xib still needs to finish!). Mika’s mom was also super nice and did not seem too out of place hanging out with a bunch of nerds, haha.

Mountain of kaiten sushi plates (and I wasn’t even done yet).

SATURDAY

Setup Saturday morning began at 7am; Exhibits opened to the public at 10am. We crawled out of bed around six, but it was a pretty lazy start. There were a whole bunch of loud drunks staying at our hotel and I’d woken up a lot in the night. A bit past seven we went down to the hotel’s complimentary breakfast, the highlight of which was self-pressed waffles. More hotels need free breakfast, man. I’m sure the con hotel, the Doubletree, is nice, but I’ll take the short commute and paying for parking for that relaxing breakfast away from the chaos of the con.

Hotel breakfast.

We rolled into the convention center’s loading zone around 8:15. By contrast to last year, there were various convention center staff around outside, but no KNC staff. No one approached us when we parked, but the loading door was wide open and building staff pointed out that the Exhibit’s Hall this year was right across from the loading door. Last year, we had to push things through a winding back corridor, so this was a huge improvement.

Though there were no KNC staff in the immediate vicinity of the loading door, there were plenty inside the actual Exhibit’s Hall, and as it turned out, my table was right next to the staff table this year and right by the main entrance . Xib was on my other side, so our tables and staff are the first ones attendees will walk by. (See map here.) Makayla checked us in and gave us our programs and badges, then I started setting up while Xib went to park the car at the Doubletree’s garage. The event parking for the weekend was just $5/day.

TOO MANY PRINTS.

Setup has been taking me a bit longer lately since I’ve been building regularly to 5′ and the two, nearly full-height “wings” on each side of the table take up a fair bit of extra time. I’ve also accumulated so many different print designs now that I always end up spending a lot of time debating which I should display. There are several older designs I plan to retire as soon as I sell out of my remaining stock, so hopefully this won’t be an issue for too much longer. My other problem is that I have an even mix of horizontally and vertically composed pieces, which makes piecing together the print wall more of a challenge.

I managed to finish setting up almost exactly at ten, but because many artists and several dealers didn’t arrive until right around then, opening ended up being delayed to 10:30am. This always annoys me a bit, but I wasn’t horribly fussed about it at KNC since it gave me extra time to clean up behind my table and then make a quick pass around the room before settling in for the day. As a small con, I also knew that attendees would circle back a lot throughout the course of the weekend anyway.

The Fake Lemonade Stand @ KuroNekoCon 2014

The Exhibit’s Hall had about the same number of dealer and artist spaces as last year, but the new room we were in was bigger, giving everyone more space to work with. It was very spacious behind the tables, and, though I didn’t notice until near the end of the weekend, I had a floor outlet behind me, so there was power supplied too. Outlet placement wasn’t perfect for every table, but it seemed like everyone that needed power got it somehow.

Since there was still only about a $10 difference between dealers and artist spaces, a lot of the dealer spots were occupied by artists and artisans. Because of this, I think there were fewer actual dealers compared to last year.

Kageyama and Hinata!

Traffic was steady for the morning, but tapered off around noon. I had one big commission pretty early on, then not very much for the rest of the day. Still, sales were pretty robust and there was more commission interest than last year. Since it’s a small con, people left and came back a lot. The new Exhibits Hall was right by registration, so a lot of attendees came in as soon as they got their badges, then went to see other things, then came back, and back again.

Though I was disappointed that there weren’t more Yowamushi Pedal cosplayers, I was happy to see all the Haikyuu!! (volleyball anime…) cosplayers at the convention within the first hour or so. I was also happy to get to spaz about Digimon Adventure with several people since it’d been announced just that morning that there would be a new direct sequel to the original series, to air in the spring season for Digimon’s 15th anniversary.

Kenma! (Cosplayer’s Tumblr)

Mika wasn’t tabling this year and hadn’t originally planned to attend, but since my table came with two badges and I wasn’t using the second one, I offered it to her. She showed up in the mid-afternoon and went on an accidental shopping spree for Evangelion and basketball anime merchandise. ;) Sports anime has consumed us all…!

Mika and I also traded the originals for our pre-arranged art trade, where we each drew the other’s bike OTP. :’D

Mika’s lovely drawing of my gross bike ship. <3

Because I was motivated by everyone else’s Yowapeda zines and mini artbooks, and because I just happened to have a lot of usable material, I made a 26-page copybon zine with various drawings of my bike OTP. It was nice having a new zine on the table — the last minicomic I made was for The Z Train in 2012 — but to be honest, I wasn’t expecting it to sell at all. Bike anime isn’t actually that popular (it just happens to have a very vocal, active, and artistic fandom), and even within the fandom, my ship isn’t the most popular ship. A labour of love! Obsessive, obsessive love!

The non-zero sales of the zine genuinely surprised me! XD And it was fabulous geeking out to the people who bought it. I love being able to geek out about these things at anime cons… ; 3 ;

This Makishima bought my zine and was also the only Yowapeda cosplayer at the entire con. ;3; (Cosplayer’s Tumblr)

One of the weirdest things about the day was the fact that there was a (Captain) Jack Sparrow cosplayer going around glaring critically at basically all the artists and making disparaging comments, either directly to them or within earshot of them. He wandered by my table several times, but never stopped to actually browse. At one point, I overheard him asking rhetorically why I had MLP-related stuff when it was an anime convention. (My mental retort was obviously, well why are you cosplaying Jack Sparrow; that is totally not from an anime…)

Rude comments said carelessly within earshot of artists is nothing new, and it honestly didn’t bother me at all, but apparently this person went straight up to Xib’s table and told him directly that some of his art was” inappropriate” for a family event and that if he could burn down people’s tables, his would be the first to go. o_O

Xib has some suggestive work, but there were no lines being crossed or even toed, and we know that KNC staff does check because Xib was asked to censor one of his buttons last year for having the word “fuck” on it, lol. (I think the guy was specifically mad about Xib’s Kill la Kill print?) Mr. Sparrow made a similar comment to Lauren, one of the artists at the table across the aisle from us, who also had some suggestive, but not inappropriate, work, so it’s likely that he approached other artists in the Alley as well.

After some thought, Xib reported the cosplayer to KNC staff, who seemed to take the issue very seriously. A little while later, staff followed up and told us that they’d spoken with him, and that if he continued with his remarks, to report him again. And so while Mr. Sparrow wasn’t kicked out or anything, to my knowledge, he didn’t make any other rude comments the rest of the weekend.

Nishinoya!

Exhibits closed at 6pm and as the day wound down, Xib and I made haphazard dinner plans with a couple of other artists. As everyone was packing up, I ran over to say hello to Emily (Sal/Crossexe), as well as Elaine (Misurabu) and Jackie (Azure-Inferno), the pair of whom I’m pretty sure I’d seen before at at least one other con, but whom I’d not spoken to until then.

Emily, Elaine, and Jackie sort of had other plans for the evening, but I also wanted to avoid a huge, huge party for dinner since those end up being a bit chaotic and not as fun. So the group for the evening ended up being me, Xib, Mika, Lauren and her table partner Markie, and Kacy (AmberTDD) and Robin (Rezllan), whom I’d met at Chibi Chibi Con.

Dinner was great. I ate my food and drink and then I ate everyone’s food and drink. :’)

We went to the Chili’s conveniently across the street from the convention center, where everyone had delicious watermelon lemonade and 2 for $20 dinners (except the odd person out, Mika, who wanted a big fancy steak anyway). I’m still really mad that there isn’t a Chili’s within any reasonable distance of Seattle, except for the one at the freakin’ airport. :| I love Chili’s.

Since Exhibits closed so early, we had plenty of time to relax and chat and hang out over dinner, and even though we stayed at Chili’s until 9pm, I still had a lot of free time that night. I didn’t have any commissions to do overnight, but thankfully I was able to entertain myself that night working on an impromptu art trade with Elaine and Jackie. And it was more bike anime stuff, wee! :D

Freshman bikes for Elaine and Jackie.

SUNDAY

Sunday started similar to Saturday, though we slept in a bit later since we didn’t have to worry about setting up. We checked out of the hotel after breakfast, then parked again at the Doubletree. The receptionist we’d had at our hotel last year had been an anime fan and had lamented not having known about KuroNekoCon. We didn’t see him at the hotel this year and hoped that he got to go to the convention, but if he was there, he probably didn’t remember us well enough to re-introduce himself at our tables, haha.

Sugawara! The last of the volleyballs at the con.

In the time before opening Sunday, I did another circuit around the Exhibit’s Hall and barged into a conversation between Makayla and some dealers about how things were going at the con and plans for next year. Makayla confirmed that as of Saturday, they’d had ~1,200 registered attendees, which is a pretty good jump from last year’s ~800/900.

She mentioned that they’d done a lot more marketing for 2014, including a local TV commercial, and it seemed to have paid off. The unfortunate part was that programming did not expand as much as she wanted — it seemed that last year panels broke some fire codes because rooms were overcrowded and that this year, they got bigger panel rooms, but not more panel rooms. This sounds it’d be pretty easily remedied for next year though.

Makayla also said that they probably weren’t going to increase the number of vendors next year, agreeing that the current amount was a good amount. There’s a good mix of dealers, artists, and artisans, and the room got comfortably busy at various points, but was never crowded. It’s a good, healthy Exhibit’s Hall for a con KNC’s size.

Exhibit’s Hall. This photo was from Saturday morning, before everyone was set up.

Sunday morning traffic was much slower than Saturday, but I got a higher volume of simple commissions to work on. I was really flattered by the number of customers who remembered me from last year, and more than one person told me they’d specifically looked forward to my being there. ;___; Almost all of these repeat customers bought new things or commissioned new things, and I’m really grateful for that continued interest and support.

Compared to Sakura-Con and other Seattle-area cons, where I felt that my constant convention presence made people bored of me, this was a really good feeling. I also got more people at KNC mentioning that they already followed me on Tumblr or dA… and I noticed a significant uptick in new followers over the days of the convention, which is incredibly rare. It’s a big bummer, but traffic to my online haunts almost never increases significantly in relation to my presence at conventions.

Ink sketch card commissions of Barnaby and Kotetsu!

The Exhibit’s Hall had the same hours Sunday as Saturday, which meant they closed pretty late for a Sunday. Commissions trickled to a halt in the early afternoon, and I didn’t have much to entertain myself with after that.

Traffic came in more noticeable waves Sunday, as the room emptied out significantly for big events like Cosplay Chess. This is similar to last year, but things didn’t get as dead as they did then. There were a couple of people that wandered in off the streets after seeing cosplayers about, so that was pretty cool. I’m really glad that KNC is centrally located enough and small enough to let casual passersby come in and check things out!

Sketch card commission of Robin’s cool TV head character. SPARKLES!

At the end of the day, I did a couple of merch trades with other artists, including Otomepeach and Wifom, then took forever tearing down because I have too much stuff!

The Sunday night dinner party was me, Xib, Emily, Elaine, and Jackie, and I was the last of the lot to finish tearing down, so everyone was waiting for me. <_<We had to split up to drop things off at cars anyway though. We didn’t want to move the car from the Doubletree’s garage to the loading zone, and the garage was too far away to effective use the giant palette dollies the convention center provided, but thankfully, Xib and I were able to get one of the staff to help us haul our stuff. Despite my taking forever, we somehow still beat Emily and company to Chili’s. (Chili’s is so close to the convention center and their 2 for $20 is so great; who cares if we go twice in a row??)

One of my favourite commissions over the weekend!

Dinner was once again great. I see Emily at a ton of other conventions, but this was my first time getting to hang out with her, so that was nice. It’s funny that she, Xib, and I are all local to Seattle, but we basically never see each other outside of cons… Elaine and Jackie are also in the area, though not in Seattle proper.

We should… really try to hang out more, but… we’re all such hermits, hahaha. <_< Several rounds of lemonade and one delicious watermelon margarita later, we all realized that it was like 9pm and all of us had to drive back to Seattle except Emily (who’s from Spokane and staying in town some extra days to visit family). The drive from Seattle to Spokane is lovely, and maybe the drive back is lovely too, but not in the dark. There are a lot of stretches of highway with no lights at all… it’s so hard to focus when you’re basically driving into a black hole. o_o

Haru-chan~.

OVERALL

KuroNekoCon was a good show.

I was up 27% from last year and made almost exactly the same amount Saturday and Sunday. Percentage revenue from commissions held steady from last year, at 22%. From a vending perspective, the con improved a great deal between this year and last, and I’m really happy that many of the things I brought up last year were addressed in some way. Being right next to the staff table certainly helped for me, but the Exhibit’s Hall is small enough that the general staff presence is easy to note. Everyone was very nice and knowledgeable and took vendor concerns seriously.

The con’s growth in attendance this year is also encouraging, and there’s still plenty of room for them to expand within the Spokane Convention Center. The location really can’t be better, and with more marketing and outreach, I think they can really carve out a good place in the local nerd scene.

Xib @ KuroNekoCon 2014

Though there are more than a dozen nerd conventions of other genres, KuroNekoCon is one of just three Washington state anime conventions — the other two being Sakura-Con in Seattle and KumoriCon in Vancouver, WA, though the latter is so close to Portland, it may as well count as a Portland con. (oh, what about Aki Con you say? What Aki Con? That con is dead to me.)

Spokane is far enough away from Seattle that there are a lot of people unable to travel out for Sakura-Con, especially teenagers. Unsurprisingly, KNC’s crowd skews young, even for an anime con. There were a lot of kids 10-16 there, and honestly, that makes for one of the best crowds because most of these kids don’t have a way of buying goods online. This one home town convention is all they have, and I think dealers do especially well because of that.

KuroNekoCon swag.

I also really appreciate that for a con that I am traveling a fair bit to attend (five hour drive, man), KNC’s a pretty low-stress con. Their small Exhibit’s Hall and reasonable hours makes it way easier to actually chat with and hang out with other artists (not to mention the Most Convenient Chili’s).

More than one vendor at KNC mentioned that they’d read my con report from last year, haha… I don’t know that they specifically attended the convention because of that report, but I hope everyone had a good show. I did! And I look forward to next year. :)

So DragonFlight is a small tabletop gaming convention, run by Seattle Metro Gamers, and held annually in Bellevue, WA. This year it was August 8-10, the weekend after KuroNekoCon.

I knew it was a risky venture — I’d never done this sort of show before, it’s outside my usual, and expected attendance was low compared to most anime or comic cons at ~500 — but it’s more or less local, and I convinced Xib to give it a shot with me, so at least I’d have company. I was hopeful that the roleplaying crowd would have plenty of original characters to commission sketches of, and I also figured I’d be able to do some promotion for ‘Souls RPG, the collaborative writing roleplay I help run.

DragonFlight banner.

This report is 4,098 words long.

Jump to: Pre-Con, Friday, Saturday, Overall.

Pre-Con

When I stumbled over the convention initially in March, the information on their website hadn’t been updated yet for 2014, and their website in general looked like it was stuck in 1995 or so in terms of layout and functionality. General info was sparse and confusing, and it was hard to tell if contact info was outdated or not, since they seem to create new emails on a yearly basis (with addresses like dealers2012@dragonflight). DragonFlight has been around since 1980, so the outdated web practices weren’t surprising. This is the opposite of KuroNekoCon, run largely by college kids younger than me; DragonFlight is run by the generation before me.

I emailed the general info email and received a pretty prompt response back from Amy, the Dealer’s Room coordinator, that they weren’t accepting applications yet. DF doesn’t have a separate Artist Alley, but vendors of all sorts are apparently welcomed in the DR. Spaces were $110 for a 6′ table and two badges.

At the beginning of June, I noticed that the website had been completely overhauled with a slicker, modern layout, and that registration and event scheduling were being run through a third party (Eventbrite). I pinged them again about dealer registration and was sent an application a few days later. I emailed back the application and got an invoice in another few days. Painless all around.

Eventbrite sent out a bunch of emails about the show in July, and Monday before the con, I emailed Amy about setup and public hours. She again responded back pretty quickly, then sent out a general vendor email with some additional information.

Last minute ‘Souls RPG promo poster I threw together using last year’s birthday art.

FRIDAY

Setup Friday started at 10am, but the room didn’t open to the public until 2pm.

That was plenty of time, so Xib didn’t pick me up until around 10. Traffic was very light, and we got to the Bellevue Hilton from downtown Seattle in about 20 minutes. It was kind of weird being back at that Hilton, since the last time I was there was for the disaster that was Aki Con 2012. I didn’t look too closely at the parking garage when we passed it, but there were cars in it, at least, instead of tables and other stuff.

The DragonFlight Dealer’s Room was in the first partition (of four) of the main ballroom on the lower floor of the hotel. Registration was right by the lower level’s entrance and they directed us towards the ballroom for vendor badge pickup. When we pushed open the door, Amy, the Dealer’s coordinator, was there and immediately greeted us with, “You’re Kiri and Xib, right?” We’d never met, so that was kind of creepy! But she explained that it was process of elimination, since we were the only vendors she hadn’t met yet.

Xib and my DF table. No Fake Lemonade banner to save on space!

It was a challenge figuring out how to set up since Xib and I were going from each having our own 8′ table at KuroNekoCon the weekend prior to needing to share a 6′ table, but we made it work! More or less. I was trying a new thing with my letter-sized prints (individually boarding and sleeving them for display), but unfortunately that new thing took up a lot of space. Xib always insists that he doesn’t care if I have my Fake Lemonade Stand banner up when we share tables, since he doesn’t have a banner anyway, but I think ditching it this time was a good call because we really had no room, haha.

Since we got there so early, we finished setting up with more than an hour to spare. When we’d arrived, only one other vendor was there. When we finished, there were maybe four or five other pairs or small groups, all in the process of setting up. The vendors erecting bookshelves of tabletop RPG books and board games, I expected, but I was pretty surprised to see a fandom tea blender, Friday Afternoon Tea, amongst the other vendors. There was also a leatherworker, a steampunk jeweler/metalworker, and a builder of adorable little terrariums that also housed tiny miniatures.

Dealer’s Room setting up.

The Dealer’s Room was pretty small. There were only 12-15 of us total (I never got an exact count, since some vendors took up multiple spaces), and the other three partitions of the ballroom were being used as the main game room. All the vendors were lined up against the walls, and the middle of the room had two round tables and one long table (see above) to be used for game demos.

There were also some vendors out in the hall, including one fantasy artist. I think most of the others out there were promotional groups though. Just outside of the hall, the Hilton had available a variety of conference-style, semi-catered food options, including pizza and sandwiches and salads (similar to what they had at Aki Con in 2012). Apparently, some of the proceeds from these food sales went to DragonFlight. Upstairs on the main floor of the hotel was a Tully’s Coffee and the hotel restaurant, so food options were fairly decent overall.

Dealer’s Room (still early in setup; vendors at the table against the wall hadn’t arrived yet).

At 2pm, there was no real indication that the Dealer’s Room had opened except that the gatekeeper was no longer shooing people out.

The flow of attendees into the room was minimal, and certainly no one had been waiting around for us to open. Instead, all the action and interest was concentrated in the game room, where there were end-to-end rows of tables filled with people running various board and card games. Out across from registration, there were more game tables. Out by the bathrooms, more game tables. There were signs noting that various other games were on the upper floor as well. Everywhere, tabletop games.

Main game room, before it got even more crowded. Photo by @Chiparoo.

In the first hour, I got several inquiries from game makers about doing art for their games and roleplay books. New contacts and potential future gigs are great, but I tend to be skeptical about them until project details are on the table and a real dialogue starts. At the business card exchanging stage, these jobs are still mythical beasts to me. What I really wanted from the con was at-con work and at-con sales. Something real and substantial to keep me busy in the present. Unfortunately, traffic was absolutely abysmal throughout the day.

They actually opened up part of the wall partition between the Dealer’s Room and the game room so people could pass through more easily, but this didn’t actually improve anything. There was never more than ten attendees wandering through the DR at any given time… And those that did come by did not seem very interested in browsing, shopping, chatting, or even making eye contact. It was the most disinterested crowd I’d ever seen.

Close-up of our table.

Shy and awkward can describe a great many con-goers, and I think I’m pretty used to dealing with shy and awkward. I am also shy and awkward. I get it.

There are conventions where I feel a bit out of place (furry cons) or at a loss as to how to connect with attendees (most comic cons), but this was the first where I felt that people were…standoffish? Condescending? A majority of those that passed by the table wouldn’t return basic greetings and rushed on as soon as they noticed that we noticed them. This in and of itself isn’t super atypical, but it was, admittedly, more jarring to see from grown men in their 40′s than teenagers, and the former was what DF’s attendee pool was comprised of.

The main crowd for anime cons is squarely in the teens and early 20′s demographic, with a smattering of older folks, but it’s very diverse in terms of gender and race. The crowd for furry cons is older, 20′s-40′s maybe, but still very diverse. The crowd for comic cons combines everything, with people of all age groups and backgrounds. DragonFlight seemed to be primarily white men in their 30′s-50′s. It was the most homogeneous crowd I’d ever seen at a convention, and also the demographic I’ve sold to the least, but surely not for lack of trying.

I don’t doubt that some of it may have been paranoia, but I got the distinct feeling that most passed by our table, judged harshly, and moved on, even before we could get a word in. It was weird. And discouraging.

Ask me about my RPG! Few did.

Not everyone was like that, of course. The small handful of people who did actually stop by our table for more than a second were very nice and polite, teven if still very shy and awkward. One guy was super enthusiastic about both Xib’s and my art, and that made us both feel better about things for a while, but sadly, the multitude of briefer, negative interactions stick with me more. It’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re not really welcomed.

I was disappointed, too, that I felt like I couldn’t really promote ‘Souls in the way that I wanted. The RP board has gotten a lot more diverse in the last few years, but there’s no pretending that it isn’t still a majority women and queerfolk in their teens and 20′s. I don’t know how to pitch that to an older, cismale crowd, but few stopped long enough at the table for me to mention it, and honestly, the demographic clash was so obvious that I’m sure that even if anyone had checked out the board, they wouldn’t have been interested anyway.

Bored doodle of random demon.

Both Xib and I had one commission each the entire day and could count total sales on one hand. As usual, I found it maddening to be at the table with nothing to do. I took some sketch requests from Twitter and spent as long as possible on the one commission, but ultimately still spent a lot of time doing absolutely nothing and feeling bad about it.

Three other conventions come to mind when I think about painfully slow shows: EXPCon 2009, Delta H Con 2010, and Aki Con 2012. All of these were anime cons though, so at least I could relate to the attendees, enjoy the cosplayers, and bond with other artists in our collective misery.

EXPCon was one of my first conventions, so I was still learning a lot. That con also happened to be over the weekend of a hotelmate’s 21st birthday, so we found other ways to entertain ourselves through the otherwise lackluster weekend, lol. During Delta H Con, all seven of us in the Artist Alley were so bored, we mostly spent the weekend commissioning each other and chatting a lot, but at least it kept us entertained. Aki Con went similarly, with me keeping busy with art trades and doodles until things finally sort of picked up Sunday.

Spiked milkshake. It was one of those days.

DragonFlight though… I felt out of place enough that I didn’t really feel comfortable mingling with others.

As a show run by Seattle Metro Gamers and which has been around for many, many years, it seemed that a lot of people already knew each other. Amy, after all, greeted me and Xib by name by process of elimination, and even though there were several first time vendors there, my guess is that they’d been around the game group or otherwise knew people in it. Most of the vendors in the back of the room chatted heartily amongst themselves throughout the afternoon.

Things were going slowly for everyone though, so I guess my out-of-place feeling wasn’t the only contributing factor. It was obvious that the crowd at DF just wasn’t there to shop or buy. They were there to play games.

Xib’s partner Vinty showed up an hour or so before we closed for the day (7pm), so afterwards, we all went to dinner at Lunchbox Lab. My spiked milkshake wasn’t spiked enough.

Lunchbox Lab food.

SATURDAY

After mulling over some things Friday night, I decided to come prepared Saturday with things I could work on if it was dead again. Namely, I was going to work on the silly 10-page Yowamushi Pedal doujinshi I had thumbnailed out on a whim a week or so prior.

I think I’ve had a hard time entertaining myself at the table recently because I filled up my little sketch commission examples binder a few cons ago and now have no where to put new examples, so there’s less incentive for me to work on more. I have plenty of room for more ACEOs, I suppose, but I’ve had a harder time thinking of interesting compositions for the small space. Even I get tired of drawing floating heads sometimes… but I keep remembering that in my last quarter of college, I did three conventions while busting out pages for senior project, so there was definitely a time when I could do more substantial work at the table.

So I brought paper for comic pages and tried to be as optimistic as possible about Saturday, which had hours from 9am to 7pm.

Four pages penciled.

In the first hour we were open, we had two people look at our table for more than a few seconds, and I penciled two pages of comic.

In the second hour, I penciled two more pages. By the end of the third hour, I had eight pages penciled. Meanwhile, we’d had zero sales. I felt a ton better having something to focus and work on, but I felt really bad for having dragged Xib in with me. He was doodling and listening to music, but he was obviously still bored out of his mind. I’d never seriously considered not coming back for the last day of a convention before, but I considered it then. Even EXPCon, even DHC, even Aki Con, I came back Sunday. For those cons, I still had hope, somehow.

DF… honestly, I feel bad about the whole ordeal because DragonFlight itself was not a bad convention.

It’s small and intimate and they used the space well. The showrunners are organized and Amy was helpful, accommodating, and understanding in every conversation we had. The attendees were there to game, and it seemed, for the most part, that they were having a good time doing just that. They even had free badges for visitors, which seems like a neat idea. Visitors were free to mill around the show and visit the Dealer’s Room, but they couldn’t participate in any games. I think DragonFlight probably a great show to go to as an attendee if you’re into the genre and have some friends to bring along with you.

But it’s not a show for vendors.

I finished penciling around 1pm and started lettering.

The Dealer’s Room remained dead through Saturday afternoon. I heard one attendee remark that the games in the DR weren’t “priced competitively,” which is why they weren’t buying. The demo tables in the DR weren’t being used all that much, especially compared to the game tables in other areas of the con.

Since I was too shy and awkward to chat much with the other vendors, I can only speculate as to how everyone else did, but the easy guess is that a dead DR meant few sales all around. Xib and I made our first sale at 1:30pm, more than four hours after DR opened. In the mid-afternoon, I briefly considered packing up and leaving before we even closed for the day. Even with my doujin to work on, I was getting restless and feeling perpetually guilty about Xib’s boredom. At some point, he swapped to reading an ebook on his iPad, and he went an hour or two without interruption because there was nothing to miss.

All lettering done.

Around 6pm, I stopped working on the doujin because my general irritation with the con was leaking through and my work was getting sloppy. We coasted through the last hour, then tore down. We weren’t coming back to vend Sunday. I was convinced that it would be a complete waste of time to spend another day sitting at a table no one was looking at.

Amy was incredibly understanding about this, which I really, really appreciate. She mentioned that it was always kind of hit or miss with artists — that sometimes they’d do really well, and sometimes not so much. I should have really asked more about how other vendors usually did, and whether this was just an off year for everyone, but I didn’t have the energy to.

I entertained the idea of going back to actually check out the rest of the convention Sunday since, again, it did seem like a good con for attendees, but my apparent inability to mesh with the crowd made me nervous. It’s one thing to go to these things with friends, play games, whatever. It’s weird to go by yourself, maybe doubly so after already being made to feel like an outsider.

The nail in the coffin came, though, when Xib dropped me off at my apartment and I discovered that the elevator in my building was broken. I live on the top floor. And so after dragging 140+ lbs of luggage up five flights of stairs by myself, I decided I was pretty much done with the weekend.

Twitter sketch request for @KaloMermaid from Friday, of her kirin character.

OVERALL

From a vending perspective, DragonFlight was a huge bust.

I absorbed the cost of Xib’s half of the table because I felt so bad about the whole thing. Neither of us lost money ultimately, but we sure did lose time. I guess we got a learning experience though.

It’s really too bad, because it seemed like the show could have worked out if things had been just a little different, if the crowd had been a little more diverse and open, if a bunch of a little things. It still surprises me that there weren’t any roleplayers wanting art of their characters, or if they were, that they never came to the Dealer’s Room. I overheard here and there attendees mentioning that this was their first time breaking away from their game tables to see the DR, but even when they got there, their browsing was brief; they were mostly disinterested.

The tabletop crowd is probably closest to the sci-fi/fantasy crowd. The only SFF con I’ve done is AggieCon 2011, where I did reasonably well by being the only person in the room doing commissions, and that’s the main reason I had hopes for DF. I think AggieCon being a college con skewed things though, and there were definitely more younger attendees there than at the typical SFF con. There weren’t a lot of teenagers at DF. Most of the kids there were in the 6-13 range and were the children of older attendees. And of course, children under 13 are the people I am most uncomfortable with, haha…

Twitter sketch request for @Shazzbaa from Friday, of one of her D&D characters.

Pros

• Old, established convention. DragonFlight has been around for more than thirty years, and there’s an amount of stability and experience that comes with that.
• Staff communication & professionalism. Amy, the Dealer’s Room coordinator, is also apparently a Vice President of the show and the Convention Director, always responded to emails within a day, was good at answering questions, and overall just a nice person who was pleasant to deal with. I feel pretty bad that we abandoned ship early, but she was very understanding about the whole thing, which I’m still thankful for. All of the other staffers I encountered at the con were also very kind.
• Venue space & usage. The Bellevue Hilton doesn’t have a whole lot of space, which is one of the reasons Aki Con had such a hard time there, but for the much smaller DragonFlight, the space worked really well. The DR was in a pretty prominent location, right by the entrance, registration, and the main game room, and there was potential for good traffic flow if anyone had actually cared about DR. Parking at the Hilton is normally $20/day, but for DF attendees, it was just $3/day, and you could get a validation ticket at registration, nice and easy. Convenient on-site food options are also always a plus.
• Free visitor badges. I think badges for the convention were $35/weekend, but I really liked that they allowed visitors to watch and mingle for free. It’s a good way to encourage passersby to check things out while still keeping tabs on everyone at the convention.
• Small Dealer’s Room. Though I’m sure part of it is lack of interest in the DR, it was good that the DR wasn’t bigger than it was. 13-15 vendors is plenty for the ~500 attendee crowd. They didn’t even have different vendor badges because there were few enough of us that Amy and the DR gatekeeper relied on sight to recognize who was and wasn’t supposed to be in there before and after hours.
• Secure Dealer’s Room. The DR was locked down after hours every night. Vendors out in the hall could keep whatever hours they wanted (and you could choose where you wanted to be when you registered), but the one artist outside always hauled their display stuff into the DR when it closed, and that was allowed and fine too.
• Overall organization. From what I could tell, DragonFlight was a pretty well-run show. Registration lines weren’t long; visitors could get free badges fairly quickly, etc. There were a few speedy announcements shouted unsuccessfully over the din of the game room Friday, but later on they got the intercom system working for announcements.

Cons

• Very disinterested crowd. It became very obvious very fast that no one was really interested in shopping at DragonFlight, whether it was for games or art or other things. They were there to play games and that was it.
• Very homogeneous crowd. Even without making generalizations about individual demographics, it’s easy enough to say that the more diverse a crowd is, the better. I think most artists have a pretty good idea of who their work appeals to the most, and while we’ll do our best to sell outside of that audience, mileage will vary. For me, I don’t think I’ve ever met so much resistance trying to get people to stay at the table for more than a few seconds. If the middle-aged, white male audience isn’t your best one, you’re probably going to struggle here.
• Attendees not familiar with art/commissions. It’s been a while since I’ve encountered so much confusion about on-site commissions, and it clearly stems from these attendees’ lack of experience with artists at conventions. We had several people not understand the difference between prints and commissions, including one person who asked for a BW inked version of one of my prints and was confused when I quoted a price far higher than the cost of the print. Custom-made originals are gonna cost more than printed reproductions, guys, and I don’t make BW prints of stuff I finished and colored…

Truthfully, the pros outweighed the cons, but the first con is an absolute deal-breaker. For a vendor, it doesn’t matter how well-run and organized a convention is if they can’t engage the crowd or make sales.

I feel really lucky that I didn’t lose money on this, and I’m glad that I got as much work done on my doujin as I did Saturday. Mostly though, I feel bad that DragonFlight didn’t go well, especially since it was no one’s fault.

Oh well.

Kumoricon, held annually over Labour Day Weekend, is an anime convention in Vancouver, Washington — which is across the river from Portland and not to be confused with Vancouver, British Columbia, which is the same distance from Seattle, but in the other direction.

Kumoricon has a small, juried Artist Alley, and they’ve declined to accept me every year I’ve applied… until this year.

Kumoricon Artist Alley.

This report is 7,371 words long.

Jump to: Pre-Con, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Overall.

PRE-CON

I was glad to finally have the chance to go, but honestly, there were a lot of things about Kumoricon that made me hesitant: they’re a mid-sized convention (~6000 attendees), and this would be their first year as a four-day show; they’re split between two hotels, the Hilton Vancouver and the Red Lion, about 3-4 blocks apart; and most of all… their Artist Alley was in the Hilton’s garage last year (and in some previous years?), and set to be there again this year.

When the whole Aki Con fiasco was going down, a lot of people threw out comparisons to Kumori’s garage use, saying that Aki Con could have put in at least as much effort as Kumori, which, according to reports, made their garage fairly habitable. Still, at least one report pegs Kumori’s garage conditions to be health-threatening in the summer heat, and it made me wary that the con’s management didn’t deem its vendors worthy of a better space.

Sports anime mania isn’t over yet, if you were wondering.

Kumori’s AA reg is fairly late in the year as is, but I also didn’t get notification that I’d moved off the waitlist until mid-July, a month and a half before the show, so I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to figure out last minute accommodations with most of the hotels sold out already. Without a car, my options were really limited.

Despite its many problems though, most I asked said that Kumoricon was worth it, and in the end, I decided that I wanted to try the show at least once. So I reached out to Errow (the headlessgirl) to see if she was interested in splitting my table in exchange for a ride down, since she hadn’t been able to move off the waitlist. Errow’s partner AJ (the hauntedboy) was already splitting a table with their friend Tara, so that rounded out our party to four, perfect for carpooling and hotelsharing!

Ellen, the Artist Alley coordinator, was understanding and accommodating of the time it took for me to make a decision about attending and to sort out things with Errow. It really only took about a week for me to get back to her, but as many conventions move down their waitlist very quickly, I appreciated the extra time.

Around the end of July, we were sent contracts and payment instructions… I had confirmed with Ellen prior to contacting Errow about tablesharing that the tables were 8′; however, when the contract came, Ellen apologized and noted that the tables were only going to be 6′ after all. I was pretty miffed, since that meant 3′ of space each for Errow and me instead of 4′, and considering each of us could fill a 8′ table on our own, this would be a pretty cramped setup. There wasn’t really anything that could be done at that point though.

A week before the con, we got the map, table assignments, and other information, including notes about parking and power.

I packed light for Kumori since I only had half a table, and I knew the car would be cramped…

THURSDAY

Errow, AJ, and Tara picked me up around 1pm Thursday. Errow drives a compact car, so I was expecting one helluva Tetris game with four artists and their con gear.

Since Errow’s PVC setup is lighter and takes up less space than mine, we agreed that we’d just use hers, saving me the trouble of having to bring mine. I also shed most of my non-print merchandise because I knew I wouldn’t have room to display them anyway. This got me down to one small carry-on size suitcase and a large duffel — I haven’t packed so light for a con since I was in college! It was a good thing though — if I had brought my larger suitcase, there was no way everything would have fit in the car without a heavy suitcase sitting in someone’s lap for three hours. :’)

Unfortunately for me, I packed my clothes separately in a small bag… and then I forgot to bring it. I realized it about half an hour out of the city, but I didn’t want to make the whole party double back for it. ~_~ It was my first time forgetting to bring clothes, and between all the other times I’ve forgotten something (my PVC, my PVC connectors, half my prints, all my buttons…), I think I’ve forgotten everything I could possibly forget at one point or another. SIGH. Hopefully this means I’ve learned my lesson?

Kumoricon Artist Alley dungeon.

I dozed for most of the drive, but we stuck well to our schedule and rolled into Vancouver around 4pm.

We had no idea where to park for load-in though, and when we asked the staff around the Hilton’s front entrance, they directed us kind of vaguely in the general direction of the garage. Since the garage itself was being used for con space, we obviously couldn’t park there, and ended up in a weird semi-private lot behind the hotel. There were a bunch of other cars parked, but we were still iffy on whether we were allowed there. The building/storefronts the lot was feeding looked creepy and abandoned… Errow and Tara went to ask Artist Alley staff. There wasn’t a clear answer, but they checked in and we decided to take our chances and go ahead and unload.

Registration was directly to the right of the garage entrance and Artist Alley was straight ahead, partitioned off by a chain link fence. Various draped, temporary walls also sectioned off parts of the AA from the Game Room, which was also in the garage. The Alley was pretty empty when we arrived, with only Ellen and maybe 3-4 other artists around. AJ and Tara were just a few tables down from the entrance, but Errow and I were way at the end of the aisle, in a weird section that deadended with a fenced off part of the Game Room.

Weird deadend in back of long Artist Alley aisle; our table was to the right of this photo. (The fence would be closed after setup.)

We weren’t thrilled with the placement of our table relative to the rest of the Alley, and the overall lighting in the garage was abysmal, but even still, it was clear that Kumoricon had put a lot of effort into making the space comfortable:

• The garage was fully carpeted.
• There were long funnels snaking through most of the garage with various openings near Registration, the Kumoricon merch stand, Artist Alley, and the Game Room, feeding in cold air from huge air conditioning units outside.
• Upright fans were also positioned here and there throughout the Alley for additional air flow.
• Two prominent water stations were at the entrance of the garage, and Artist Alley staff went around offering artists water intermittently.

It was still fairly stuffy in the garage, but the forecast for the weekend was partly cloudy and mid-70’s, so that helped a lot to keep temperatures tolerable.

And guess what? The tables were 8′ long after all.

This was great because it meant Errow and I got our 4′ space each, as originally planned, but it was really, really lucky that we’d decided to go with Errow’s PVC supplies instead of mine. Since we drove in, she hadn’t been worried about weight and had packed all of her PVC. If it had been me — even though we weren’t flying, since my PVC is thicker and takes up a lot of space — I would have packed exactly the amount I thought I needed, which was 6′. :/ It was clear that a lot of other artists were thrown off by the longer-than-planned tables and several people had PVC displays that did not cover the full length of their table.

When prompted, Ellen told us that every time she had asked the hotel, she’d been told six foot tables, six foot tables, and when she arrived on site, they were eight foot tables. From what I gathered, they were eight foot tables in years past too, so I have no idea what the confusion was on the hotel’s end. Even though things worked out in our favour in the end with the longer tables, it’s frustrating as hell to be told one thing and then given another… :/

Kiriska x the headlessgirl @ Kumoricon 2014.

It was a little difficult setting up my print wall since there was an upright fan blowing right at the table, but other than that, I think Errow and I split the space well, and I got to put up basically everything I wanted to put up. The extra foot of table space gave me more room to work behind the table as well.

Marl, tabling on behalf of PurpleKecleon, was at the table next to us, so we got to chat a bit during setup. One of his table assistants (I’m sorry I still don’t know either of your names…) was from Vancouver and gave us directions to the nearest Fred Meyers, about a mile and half away.

After AJ, Tara, Errow, and I were all set up, we made our way there to load up on snacks and miscellaneous things — in my case, I grabbed some underwear and a set of clothes I could sleep in. I’d picked up a toothbrush and toothpaste when we stopped for gas en route to Vancouver. Instead of blowing a lot of money rush-buying a bunch of new crappy clothes for the weekend, I planned to hand wash the shirt I was wearing each night at the hotel and hang drying to wear each day. u_u

Kenma~.

We had dinner at the Panda Express in the same lot as the Fred Meyers, then checked into our hotel, some eight miles out from the Hilton, as all of the closer hotels had been booked full by the time I got notice of my table. Despite the distance, the hotel was still one of the official overflow hotels for the con, which meant it was still full of convention goers (which meant the halls were pretty noisy). Still, they had free cookies at check-in and free breakfast every morning, and the hotel rooms themselves were surprisingly huge, so no complaints here.

…There were two big lamps in the hotel room which weren’t tied down to anything and we seriously contemplated ~borrowing~ them for the weekend and bringing them to the convention with us to provide extra light. They were pretty large desk lamps though, and we weren’t sure there’d be space at the table to set them up. In the end, we didn’t use the lamps, but it’s pretty sad that we really considered it… It’s ridiculous that vendors should need to provide their own light!

The Kumoricon mascot this year!

FRIDAY

Artist Alley didn’t open to the public until 11am, but we got up pretty early so we had time to get breakfast and figure out parking… There was no parking at the Hilton, street parking was metered, and the Red Lion only allowed guests staying at their hotel use their lot.

The gatekeeper at the Red Lion lot pointed out that there was a grass lot across the street and that we could park there “at [our] own risk.” The lot wasn’t marked for parking, but nor were there any notes about not parking or getting towed. There were already several cars pulled into the lot, and so we decided to go for it and joined them. No way they could tow everyone, right. >_>

After parking, we walked over to the Red Lion to check out Dealer’s Room. DR had the same hours as AA, so we weren’t technically allowed in, but security was pretty lax, and AA badges, while marked differently, were the same color as DR badges. <_< We were uncomfortable enough sneaking in that we sort of just made a quick loop around though. I’d wanted to find Pete to say ‘hi,’ but I didn’t see him there! The DR was surprisingly tiny and it wasn’t until much later that I learned that it was actually split into two rooms, the second of which was in a separate building, an annex to the Red Lion. Geez.

Ramp leading down to Hilton garage, aka Registration, Game Room, and AA dungeon.

The walk between the Red Lion and the Hilton wasn’t as bad as it looked on the map, but it was still far enough that I resigned myself to not being able to really being able to check out the Dealer’s Room(s) while they were open. This normally isn’t a big deal to me, but as Kumori was my last anime con of the year… I really, really wanted to look for some Yowapeda doujinshi… (Errow went at some point and reported back that there was none to be found anyway, but still.)

Since we had already set up, I spent most of the rest of the morning wandering through the Alley catching up with people I knew and having various discussions about both sports anime and the conditions of the Kumoricon Artist Alley. At some point, it came to my attention that one of the other artists in Errow and my back corner of AA dungeon had complained about our weird placement and convinced Ellen to have the tables moved.

This is basically what happened:

Kumoricon AA table shuffle; diagram is approximate and number of tables is inaccurate.

The bottom section was our dark, isolated corner of the Alley, which deadended. This is not ideal, as people don’t like having to double back the way they came, and we felt it was likely that they’d avoid the corner altogether.

Mari, the artist who complained, recognized this as readily as anyone else, and was confused as to why there weren’t any tables placed along the left-side wall with their backs to the Game Room, especially since there were tables facing that direction. There was enough space along that wall for everyone in the dark corner, and so Ellen agreed that the tables could be moved as long as all the artists agreed. Well, of course no one was going to object!

There were several hotel staff on hand to help us move the tables; however, the head of the hotel staff was absolutely adamant that no tables could be placed at the very top section of the diagram, for whatever reason. Fire hazard? No table was allowed to create an endcap on that middle island either, nor could any table be placed against the wall perpendicular to the dark corner (the wall above the “con” in “Kumoricon” in my drawn diagram). This meant that all but two of the tables from the bottom corner could be moved.

Those two tables belonged to Marl and a steampunk artisan, as those were the only artists who’d yet arrived when the table shuffling was happening. Thankfully, when they did arrive, Marl was fine with moving his table up to the very front of the corner section, and the steampunk artisan was fine with staying in the back corner and getting permission to spread out all over that space.

The steampunk guys definitely took advantage of their ability to spread out once all the other tables were moved.

So in the end, everyone was satisfied with the table shuffle. I’m really glad that Mari was forward enough to make the request, and I’m glad that Ellen was agreeable on the matter, but it does make me wonder why the tables weren’t set up like that in the first place? It seemed like the obvious sort of set up. How were tables set up last year?

In our new location, Errow and I were right next to the Artist Alley’s side entrance, which led into the main area of the Game Room. We had a lot more room behind our table now and sliiiiightly better lighting, but that isn’t saying much at all. Since we were in a garage, all of the ceiling lights were inline with pillars, which meant it was impossible to have ceiling lights in the aisles in front of tables. Instead, all of the Artist Alley tables were placed so that the ceiling light was directly above or behind them, which meant anyone with a print wall would be awkwardly back-lit,\ and that lighting in front of tables was almost non-existent.

We could hardly see people’s faces when they stood in front of our table. Seriously.

A very sweet Kashima cosplayer (who gave me a rose from her basket), but note the crap lighting in front of our table.

One of the other problems with being in a garage is, of course, poor cell reception.

I had been able to send a few tweets Thursday during setup without too much delay, but sending photo tweets was a no-go, and once more people showed up, even regular tweets became difficult to send. Errow meanwhile was completely cut off. AA staff came around with a wifi password right before we opened Friday, but despite connecting fine, my web-dependent applications failed more often while connected to wifi than when I was trying to go through 4G, so I ended up turning off wifi a lot.

Queen Chrysalis! Lighting to the side of our table was much better since the printwall wasn’t blocking any of it.

AA opened (without warning) at noon to an impressive rush of traffic and several immediate sales. I don’t think I’ve ever had a shorter span of time between the doors opening and my first sale. o_o

The rest of Friday followed at a good pace. There was a bit of a mid-afternoon lull, but otherwise traffic was steady throughout the day, and things were never dead. Registration being right next to Artist Alley definitely helped a lot — my guess is that everyone went to AA immediately after making it through Reg for their badges. The garage being separate and out of the way from the rest of the hotel was worrisome, but Reg being there meant that everyone had to stop by first thing, and there was no missing AA.

Zelda and Link.

Commission interest was surprisingly low for such an eager crowd though, and spotty reception meant I had to run a few cards in Square Offline mode…

I relied on Offline mode a lot while I was at A-kon and it never failed me, so I wasn’t too worried. The first transactions I ran on it at Kumoricon failed though, and it was a $30 transaction… this made me super wary for the rest of the day, especially since I couldn’t see the reason it failed (turned out it was a declined card, but I didn’t figure that out until way after the show). Thankfully, a majority of people had cash and there was an ATM right at the entrance of the garage, so it didn’t become too big of an issue.

Another problem with the garage was that there was only one elevator up to the first floor of the hotel (where the nearest bathrooms were), and no other way to get up there without going outside and around the building. There was no staircase that led to the hotel lobby. :| The one elevator was fine during setup hours and the first part of the day, but later on, about a dozen signs were plastered over it saying that it was for staff and disabled use only. It was annoying on principle to have to go outside and around the building to get to the bathroom, but since it was so nice outside all weekend and since we were otherwise trapped in a dimly-lit dungeon, I actually enjoyed those brief moments I had to go outside. u_u;

Makishima! Cosplayer is K. Better photos of this and other bikes here!

Since I didn’t have very many commissions to work on Friday, I passed time by doodling a bunch of random scenarios from my T2 deertaur AU, and my friend Miyu enabled me by also spending the weekend drawing nothing but T2 deertaur AU on the other side of the country. Together, we were a spiraling disaster of dumb fandom feelings, obsession, and completely nonsensical texts. I shared a lot of our doodles with Errow and gradually roped her into our special hell as well. 8) The risks of tabling with me, haha!

I was really happy to see a fair number of Yowapeda (bike anime), Haikyuu!! (volleyball anime), and, of course, Free! (swim anime) cosplayers about. The wide aisle in front of our table did mean a fair number of them passed through without my being able to get their attention for a photo though. Sigh! On the up side, it seemed like a large number of sports anime cosplayers were friends or acquaintances of two of the artists across the aisle from us, which meant they congregated there on a regular basis??

Two of the artists across the aisle from us were a cute Kageyama and Hinata on Friday! (Hinata’s dA / Kageyama’s Tumblr)

AA closed for the day at 6pm, a reasonable hour. We all packed up fairly quickly and bailed. It was weird to see daylight outside after being shut up in a garage for the whole day.

The grass lot we’d parked in had filled up during the day and getting out was tricky business — this was undoubtedly what the Red Lion staffer meant when he said “at your own risk.” Since there were no markings in the lot, people piled in wherever they could, and here and there, unlucky cars were boxed in by other cars… We managed to pull out without too much difficulty Friday though and went back to our hotel so Errow and AJ could change out of their cosplays before we headed out to dinner.

Stack it up, kaiten sushi.

We ended up at Sushi Tsunami, a short walk from our hotel. It was pretty good sushi for the price and their udon wasn’t bad either!

There were some epic clouds in Vancouver that night too, making for a lovely sunset. After dinner and a shower, I ran numbers for the day and worked on a pair of commissions I got right at closing, finishing up just in time to go to bed at the oddly reasonable hour of midnight.

Overall, Friday was a great day, especially for a con of Kumori’s size, and especially considering how few commissions I had. My Friday total was almost exactly double what I made Friday at Sakura-Con this year and roughly the same as what I made Friday at Sakura-Con last year (if you recall, Sakura was down 20% overall for me this year compared to last year). Sakura is more than three times the size of Kumori, so that’s pretty telling!

I’d always heard that Kumori was a pretty good con from artists who’ve attended, though I wondered how much Registration traffic had to do with it this year. I worried that once people were through with Reg, they wouldn’t have any reason to return to the garage dungeon unless they were interested in the Game Room. Plenty of people say they make a point to visit AA, but I’m still stuck on the idea that most traffic to AA is incidental, and if there’s nothing else driving people there, then they won’t come…

Sunset in Vancouver.

SATURDAY

Saturday started similarly with breakfast at the hotel and awkward parking in the grass lot, which was still pretty empty when we got there. We had about an hour between arriving and when AA opened at 10am, so I once again spent most of the time wandering around. It was a pretty small Alley, and for better or worse, I knew enough people there that I mostly only spoke to those I already knew, including Robin (The Gorgonist), Jackie (Azure-Inferno), and Kevin (Yanimator).

There was a bit of discussion about what could be done about the poor lighting, and it seemed like Kumoricon was going to try and bring in some flood lamps. I’m a bit fuzzy on the details, but only one set came in, which illuminated two tables near the entrance of the Alley.

AA opened again without prior announcement. The side entrance to Game Room near Errow’s and my table had been opened partially since before we officially opened though, and without anyone doing badge check there. :/ A heavy chain had kept the chain link gate shut after hours, but I’m unsure if there was ever a padlock on that chain… <_<

Flood lamps between two artists’ tables.

There was a decent rush of traffic at the beginning of the day, but it tapered off fairly quickly, and the rest of the day went significantly slower than Friday. Commission interest remained really, really low, so I continued doodling deertaur AU things and entertained myself briefly with a sketch card of one of Errow and AJ’s characters.

It was a really nice day outside Saturday — blue skies, partly cloudy, low to mid-70’s and breezy: perfect for all sorts of cosplay photos and shenanigans in the nearby park — so I wonder if attendees were just adverse to spending it in a dark dungeon garage.

It got a bit maddening in the last two hours of the day with traffic being so slow, and it didn’t help that we were right next to the Game Room… right behind us was a rhythm game similar to DDR loaded up with fabulous songs like “Caramelldansen,” “Dragostea Din Tei” (the Numa Numa song), and “Gangnam Style.” To be honest, I wish the latter two songs had been selected more often, but nope. It was mostly Caramelldansen. At least thirty times a day it was Caramelldansen.

And you know what sucks? I like Caramelldansen. I like it, and I know all the lyrics, and I’m compelled to at least bounce in my seat and mouth the words every time it plays, and I ended up irritating myself a lot with these compulsions. I have a very high tolerance for music I enjoy on repeat, but especially with little else to occupy myself with for the course of the day, it got to be pretty mind-numbing pretty fast.

Errow and AJ’s character Marie from their comic The Kinsey House.

We bailed right after closing at six. This time, getting out of the grass lot was even more difficult. Some asshole had parked in the “aisle” behind us, blocking most of our way out.

We were really fortunate that one of the spaces next to us was empty, giving us just enough room to awkwardly maneuver around the asshole car. The other car next to us was totally boxed in though, and the asshole being in the “aisle” meant that everyone trying to exit in that direction had to very carefully squeeze past them. Two other people had left notes on this asshole’s windshield and we added a third, politely asking that they not be so inconsiderate next time. u_u

After getting out, we straight to the Red Robin (which was near the Fred Meyers we went to Thursday) for dinner and got back to the hotel around 8:30.

Asshole car with a fine collection of displeased notes collecting on their windshield.

I made a few bucks more Saturday than Friday, but considering we were open for longer Saturday, I really did do better Friday. Pretty much everyone I spoke to reported the same, and this is at least the third convention this year where Saturday was about the same as or worse than Friday. Weird trend, that.

I was still feeling good about the weekend overall though. The attendees at Kumoricon were markedly aware and polite. More than once, I noticed people going out of their way to not set their things down on our table and our wares while ruffling through for wallets or whatever. No one complained about prices; no one blocked our table taking cosplay photos, and there wasn’t really any running around haphazardly knocking into things. It was really lovely!

The Hinata and Kageyama from Friday were Momo and Sousuke on Saturday! XD

SUNDAY

The grass lot was a lot emptier Sunday morning, and we made a point to park so that it would be difficult for anyone to box us in. There were noticeably fewer attendees milling around in the park next to the Hilton and on the streets around the con in general.

When we entered the garage, the temperature seemed cooler than it had been previously. They had apparently added another fan to the Game Room — it was very noisy, but it was definitely helping.

Also new Sunday morning: Robin brought us a standing lamp (and extension cord) to use! This was somewhat reminiscent of when Stacy and Michael brought me lamps to use at IKKiCON that year we were in a dark, unlit hall — Robin, as a Portland local, could bring in extra lighting from her home, something those traveling couldn’t. In addition to bringing Errow and I the standing lamp to use, Robin’s own table was set up with various desk lights.

LET THERE BE LIGHT.

Though Ellen’s pre-con email mentioned that power would be available for purchase at the con, it turned out that the whole garage was pretty much wired for power (a necessity for Game Room, obviously), and almost all tables had a working outlet behind them. We’d found one at our table’s original spot, but since our new location was back-to-back with Game Room, there was more space to cross, and we hadn’t actually checked for an outlet until Robin brought us the lamp. There wasn’t a dedicated outlet for our table as there was for other Alley tables, but one of the outlets being used to power games still had an open slot, so that worked out for us!

My camera auto-lightens the environment, so it actually isn’t that obvious in most pictures, but the lamp helped a TON. People in front of the table could see the prints clearly! They could see my buttons! And we could see their faces! Imagine that!

Seriously, look at these photos of the same Chiyo Sakura cosplayer (from Nozaki-kun!). I took her photo once on Friday and once on Sunday — mostly because I didn’t realize it was the same cosplayer right off, lol — but now I have these great comparison photos of the lighting in the garage before and after we got the lamp.

BEHOLD THE DIFFERENCE.

I was really excited that the lamp made such a difference and it was cool enough in the garage that I could actually wear my Samezuka jacket. Conditions in the AA dungeon Sunday seemed much better indeed!

Most of the morning was slow, but there was a sudden surge in activity around 2pm. Things slowed again after that, but I did notice significantly more button sales and an increase in commission interest. I’m certain that the uptick in button sales was due entirely to the fact that people could now see the buttons, but I’m tempted to say the sudden commission interest was due to the fact that people realized it was Sunday. Why is there so frequently sudden commission interest on Sunday??

I got more commissions Sunday than Friday and Saturday combined. I was glad for something to occupy me at the table though, and luckily, as a four-day con that went through Monday, I had still had Sunday night to work on things. When prompted, almost all attendees said they’d be returning for Monday, which kind of surprised me at the time.

Look at all the volleyball cutes! The left-most Kageyama is Kaeilash, Mari’s table partner!

We didn’t have any problems getting out of the grass lot this time and hit up Red Robin again for dinner. I had a handful of commissions to work on that night, but most of them were sketch cards and I forgot to bring blank sketch cards back to the hotel, so I could only work on my one non-sketch card commission. Blah! What a waste of the extra night to work!

Thanks to the increased commission interest, Sunday ended up being better than Friday and Saturday for me. Without the extra commissions, it would have been about the same. Reports from other artists about Sunday varied, with many reporting “about the same” and a handful noting that sales seemed best on Friday and had decreased for them every day since. Despite this though, overall numbers for basically everyone were really strong for a con of Kumori’s size. I don’t think anyone felt that their time in the AA dungeon was horribly wasted, anyway.

I like this burger. ANOTHER.

MONDAY

Monday morning was about even more quiet than Sunday morning, and it was most noticeable in the fact that breakfast at our hotel wasn’t super crowded. We checked out, drove to the Hilton, and parked in the same grass lot.

In the time before opening, I worked on the commissions I couldn’t work on the night before and finished up my queue shortly after the gates opened — just in time for Marl to come over and commission me for Min and Cress, two of PK’s characters from their Floraverse project. Cress was a huge challenge for me, but Min was a lot of fun. I like how they both turned out! :o

Color page commission of Min!

Traffic wasn’t bad for the last day of a four-day con. I was honestly pretty surprised that traffic was fairly steady most of Monday. Later, someone pointed out that school starting the next day probably motivated them to make the most of their last day of summer and freedom. A lot of people were spending the last of their budgets as well. Makes sense!

The Kumoricon-provided wifi network for artists had been problematic all weekend, but on Monday, they got the equipment to set up multiple wifi networks and asked artists to connect based on their relative location in the Alley so no single one would be overloaded. This worked out really well, but it’s a shame that it couldn’t have happened earlier in the weekend. Still, it’s good that the con recognized reception being an issue in the garage and that they worked to provide a solution.

Color sketch card of Cress!

Other than Min and Cress, was only one other commission Monday, but this was just as well, as we closed up at 2pm that last day. It was my first time selling on a Monday on the tail end of a show (the only other four-day con I’ve done is Rainfurrest, goes went Thursday-Sunday instead of Friday-Monday), so I wasn’t sure what to expect at all, but I made about 70% of Friday on Labour Day, which is pretty damn good, in my opinion, especially considering short hours.

After tearing down, Tara got the car and moved it to the semi-private lot behind the Hilton where we unloaded Thursday so we could reload more easily. I’m still not sure we were supposed to be parking there, but it seemed that parking anywhere all weekend was a risk of one sort or another.

Seattle welcomed us home with epic clouds.

OVERALL

I’m really glad I went to Kumoricon.

It was a good time spent with good people and I made good money. The hours were reasonable; the staff was nice; the crowd was great. Kumoricon has a lot of great things going for it. If only, if only Artist Alley weren’t trapped in a garage!

Kumoricon spoils.

The convention has already confirmed its dates and location for next year — they’re returning to the Vancouver Hilton and the Red Lion for Labour Day Weekend 2015 — which means that it’s almost a sure thing that Artist Alley will be in the same space. And I guess… that’s fine for as long as they’re at the Hilton/Red Lion… it’s really unfortunate, but there honestly isn’t a better space for the AA at that venue.

Both hotels are small. I never saw much of the Hilton beyond the small lobby I passed en route to the bathroom, but even from the outside of the building, the Hilton doesn’t look very large; con events are spread across three floors, including the basement garage, but all the rooms are tiny.

What I saw of the Red Lion was similarly cramped — there isn’t even much over there — and that’s made doubly obvious by the fact that Dealer’s Room was split up into two locations, one of which was in a detached building separate from the rest of the hotel. I felt really bad for the dealers. It’s bad enough that DR and AA are so far apart — even if they’re in separate rooms, I always think it’s better for vendors to be in the same general area — but for there to be in two DRs! If attendees don’t know this right off the bat (and certainly, I didn’t), then how are they to know to look for the second one after they’ve found the first? What a disaster.

Chain link fence/gate side entrance to Game Room.

Kumoricon needs to move. It’s outgrown the Hilton/Red Lion. They’ve been there for four years already, since 2011, when they first moved to Vancouver, and their attendance has gone up 61% since then. There’s always that noble desire to stay a small con, as if small cons are completely free of the problems that larger cons have. That obviously isn’t true. Small cons just have different problems, and insufficient space for the event is one of those problems.

2014 was their twelfth year, so Kumori has been around the block a few things. A lot of their current issues fall frustratingly into the category of “they should know better.”

It is ridiculous that vendors who pay for their space at the convention should have to put up with substandard conditions. It is really sad that these substandard conditions are already so commonplace that many of us aren’t even surprised, that we put up with it, that we’re grateful to even just have a bit of carpet and air conditioning in the dungeon garage because we don’t really even expect that much out of some cons. At what other type of show would it be acceptable to put paying vendors in that sort of space?

Many cons pride themselves on being “for fans, by fans,” and maybe that’s why Kumoricon is resistant to moving to a bigger venue, to becoming a bigger show, to hiring management with more large event-planning experience. Well, hey, guess what. Fans don’t put fans in dungeon garage conditions for a weekend.

Robin’s table, lit by the lights she brought herself.

Yes, Kumoricon did do a great job in making that garage as nice a space as it could possibly be — and I’m very glad for that — but they should reinvest that energy into securing a better future venue. The garage might not have been horrible this year, but how much of that was because of the weather? If it had been in the 90’s this year as it had been last year, would there have been problems with artists overheating and passing out again? What if it’s that hot next year? No matter the modifications to the space, a garage is still a garage, and a garage is meant for cars to spend time in, not people.

I can’t really speak for any other aspect of the convention, but surely there’s no part of Kumoricon that wouldn’t benefit from a venue that wasn’t split across two hotels, that had actual parking, that had more space, that didn’t put Artist Alley conditions (and Registration and Game Room, for that matter) at the mercy of the weather?

All the eevees!

Ellen, the Artist Alley head, was very nice, understanding, and accommodating, but ultimately it seemed like many things were out of her control. It’s not by her choice that Artist Alley is in the garage, certainly. She wasn’t in charge of the garage’s lighting, air conditioning, wifi, power, or whatever else, and she had no control over the size of the tables.

There are other things I think could be improved with Kumoricon’s Artist Alley too though.

Registration should happen sooner. This year, they accepted applications for two weeks in June and sent out notifications at the end of June — that’s just two months ahead of the show for first-wave notifications! Those moving off the waitlist, like me, didn’t know until mid or late July. Even for local and localish people who don’t have to book flights, that’s very little time to make accommodations.

AA dungeon peaking into the back of Game Room.

I also think Kumori’s AA could stand to be a lot clearer and/or impartial in its jury system. Currently applicants are selected based on what staff “think[s] will best suit the Alley [that] year” so as to “ensure that [they] get a good variety of art/crafts/etc. into [their] limited amount of space.”

That’s incredibly, incredibly subjective and leaves room for a lot of speculation and paranoia on the part of applicants. What constitutes a “good variety”? Is the distinction between 2D artists and crafters? Between artists of primarily different fandoms? Between artists of different art styles? Why do some artists get in every year while others, who have never been to the show, get juried out every year? Is perceived skill level a factor? Are local artists more favoured? Is level of “professionalism”? What? Kumoricon never gives rejected artists a reason for being rejected or waitlisted or whatever, so we’re all just left to wonder.

It’d be far better, in my opinion, to instill some element of first come, first serve — as stressful as FCFS can be, it remains the most impartial judge, in my opinion — or at the very least, offer clearer criteria for what they’re looking for in the makeup of their Alley, which applicants (and attendees) can then check against. If they want 50/50 2D artists VS crafters, they should state so, and their Alley should obviously reflect it at the show. If they want a mix of newcomers VS veterans, they should state that, and their Alley should reflect it. Transparency goes a long way.

Cop Rin is best Rin.

All in all, I think Kumoricon is a good show, but it could be better.

I don’t know that there’s much to be done as far as the venue and the garage goes for next year, but I’d love to see them expand to a better space for 2016. I also don’t think my two suggestions for AA reg are difficult or unreasonable, so perhaps that, at least, can improve for 2015.

I’d love to attend again and will certainly be throwing my name in the pot again come reg time, but who knows if they’ll let me in. After all, I still don’t know why I made it this year VS the other years I’ve applied.

Rose City Comic Con is a two-day comic convention in Portland, and this year it ran September 20th and 21st. RCCC is partnered with and shares a lot of staff and resources with Emerald City Comic Con, so I figured they’re similarly run and attract a similar crowd.

ECCC 2013 wasn’t a particularly good show for me as a vendor, which is one of the reasons I didn’t attempt RCCC 2013. I went to ECCC 2014 as an attendee (and table helper to my friend Kara) and decided afterwards that I’d rather do so-so as a vendor than feel weird as an attendee (and I always feel weird as an attendee), so I’m on board again to vend at ECCC 2015. RCCC was still iffy for me because of travel reasons, but Laura invited me to join her carpool down for the show and then, as usual, I figured, “I may as well give it a try.”

The Oregon Convention Center is really gorgeous.

This report is 4,237 words long.

Jump to: Pre-Con, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Overall.

Pre-Con

RCCC’s Artist Alley application process is like ECCC’s: mail in a physical application along with payment, and presumably, artists are accepted on a first come, first serve basis. I’m not sure when applications first opened, but I didn’t send mine in until late May, as it wasn’t until then that Laura mentioned the possibility of a carpooling. I emailed the Exhibits Director two weeks later to check that they’d gotten the application and was notified that they had, but that I was waitlisted.

I wasn’t too fussed about it, and I moved off the waitlist just a few weeks later anyway, in mid-June.

Mid-August saw an email go out to all exhibitors about convention center show arrangements like renting furniture or fixtures and other things that are probably useful for dealers, but which are pretty overkill for independent artists. We got table assignments around the end of August, then a final informational email reminding us of hours and such a few days ahead of the show. All-in-all, very tidy, professional, and reminiscent of my interactions with ECCC. This is only RCCC’s third year, but they’ve clearly benefited tremendously from their partnership with and the expertise of ECCC.

Rose City Comic Con, go!

Friday

The carpool party was me, Laura, her friend Stasia, and Stasia’s roommate Leigh. Only Laura and I would be tabling at RCCC, and Laura doesn’t have a very complicated setup at all, but the car was a Toyota Corolla and as usual, I was worried and felt bad about having a lot of stuff. My Kumoricon party had managed somehow with four artists in an even smaller car, but I had parried down a lot of my luggage for Kumori since I only had half a table. RCCC’s tables are only six feet, but that’s still a full-sized table, and so I was bringing… all my stuff.

Somehow it all worked out fine though. My print order for RCCC arrived literally 30 minutes before Laura and Leigh came to pick me up at 12:30, and Leigh has some amazing Tetris skills that somehow made everything fit. After grabbing Stasia from work, we started making our way south.

Epic clouds en route to Portland. There’ve been so many nice clouds lately. (Wow, ignore that bird poop stain on the window there…)

Traffic was pretty bad around Tacoma and Olympia and again right outside of Portland, so we didn’t get to the convention center until around 5pm.

Parking at the Oregon Convention Center was $8/day, I think, but there was a weird side lot for vendors to temporarily park for load-in. It was strange because the lot was across the street from the OCC (and sort of poorly marked, so we missed it the first time and had to circle around), but thankfully, there wasn’t a lot of traffic on that street, so dragging our stuff across wasn’t too hazardous.

After we unloaded the car, Leigh left with it, as she wouldn’t actually be attending RCCC — the carpool down was an opportunity for her to visit her family in Portland, and she was taking the car for the weekend since the rest of us wouldn’t need it. The hotel we were staying in was just two blocks from the convention center.

RCCC’s Artist Alley. I thought it was weird that the Oregon Convention Center had the same ceiling lights as the Washington State Convention Center.

We dragged our stuff into the loading dock, then asked directions to Artist Alley and AA check-in. As with ECCC, the Artist Alley and Dealer’s Room shared the same space and were collectively the Exhibits Hall / the Show Floor, which comprised of Exhibit Halls A, B, and C of the Oregon Convention Center.

There wasn’t much going on as far as security — probably because most everyone was coming in through the loading dock, while badge pick-up was outside of Exhibits and in a small, separate room across the hall, which would make badge-check at the dock inconvenient for basically everyone. We dropped off the bulk of our luggage at our tables before grabbing our badges and then going back to set up.

Fake Lemonade Stand @ Rose City Comic Con 2014.

Both tables next to mine were already set up, and I felt kind of bad because neither had a lot of vertical structure on the tables themselves — Creator’s Edge, to my left, had grid cubes just two cubes tall, and Tom Rogers, to my right, only had easels propping up books and prints. And as we all know, I have a towering PVC fort.

I ended up limiting the number of prints I had on the outside of the PVC side arms so I wasn’t completely dominating the shared space between my neighbours and me, but I still felt pretty bad about it. Both CE and Tom had tall vertical banners behind their tables, as is typical for comic cons, but my vertical structure being on my table still made me feel like I was blocking their stuff.

I was trying the individually boarded and sleeved print setup I had previously tried at Dragonflight, but I think I may need to get a second large, plywood rack if I want to keep doing that. I just have too many prints to comfortably fit, and my smaller plywood rack is oddly suited for button display. A lot of people have the plywood racks now, and I saw a ton of other artists that had double-stacked large racks for individually packaged prints. The downside of that. though, is decreasing the number of prints I can hang from the PVC… Hm.

RCCC’s Exhibit’s Hall

Since Laura finished setting up a whole hour or so before me, she and Stasia had gone ahead to check into the hotel. After I was done, I made a quick circuit through the rest of the Alley and the Dealer’s Room (which was really pretty empty, and most of the people I knew in the Alley weren’t around yet) before going to join them.

Laura had booked at the Motel 6 two blocks over. The location was really great, but the building was about as shady as you’d expect. <_< We lounged around for a little while before deciding to head out to the RCCC Kickoff Party at a comic shop about a mile away. Honestly, I was iffy on the idea because mingling is awkward, but Laura and Stasia were enticed by free beer while free food was a reasonable enough lure for me. When we left the motel room though, we had difficulty getting the door to close. :’D We’d pull the door shut, but it could still be pushed open easily without a key. We called the receptionist up and he managed to close it eventually by slamming the door shut really hard, but yeaaaaaaah, I didn’t leave anything valuable in the room. >_>

In lieu of figuring out Portland’s bus/lightrail system, we decided to just walk the mile. It was overly sunny and hot there all weekend, but by 7:30pm, when we were heading out, the sun was mostly set and there was a good breeze, so the walk wasn’t that bad.

Sriracha cosplayer!

We got to the kickoff party a little after eight, but left almost immediately. The comic shop itself wasn’t very big, and so most of the people were outside in the empty lot next to the building. Some tents had been set up to serve food and beer, and most of the people were in some kind of huge, tangled line trying to get to the goods. There was also a cop car parked, with its sirens flashing but muted, outside the shop when we arrived.

Instead of trying to figure out the messy crowd, we decided to just seek dinner elsewhere and after wandering around a bit, settled on Thai Pod. It was pretty good!

On the walk back to the hotel, we stopped by Safeway and Walgreens for miscellaneous supplies. It didn’t end up being a very eventful evening, but that’s always totally fine with me, haha. x_x

Thai food for dinner, finally.

Saturday

I woke up at 6:30am Saturday morning because the lightrail train that passes by the hotel sounds… exactly… like… the TARDIS.

The air conditioning in the hotel room wasn’t very good, so we had the windows open all night, and the noise was really loud. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have bothered me nearly as much if it didn’t sound exactly like the space-faring time machine of dreams though. I manage to go back to sleep for a little bit though and eventually get up around 8:15, ahead of Laura and Stasia. Exhibitor setup for the day started at eight, but we were all already completely set up, and doors didn’t open to the public until ten.

The TARDIS (and the DeLorean) at the con…

I knew there was a Starbucks across the street from the convention center, but I didn’t feel like figuring out which side of the convention center it was on, so I just spent most of the morning wandering around inside the Exhibits Hall. I managed to find the tables of most of the people I knew, with the exception of Wendi Chen, who I knew was in the Dealers’ area instead of the Artists’ area, but I couldn’t figure out where her booth was. x_x

There were several food options in the convention center, including many sharing a wall with, or directly inside, the Exhibits Hall. There were concessions with popcorn and fries, as well as some local ice cream? One of the exhibitors right by the entrance was preparing to serve energy drinks and/or slushies for the day, though they weren’t ready yet when I wandered by. I ended up getting coffee from the restaurant right by one of the Exhibit Hall entrances, then said hi to Unicorn Empire, Errow, AJ, and Tara, before finally making my way back to my own table.

The Oregeon Convention Center is a really nice venue.

It seemed initially like we opened earlier than scheduled… The main reason I went back to my table was because, while chatting with Amber at Unicorn Empire, I noticed people with attendee badges wandering around. They weren’t VIP badges or anything, just regular weekend attendee badges, and even a Saturday-only badge. After I got back to my table, an overhead announcement warned that we’d be opening in ten minutes, so I was really confused.

I guess someone wasn’t badge checking carefully enough?

I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case — the label on the badges indicating what membership type a person was wasn’t very clear. Identification was most obvious in the kind of image on the badge, rather than the words on the badge, which would require badge-checkers to memorize what image is associated with what member type, rather than just reading the badge. Staff and exhibitors had a red alien picture on their badge, but the actual words “staff” and “exhibitor” were in tiny text. Attendee badges were actually physically smaller than staff/exhibit badges, so that was an indicator as well, but still, the labeling shouldn’t have been so tiny.

LOOK AT WHAT HANNAKO GOT ME.

Right before we officially opened, Hannako came by and gave me these super cute fanmade swim anime buttons she got while in Japan. ; A ; We’d only run into each other a few times and only very briefly at previous cons, so I thought it was super sweet of her. ;__;

Traffic after we opened at 10am was all right, and it got to be fairly heavy around noon and the early afternoon, but none of it was “high quality” traffic. Most people were making their way through the aisles at a normal walking pace, with little more than a cursory glance at most tables. Very few people stopped to browse or chat. My first sale came a full hour after opening, and the rest were very scattered throughout the day with long stretches in between. I was definitely getting a strong ECCC vibe from the crowd, which, while completely expected, was still sort of disappointing and discouraging.

A guy from a local haunted house.

Something interesting though… One of the things I wish Sakura-Con would do is reintroduce single-day passes, and one of the things I wish ECCC would do is reserve a number of single-day or weekend passes for sale at the door (so the entire show isn’t completely sold out five months in advance).

This is because I think it’d be beneficial to vendors if more these cons made it easier for more casual fans to attend, since many of the more “hardcore” fans have already seen specific vendors dozens of times across dozens of shows and we’ve already sold to them. Single-day passes are less of a commitment, and having some passes available at the door allows curious passersby to attend the convention without planning for it several months out.

That was my “oversaturation” theory, but I think RCCC attracted a lot of that casual crowd…without the desired results. There were a lot of families and first time con-goers at RCCC, but interest in browsing and buying remained very, very low.

Peter Pan and Tinkerbell!

I chatted on and off with my table neighbour Tom, who apparently also went to SCAD, graduating last year, and who’s also a friend of Grace Allison’s, who I had a few classes with. Tom had a friend who stopped by a few times to hang out who was also a SCAD grad (’07, so before my time). I dunno why I’m always surprised to run into SCAD people at cons, but I am! It was cool to talk about old classes and professors with them. Grace was also at the show, but I never got a chance to find or stop by her table.

There were a lot of kids under ten at the show making amusing comments about my work (multiple little girls were drawn to my Loki/Elsa piece, but couldn’t identify Loki, so they’d point and say “look! it’s Elsa and some guy!“), but honestly I’m never quite sure how to respond to kids that young, especially if they show up at my table unsupervised… x_x Despite enjoying a lot of children’s media and occasionally drawing in a style that might be perceived as being “for kids,” none of my work is really made with children in mind, and I get really awkward when faced with them, haha…

Here and there, a few attendees recognized me from Kumoricon or KuroNekoCon or Sakura-Con, which was really nice. As always, I’m most comfortable with and have the most in common with the anime crowd, so it really cheers me up when “my people” come and stop by, even just to say hi and stuff. ;__;

My people. ♥

The afternoon wore on a long time because it was so difficult to engage the general crowd. I actually drew a lot on Saturday, but was still frequently bored and couldn’t concentrate well. It was frustrating because I more or less of expected it to be that slow, but still hadn’t come prepared with some kind of project to occupy myself with at the table. I actually ended up packing up at my table ten minutes prior to closing because things were so slow, and I basically never pack up early?

The show floor closed at 7pm, and my initial plan was to beeline to the Denny’s a few blocks over and stuff my face. Laura and Stasia had fed off random con concessions throughout the day though, and I ended up going along with Errow, AJ, and Tara to meet up with Molly (Jakface), Anne (of Devoto), and their friend at a Thai noodle place.

I love food. I love soup.

Getting to dinner was kind of an adventure. We walked to the Doubletree where Errow & etc were staying to get the car. The restaurant was only supposed to be two miles away, but something about Portland and one way streets meant that when we missed one turn, we had to circle around for another five miles or something before we could get back to where we wanted to be? We passed a really cool food truck village or something while we were off track though? Portland seems to have a lot of neat food places and trinkety local shops. It would be really nice to visit outside of a convention sometime.

Dinner itself was nice once we got there though. It was a larger group than I was used to having and sitting at a long table meant that not everyone could easily converse with everyone else, but it was still good company. It seemed like pretty much everyone had a bum day. I was so hungry I ordered two entrees and then finished half of AJ’s meal too. <_<

Worst group dinner photo ever!

We bailed around 9pm and Errow dropped me off back at my hotel, where I ran numbers for the day.

Saturday’s total ended up being one of my lowest single-day totals so far this year — I only made less at both days of DragonFlight, Friday at Sakura-Con, and Sunday at MomoCon (though I left several hours early that day at Momo). That’s pretty alarming for the “main” day of a convention that had ~18,000 attendees last year, so probably 20k+ attendees this year.

Is the comic con crowd really that divergent from what typically makes up my audience? Even on my shortest day (4 hours of selling) at Kumoricon, Monday, Labour Day, where the attendance was less than a third of RCCC’s, I did better. Interestingly though, my RCCC Saturday total was still higher than my total both Friday and Saturday at ECCC last year, and ECCC’s attendance eclipses RCCC’s.

I keep giving comic cons another go, and another go, and another go, but maybe I should really stop…? I keep thinking that there’s something I can do better, something about my table, my presentation, my stuff that I could change to do better, but if my audience isn’t there, then no amount of repeating these shows is going to change that?

The Nishinoya cosplayer from KNC commissioned me for this Kageyama for her friend. ;3;

Sunday

We closed the windows Saturday night, but the TARDIS still woke me up Sunday morning, and I ended up heading out pretty early to find that Starbucks. It wasn’t far, and it was nice and empty at 8am too. It was grossly warm in Portland all weekend, but I got a sandwich and my first ~pumpkin spice latte~ of the season anyway and sat in the Starbucks drawing for about an hour before finally making my way over to the convention center. It was a peaceful way to start the morning.

Nothin’ like an empty coffee place Sunday morning of a con.

I made a long, slow circuit around the Exhibits Hall in the hour before show time. I did finally find Wendi’s table, but neither she nor her booth partner were there yet. Most con vets reported having a very slow Saturday, though there also seemed to be a lot of vendors new to tabling or conventions in general, including Julia Krase and Robert Ryan.

RCCC is a great opportunity for Portland locals to get their feet wet in the convention scene, but even so, I think $200 AA tables for a show that’s perhaps grown too big too fast is a bit steep, even if there are no travel or lodging expenses… I’m not really sure how well the newcomers did since they didn’t have anything to compare against, but if veterans seemed to be doing poorly across the board, regardless of style or genre or type of goods, then it was probably a discouraging show financially for everyone else too.

Right before we opened for the day, I walked with Amber to the exhibitors’ registration to pick up forms for next year. Like ECCC, RCCC allows all exhibitors to sign up for the next year’s show while at the con, guaranteeing spaces for returning vendors. I was really iffy about it Sunday morning, but I grabbed a form anyway.

ANIMAL.

Sunday felt a little busier than Saturday.

Traffic flow was about the same, but it felt like I was making a few more sales? One very kind person tipped very generously after buying and enjoying the minicomic version of Sunflowers and Rainbows, but otherwise there wasn’t much that was notable about the day…

It was still a very slow day, and I spent a lot of time at the table doodling to entertain myself. Gradually, I was able to focus better on drawing, which resulted in less preoccupation with the con being slow and an improved mood. At the end of the day, based on the vague feeling of having done better Sunday than Saturday, I decided I’d go ahead and buy my space for next year.

Goodbye, Portland.

Overall

Financially, Rose City Comic Con wasn’t a very good show for me.

Despite feeling that things were a little busier, my total for Sunday was exactly the same as they were for Saturday (off by $4), and altogether, I made about as much over the weekend at RCCC as I did in one day at ChibiChibiCon, which probably had fewer than 500 attendees. Commission interest over the weekend was extremely low (12%), and there just… wasn’t a lot of desire to engage from a vast majority of the crowd. Few people looked at the table for more than a few seconds, and it didn’t seem to really matter what incentives vendors provided for them to stop. (Tom had candy at his table all weekend, but kids would just grab and go, and their parents were almost always most interested in just moving on as well.)

Half my commission work for the weekend came from one sweet Homestuck fan who really wanted portraits of her favourite characters.

RCCC’s attendees were mostly families with young children. There were a lot of first-time con-goers who seemed mostly interested in checking out the general feel of a convention, but not very interested in shopping or buying. I think many of the points in this article about the changing face of comic conventions are directly applicable here. People aren’t coming to comic cons for comics anymore, but it’s maybe notable that even I, without significant comic work and dealing primarily in prints, mishmash, and on-site commissions, wasn’t able to hold the crowd’s interest.

There were people in crowd at RCCC that enjoyed and cared about my work, and as always, it was great being able to talk to them even if they didn’t ultimately buy anything — but those people seemed few and far between.

The vastness of the Exhibits Hall probably didn’t help either, honestly. The seasoned con-goer is accustomed to wandering down dozens of aisles of artists and dealers, but the newcomer? The newcomer dragging around an impatient five-year old? Nah. They make it down one aisle, get bored, and leave to find something else to do. They might have spent more on concessions than on art.

RCCC swag, mostly trades with other artists.

Socially, Rose City Comic Con was pretty nice. The show’s hours are reasonable and allowed for plenty of time after hours to hang out with fellow artists, though here, again, the vastness of the Exhibits Hall made it difficult to connect at times. Most of my friends were situated pretty far away from me, and while it was nice shooting the breeze with my immediate neighbours, there was still something lonely about most of the time I spent at the table with not much to do. Most of that is probably just my own awkwardness though.

But Portland’s a cool town — it would have been nice to explore a bit more. Maybe next year, I’ll head down a few days ahead of the show just to check out the city. Portland is home to a lot of artists and has a strong independent, self-made culture. Even if the attendees at RCCC aren’t there to support or buy from artists, we artists can be there to support and buy from other artists.

Am I a real artist yet.

I keep thinking that I should just give up on comic cons. Sales aren’t the only thing to gain from conventions, but if even basic interest isn’t there, then it’s probably time to consider other options. There are so many conventions these days that it’s getting more and more important to pick and choose wisely. I’ve stretched myself pretty thin this year, and there are always new shows to check out, so I shouldn’t cling too much to the ones that obviously aren’t working out.

But I’m already signed up for both ECCC and RCCC next year, so I guess for now, I’ll keep trying my best.

Three days after Rose City Comic Con was Rainfurrest, the furry convention in Seattle, or more accurately, in Seatac, at the Seatac Airport Hilton and Conference Center.

I was hopeful for a busy weekend, especially since RCCC was a bit of a bust. Last year was nice for the most part, but I wasn’t working at capacity on commissions, which make up a vast majority of the business at fur cons. This year went off to a similar start — it’s officially a four-day show, but still not a lot of people show up Thursday. I got my wish pretty quickly once Friday rolled around though…

Animal people are great people.

This report is 4,661 words long.

Jump to: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Overall.

THURSDAY

Setup for both the Dealer’s Den and the Art Show began at 9am, and both rooms opened to the public at noon. Hannako met up with me at my apartment around eight and helped me haul my things to the lightrail and to the hotel. She didn’t have a table, but she was interested in checking out the con and seeing what it was like, and I was super grateful for the extra hands, especially since Art Show stuff couldn’t be packed in with my other luggage without being damaged and had to be carried separately. (It turned out to be even more lucky for me that Hannako was helping out because the elevator down to the street from the lightrail was temporarily out of service, so we got to drag my stuff down four flights of stairs. D;)

We got to the Hilton just after nine, and, like last year, the Dealer’s Den wasn’t unlocked or ready to check-in dealers yet. :/ Art Show was ready to go though, so I went to check in there while Hannako watched my stuff and kept me updated on DD.

Sparkle dawgs~.

Pre-con prep and communication for Art Show was pretty similar to last year. Registering for panels was simple, and I got confirmation quickly. We got emails fairly often in the last few months about entering our pieces into the online registration system, but the online system was still a sloppy mess. Almost immediately after the show ended last year, the system was activated to accept registrations for this year, which means no one really even considered working on it to make it better, I guess?

My critiques stand: the system is unprofessional-looking, looks like it was coded in a night, is cumbersome to use, seems somewhat insecure (though I’m not knowledgeable enough in this area to really comment), and looks to be difficult to manage by the different branches of staff that need to use it. It forces you to pace through all of your registration information every time you want to change or update anything, rather than letting you select what you want to do, and different access URLs to the reg system give you access to different portions of your information, which makes it doubly confusing when URLs provided are incorrect or outdated.

As far as Art Show goes, the reg system doesn’t give you access to or the option of entering in information for specific pieces unless 1) you go to a very specific URL and 2) something on the backend is switched on to allow you to do that. There was a lot of back and forth with the AS head when one or both of these conditions weren’t met, and it was obvious that AS staff didn’t have direct access to verify these conditions themselves. Half the time, the given URL just stepped you through regular AS registration for panels, as if I hadn’t already registered for them. ;/

In the end, I did manage to enter in all my pieces for the show about a week and a half prior, but this was definitely an issue last year, so I’m annoyed that it was still an issue. Other fur cons like Furry Weekend Atlanta and Midwest Furfest have swapped to another custom reg system that seems more polished and professional. It doesn’t look like it’s an open source system, so probably one of MFF or FWA staff coded it and shared it between the cons (and maybe other cons as well?), and I’m not sure whether Art Show stuff is built into their system the way it is for Rainfurrest, but either way, RF should step it up and at least consider improving the UI of their current system.

Art Show panels.

Actual on-site check-in for Art Show was pretty painless, in part because I had all the info entered in already and had cut-out bid slips ready to go. It was just a matter of hanging everything, labeling the pieces, then having a staffer verify the number of pieces and print me a check-in receipt. There was some technical trouble with the printer, but the whole process still only took about 20 minutes.

Dealer’s Den was ready to finally check in vendors by the time I got out of Art Show, so I was able to do that without a problem. I wasn’t sure whether Hannako would be able to come into the DD with me since regular attendee registration wasn’t open yet, but while my DD reg only came with one badge, it did come with two dealer’s ribbons, so I could give her one of those. Honestly though, security at DD wasn’t especially tight, but it also wasn’t busy enough to warrant it, I guess. There were probably only five or six dealers there for most of the morning.

Fake Lemonade Stand @ Rainfurrest 2014.

I individually boarded and sleeved my letter-sized prints again. I do really like how people can pick them up and flip through them, and I think it helps somehow that there are fewer things to flip through on the stands than in the binder, making it less intimidating? It’s an interesting middle ground between having people stand five feet away from the table looking at the display prints I have hanging and having them flip through my 40-page binder… I have boards and sleeves for my tabloid-sized prints also, but I’d definitely need to get more stands to properly display them like that.

Hannako was awesome and did a coffee (and muffin) run while I set up the table. My number one complaint about the venue is still there are no nearby caffeine options. The nearest Starbucks is in the airport. Ridiculous.

Thursday morning sustenance.

Hannako took off just before we opened at noon because she other commitments for the day, but she didn’t miss much.

No more than half the dealers and none of the guests showed up Thursday. The Dealer’s Den was sparse, and rather than browse, attendees gathered in groups in the empty spaces of the room to chat amongst themselves. This is RF’s second year as a four-day convention, and the hours were much clearer this year from the get-go. Even so, lots of people were still traveling into town Thursday, and many locals hadn’t taken the day off work. There wasn’t a lot of programming Thursday either, so the activity level across the con was fairly low.

Emptyish Dealer’s Den.

I did get a handful of commissions throughout the afternoon, but they were mostly small pencil sketches and things I could finish very quickly. Maybe it was just as well, since I didn’t bring my laminator in Thursday because of luggage space and wouldn’t have been able to laminate badges, but one of the nice things about commissions and fur cons is that almost all of the attendees are there for the full weekend, giving me plenty of time to finish things if needed (though most of my neighbours also had laminators, so it wouldn’t have been a big deal to ask anyway). The table was wired for power though, so I’d be bringing my laminator in the next day.

It wasn’t surprising or unexpected, and I didn’t really think it’d be an indication of the weekend to come, but the slow day made me regret again not bringing something substantial to work on behind the table. But I feel like comic pages are one of the few actual project things I can work on at the table though, and I don’t have a lot of comics I want to do at the moment unfortunately. I have a storybook idea I’ve been sitting on for ages, but it’s a digipainting project and I can’t do that at the table. I have an embarrassing number of fanfic ideas I want to write, but it’s doubly difficult to focus on writing and story-crafting at the table. Woe, woe.

Pencil sketch card.

Dealer’s closed at the very reasonable hour of 6pm, and I went home Thursday with no commission queue. The completely empty evening with no convention obligations was so weird to me, it almost felt like I wasn’t even working a con! Last year I mentioned that I wanted to try and check out more of RF’s programming and try to be more social, but it just didn’t happen that way.

6pm is a great closing time, as that’s basically dinner time, but that also means everyone closes shop and immediately heads out for food. But food options around the hotel are pretty abysmal — they’re either quite the trek or very expensive — so the most convenient place for dinner for me is home. Since I commute to RF, I cooked enough food Wednesday to last me through the weekend so I wouldn’t have to spend money eating out. And once I’m home, I’m home and that’s that. <_<

Small badge commission.

FRIDAY

Dealer’s Den hours for Friday were from 10am to 6pm, so I left my apartment around 8:30 after having breakfast and got to the hotel around 9:30. Amazingly, it was drizzling enough outside that I put my hood up — it was appropriately drizzly for most of the weekend during Rainfurrest last year too. It may seem like an obvious thing, but it’s actually been a long, hot, and dry summer in Seattle. It hasn’t rained nearly enough, says I. We’re well into what should be fall now, but it’s still not raining enough. Come on!

Friday was immediately different from Thursday. While not everyone was fully set up yet, all of the dealers and guests had at least arrived by the time we were open. Artist Alley was also in operation now — they actually opened an hour before us, at 9am. Remember that Artist Alleys at fur cons are distinctly different from Artist Alleys at anime or comic cons. They’re typically free or very low cost (I think RF’s AA is $15/day?) and spaces are first come, first serve on a daily basis. While many of the same artists do claim tables throughout the weekend, a handful will only do a day or two, leaving room for a fair variety of people to rotate in. Meanwhile, Dealer’s Den is for everyone wanting a guaranteed table for the weekend and a locked room to keep things in after hours.

Large con badge!

The overall atmosphere of the convention was much busier, and I got slammed pretty hard with commissions from very early on in the day. A vast majority of them were color commissions, too, which of course take longer to do. It was a little surreal, to be honest. I was especially surprised at the number of dragons I was being commissioned for — I don’t draw a lot of dragons and find them pretty difficult for a lot of reasons, so I don’t have a lot of examples of dragons, but people kept asking me for them. o_o They were all fun and I enjoyed the challenge, but it was still puzzling to me, haha.

I was also surprised to be moving a lot more merchandise compared to last year. Prints and buttons were both doing a lot better. I have a lot more creature/monster/animal prints than I did, so that probably helped? I had a taped a sign on my Art Show panels noting that I had prints available of almost all of those pieces, so maybe that helped too. And hey, maybe the individually board/sleeved thing helped too. Too many factors to really be able to tell. I have no idea why buttons were doing better though. I only had about half my buttons out on display because of space issues too.

Though the tables were 6′ long, my setup last year was actually 8′ since Tori let me use a third of her table. She wasn’t here this year though, so it was back to a normal 6′ setup for me, but it didn’t really seem to matter at all. How I use the space is clearly much more important than the amount of space…

Full page color commission of a hipster cougar. (He only drinks Real Coffee.)

I took way fewer photos this year because I had my head down most of the day working. It was kind of weird how long the day felt. Despite also spending a lot of time handling sales and writing down even more commission information, I managed to finish a lot of work while at the convention, so I felt like time should have passed faster, but it turns out I am always working faster than I think I am? I felt really focused all Friday too, which probably helped a lot.

Even with how fast as I work though, my queue grew twice as fast, and when we closed at 6pm, my queue included 17 commissions, 15 of which were in color. o__o This was definitely a new record, trumping my crazy Saturday at Everfree this year, where I took home about 14 commissions at the end of the day. I’m still really glad for that 45 minute nap I get on the lightrail on the way home.

Full page color commission for someone’s themed “taur” sketchbook.

After a quick dinner, I launched straight back into work.

I decided to ink all of my commissions first, then move onto color and see what I could get done. My assessment of how much I could reasonably finish that night shifted as the evening went on. I was using my work night at Everfree as a gauge initially, but it ended up being inaccurate since I can draw ponies a lot faster than most furries, as ponies lack a lot of fur/feather/scale detail. I love drawing and coloring fur/feather/scale detail, but it is definitely time consuming!

I knew I wanted at least two hours of sleep, so 5am was the latest I’d stay up to work. I gave badges a higher priority since they’re wearables, and I think it’s nice for people to be able to get some wearing time out of their badges while still at the con… plus they’re the messiest to work on since they involve all this paper cutting and it was better to work on them at home where I had a lot of space and didn’t feel bad making a mess.

ALL of the to-be colored commissions from Friday night, at their inked stage. Not shown are the commissions that only required pencils.

In the end, I did stay up until 5am, and it was just enough time to completely finish all the large badges I had (minus lamination; I’d left my laminator at the con) and to ink everything else.  This was my first time not completely clearing my queue overnight, but I’m really happy with the amount of work I managed to finished, and the quality of the work too! *___*

ALL THE FRIDAY LARGE/CHIBI BADGES.

SATURDAY

All things considered, I was feeling pretty good Saturday morning. I slept in a little later than I originally planned and got up around 8am. I brewed myself coffee to go and got another 45 minute nap on the way to the show.

I spent most of the morning finishing up the color commissions I’d inked while adding new commissions to the queue. Since my ability to accurately gauge what I could finish seemed a bit off based on the previous night, I started bringing up mail-out fees on commissions as a precaution. Everyone was really cool about it — I understand that mail-out/after-con commissions are very common, if not the norm, at furry conventions, but I almost always finish all of my convention commissions at the show, so I still feel a bit weird about marking things for after-con completion I guess.

Full page color commission.

I stopped taking color commissions for at-con completion in the early afternoon, though I think this ended up being overcautious on my part. Though there was still a fair bit of new work, I got fewer commissions Saturday than Friday, and they were mostly of simpler types (read: fewer things in color).

I’ve done very few furry conventions compared to other types of conventions, so I’m still figuring a lot of things out as far as how best to handle commissions on-site and post-con, but the learning experience has been really pleasant thus far, honestly. :o

WereGarurumon!

The fursuit parade came through the Dealer’s Den starting around 2:30pm and it was nice to take a break to watch them all go by.

I didn’t bother taking video this year, but plenty of other people with better cameras did. Some of the notable species this year include a stegosaurus, a maned wolf, several really awesome sharks, two or three pteradon, A BUMBLEBEE, a meerkat, what I think was a sea lion, and three orcas. I think there was also a giraffe, but I’m not 100% sure. XD Along with WereGarurumon and the Charlie from last year, there was also a Clifford, a Scooby Doo, and a Rocket Raccoon, as far as canon characters go. I don’t think I saw any of Clockwork Creature‘s suits this year though! That was a bit surprising and disappointing — theirs are some of my favourite costumes for sure. *__*

Here is a cute deer though.

My queue at closing time Saturday was just eight things, all in color.

After packing up, I stopped by Art Show briefly to see how my pieces were doing. I was a little annoyed to find that the panel arrangement had been shifted so my chosen panels faced the back of the room instead of the entrance, as they had when I set up. I didn’t see a point in making a fuss about it though.

I was surprised to find that none of the things I had been excited to include had bids while all four of the things that I had decided to include last minute because I had space though, did. Those four pieces included three framed open edition miniprints from my Canis mythos series (which were for direct sale) and a very old piece I did for a gallery show in college. That last thing surprised me the most. :o It seemed they were closing bidding half an hour early though, at 6:30, while I was there, which meant there wasn’t much of a chance of the other things selling. Bummer.

Full page color commission. Another of many dragons.

After walking out to the lightrail, I realized suddenly that I’d left my phone in the Dealer’s Den. Thankfully, I didn’t actually board the lightrail before doubling back, but by the time I got back to DD, they had locked up for the night… and only one con staffer was authorized to get the hotel staff to unlock it. From DD, I had to walk back to Con Ops, find someone who could call this staff person, then arrange to meet them back at DD. In the end, the crisis was averted and I got my phone back. x_x

It was really, really stressful, but RF staff was polite and did their best with the circumstances. I honestly considered just leaving my phone, but I had a bunch of reference photos and things there, and it’s also my most reliable alarm. D;

Full page ink commission for a themed “cock fights” sketchbook. One of my favourite commissions from the weekend, haha.

Saturday night was pretty similar to Friday night.

I inked all my commissions first, then powered through coloring and laminating all the badges. I did bring my laminator home Saturday night and planned to leave it at home so I wouldn’t have to try and figure out how to pack it with the rest of my luggage Sunday. Since I had fewer badges Saturday, I also got to finish coloring two of the full page commissions before 5am rolled around again.

All the Saturday night commissions, inked.

Honestly I really enjoyed staying up stupid late both Friday and Saturday night working. It was weird and nice to be actually working at capacity for those two days?

I LIKE WORKING. I LIKE BEING BUSY. IT IS GREAT.

Finished badges from Saturday night.

SUNDAY

Prior to opening Sunday, I did some button trades with Ian Jay, whom I went to college with, and who had been tabling behind me all weekend. Since I’m not super active in the furry fandom, I didn’t really know a lot of people at the show aside from Ian and OnnaNoko, who I’ve run into frequently at previous shows. I did get to chat a little bit with some neighbours throughout the weekend, including Hillary (Rah-Bop) and Meezer (RedCoatCat), but didn’t really socialize beyond the few tables nearest to me.

It’s funny how Rainfurrest is such a social show for most of its attendees, but for me, I was just working most of the time. And I’m fine with that. I don’t think I’d have had a lot to say anyway, even if I had had time to socialize more. As with Everfree, where many of my friends were at Anime Expo the same weekend, Rainfurrest was the same weekend as Anime Weekend Atlanta, where I also knew many people in attendance. But in both cases, I think the show I chose was the better show anyway. ;)

Coloring fur~.

For me, inking is probably the most time consuming part of the process. Coloring goes by pretty quickly, especially when the character doesn’t have a complicated color scheme. And so, just an hour after opening on Sunday, I actually finished up all the work from the night before and cleared my at-con queue.

Sunday commissions were nearly non-existent though, and of the few bites, two of them ended up being marked for post-con completion, not because I couldn’t have done them before the end of the day, but because the commissioners were leaving already. I ended up bumping one of the previously marked post-con commissions up and finishing it at the show, but mostly Sunday was spent resting my hand, haha. After a whirlwind Friday and Saturday, things were winding down in an obvious way.

Full page color commission. One of the coolest characters I’ve ever drawn. :o He belongs to Draphilius.

Dealer’s Den closed at 4pm Sunday, and after packing up, I hit up the Art Show to pick up the leftovers.

Check out seemed much improved over last year. All of my stuff was still hanging up on the panels, so it was just a matter of taking them down and turning in the bid tags. After checking out, I schlepped on home.

Color sketch card. One of very few Sunday commissions.

OVERALL

Rainfurrest was amazing this year, honestly.

I made double what I made last year, and it was the most I’d made in a weekend, ever. It was the highest ever percentage of commissions as well — 62%, up from last year’s 53%, but that still left a significant chunk of sales in premade merchandise, which is great! Over the weekend, I did exactly fifty commissions, and of those, thirty were in color — also a record, of course. This doesn’t include the number of commissions I took for post-con completion.

I worked my ass off at Rainfurrest, and it was great!! I’m so, so grateful and happy to have had all that work. It was a really lovely weekend.

The trick is learning to draw with the wrist brace on! (Don’t quote me on that.)

Pre-con organization and communication was a bit improved from last year.

Dealer’s Den was more communicative this year; they sent out emails about setup and hours at the beginning of August and in mid-September, and both emails were very in-depth and informative. Art Show sent out fewer emails, but they were better organized compared to last year. Unfortunately, issues with the registration system for Art Show pieces remained, but since this was my second time dealing with them, I was personally better prepared and managed to get my pieces entered in properly ahead of the show, which made at-con processes go a lot smoother.

All on-site staff I interacted with were polite, though they occasionally seemed poorly equipped to answer the questions I had — nothing really noteworthy though, just the normal level of uncertainty I’d expect of new volunteers/staff. With the exception of Thursday morning dealer check-in, Dealer’s Den always opened and closed on time. And while they didn’t really announce the starts of days, they were good about announcing the ends with thirty, fifteen, and five minute warnings.

I’m not sure why Art Show closed up bidding early Saturday night though.

Con swag, mostly buttons from Ian, haha.

I’m a bit disappointed that I didn’t sell much in the Art Show this year, but more than that I’m concerned that if I can’t move originals at Rainfurrest — where art is king and the average attendee has the budget to at least consider it — then I probably won’t be able to move them anywhere else either.

I’m still somewhat resistant to the idea of putting more prints into Art Shows; it seems counter-intuitive to do so when I’d offer the same prints in Artist Alley or Dealer’s Den anyway. I could go for fancier and more exclusive print options — canvas prints or metallic ones or extra large sized ones — but those would be costlier gambles for me. I already have all these originals, after all.

Maybe it was just an off-year though. I didn’t go to the live auction this time, so I’m not sure how that went, but it did seem to me that fewer pieces than last year had bids on them when I stopped in Saturday evening. Regardless of sales though, Art Show did go more smoothly this year, so I’m glad for the little improvements. :o

The number of markers I needed to refill post-con.

All in all, Rainfurrest was super great, and I really look forward to next year!

I’d like to add more furry conventions to my circuit, but so far no luck. I was waitlisted for MFF this year and FWA next year. I suppose there’s still a chance of FWA happening, but MFF’s definitely out. I’d love to do AnthroCon next year since for once it doesn’t conflict with AX or Everfree, but we’ll see… we’ll see…

Coming up on my thirteenth convention of the year, and especially after a very busy August and September, con fatigue has been setting in hardcore.

Thankfully, Geek Girl Con — a two-day show, October 11-12, in downtown Seattle — was small and local: something low-stress and low-key after a flurry of busy or out-of-town shows.

Peddlin’ my wares~

This report is 3,783 words long.

Jump to: Pre-Con & Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Overall.

Pre-Con & Friday

Honestly, the administrative stuff leading up to GGC left a lot to be desired…

I first inquired about 2014 Artist Alley spaces in mid-December of last year. Yes, that’s pretty early for an October show, but I wasn’t sure when applications had gone up the last few years and wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I got a response back just after New Years with an attached application. After last year‘s confusion regarding table sizes, it looked like the they finally settled on the following distinctions with vendors spaces and table sizes: “Artist Alley” tables were 4′ and cost $75. “Exhibitor” tables were 8′, but the cost was more than double of AA at $200. Exhibitors could also get 8’x30″ booths for $325.

I still think four feet tables are really weird, but at least everything was clear now.

GGC Artist Alley, hidden away on the second floor.

I asked GGC’s Exhibits Head if someone could buy two 4′ AA tables but be provided with a single 8′ table. “Yes.”

I then asked if two artists buying separate 4′ AA tables could also be provided with a single 8′ table to split. “Yes, as long as both indicate such.”

Finally, I asked if the application could be submitted digitally instead of being physically mailed in. “For legal reasons we do need the hard copy.”

All the responses were speedy, and so Xib and I mailed in our separate applications in early January, with each of us indicating that we wanted to split an 8′ table in Artist Alley. We went with this plan because 1) four feet tables are weird, 2) neither of us did particularly well at GGC last year, and so neither of us wanted to spring for 8′ Exhibitor tables or wanted to put two 4′ AA together ourselves, and 3) we liked splitting the table last year and figured it’d work out fine for us to do that again.

GGC Exhibitor’s Hall, spread out on the roomy third floor.

Three weeks after we stuck the applications in the mail, in early February, I emailed to check if they’d be received. I got a response back the next day from the Exhibit’s Head saying that they’d check with a person who checks the mail more frequently… but after that there was silence. I poked again about a month later (mid-March) and got no response. I poked again in early May and finally got confirmation that the applications were received. I asked when we could expect word on whether we’d been accepted into the Alley and was told that they’re shooting for two weeks, but that was uncertain.

I think GGC fills vendor spaces in a first come, first serve manner, rather than jurying, but I’m not super sure on this since there’s no real indication one way or another. Payment isn’t taken with the initial application, so I couldn’t verify that they’d deposited a check or anything. I really hate pestering convention management about things and feeling like I’m being an annoying pain in the ass, but I think there’s cause for concern when it takes five months for a show to get back to me on an application sent… :/

Jafar!

GGC finally sent out confirmations about accepted applications near the end of June, then followed up with payment instructions a month later, in mid-July.

And they got payment details wrong: I was asked to pay for two 4′ tables — both mine and Xib’s — and had to remind them that we were registered and paying separately and that our request was just to share a single 8′ table instead of being given two 4′ tables. GGC acknowledged their mistake and said they’d send Xib’s payment instructions separately… and then never did. Rather than bug them more though, I just forwarded Xib the payment instructions sent to me me so he could take care of his the same way.

In mid-September, we got table assignments and a map. The map showed Xib and I at separate side-by-side 4′ tables, but I was too preoccupied with other conventions to think much on that. For map purposes, anyway, it could be argued that that was easier than listing two artist names to a single 8′ space? I dunno. I was pretty disillusioned with GGC’s organization skills at that point, which is unfortunate because they already weren’t too high, following last year’s incident.

Fake Lemonade Stand @ Geek Girl Con 2014, even if it doesn’t say so.

And so, when we showed up the Friday afternoon to set up and saw that we’d been given separate 4′ tables, we weren’t surprised at all.

Honestly, we weren’t even that stuck on our request being honored — it was probably a complicated request from an administrative and paperwork standpoint, but it was really lame that we had been reassured every step of the way that our request was possible, that our request had been noted at every step along the way, only to have it not be so. The first thing I asked after getting the application in January was whether we could combine our 4′ tables into an 8′ one. But nope. Just kidding. Two separate 4′ tables.

For what it’s worth, I’m certain that the request probably still could have been honored if I’d brought it up with on-site staff Friday. After all, swapping out tables was what they had to do for us last year, but at that point, I just couldn’t be bothered. I had other errands to get to Friday afternoon and didn’t want to have to wait for them to bring in another table or whatever. So in the end, Xib and I just set up at our separate 4′ tables.

And a final bit of amusement regarding the failure to fulfill our one request? I didn’t notice immediately when I checked in, but they gave Xib and I one packet between us. They gave us our badges and programs together in one packet labeled with both our names, as if we had registered and paid together, but they didn’t manage to put our tables together. Come on.

My usual banner is 5′ long, so 4′ doesn’t cut it.

Geek Girl Con is the only convention I’ve ever gone to that has 4′ tables. 6′ is standard, and 8′ a nice bonus you encounter sometimes. As such, my “Fake Lemonade Stand” is 5′ long, with an extra foot off as a nice buffer to fit on minimum length 6′ tables. My PVC is also cut specifically with 6′ and 8′ table setups in mind, but thankfully, it resized to 4′ without too much of an issue.

Still, the resulting table was super cramped, especially since the room also had a low ceiling, which meant I couldn’t built up to full height. My plywood rack took up more than half the space, forcing my window opening to be on the end instead of the middle. I did briefly consider closing it up the window entirely and sitting next to the table all weekend, but in the end I decided I liked being able to hide behind the display, haha…

Minerva McGonagall and Luna Lovegood~.

For 24hr Comic Day this year, instead of drawing a comic, I stayed up and drew sketches and concepts for 18 alien species from Animorphs and compiled it into a 40-page zine. Since that’s heftier than the other zines I’ve made recently, I decided to order them from a printer instead of making them myself. When I got back from various errands Friday, I had a bunch of packages waiting for me (it was a very good mail day), and one of them had the zines!

I was really surprised since I’d sent out the order just Sunday evening, so that’s less than a week turnaround. o_o It wasn’t a very large or complicated order, but still! I was super excited I’d get to have the zines at GGC. :o

If you didn’t already know, I love Animorphs.

Saturday

No one will ever recognize who I’m cosplaying, lol.

The show opened to vendors for setup around 7am and to the public at 9am, but I ~slept in~ until 7:30 or so and had a pretty lazy morning because I was already set up.

I hadn’t cosplayed all summer because it was too hot or too inconvenient, but I decided to pull out gambler!Rin Saturday because why not. It’s basically a closet cosplay made of clothes I never otherwise get to wear. I actually have a bunch of other neat clothes I never get to wear, so maybe I’ll work everything into weird alternate costume cosplays because that might be the only reason I’ll ever have to take them out…

I got to the convention 20 minutes before opening and shuffled things around on my table a bit to make room for the zine. I was concerned that there wasn’t a sign outside the Artist Alley room like last year, which meant there was absolutely no indication that we were there at all. (The staffer manning the room at the time said that they had misplaced it and were looking for it…)

The room AA is in is fairly spacious and has two doors, but there is nothing else on the second floor of the building aside a single lonely panel room, a staff room, and a “photo booth” in the corner of the hallway, which meant that AA was, again, very easy to overlook. The rest of the vendors, the Exhibit’s Hall, was on the third floor.

Saturday morning was pretty quiet. The flow of traffic was actually better than I thought it would be, but most people passed through fairly quickly. I had a hard time adjusting to the small space I had, which left no room for my regular commission sign. I ended up taping it sort of sideways, so people could only see it from a certain angle, but it was better than nothing? Commission interest was extremely low at GGC last year though, so I wasn’t expecting much.

To pass the time, I did bike anime-themed art trades with both Errow and AJ (since AJ finally watched the series!!). It was super fun, but nothing ever occupies me for as long as I want it to at slow cons.

Thankfully, things picked up a bit in the early afternoon, and I was selling more prints than usual?

I think in general my prints have been doing better this year because I finally have enough prints in the same sort of style and subject matter that my work (and my table) looks… cohesive? Most of my new pieces this year are swirly animal things in brush pen and marker, and not only do most of them match nicely, but I’m actually pretty happy with them too. I think having that unifying thread makes my table less overwhelming because people aren’t bombarded by a dozen different things in different styles.

It might have also helped that I didn’t really have anything other than prints displaying this time because my table was so tiny. I didn’t have room for buttons at all, and while postcards were still displayed in my prints binder, they weren’t set out separately. My zipper bags were hanging from one side of the PVC fort, but went by unnoticed by most.

I probably won’t stop making buttons any time soon, but while the itch to experiment with other products, like acrylic charms, comes up every few months, I think it’s probably way better for me to focus on expanding my print portfolio to explore that brush/marker style even more.

Hork-Bajir sketches from my zine.

Saturday afternoon also brought lots of conversations about Animorphs, which made me really, really happy even if most of these conversations didn’t end in sales. I was just stoked to be able to geek out about this series, which is hugely important to me, but which is old enough that few talk about it anymore. It was great seeing people look over the title and subtitle of my zine, then immediately do a double take.

Animorphs is a series that most people my age have probably read a book or ten from, but which relatively few ever finished (it’s over 60 books long, altogether, ha). I think that most that have finished the series are pretty big fans though, so it was really great to be able to have a reason to talk about it.

I think I was probably way, way too over-enthusiastic on the subject in many cases, but Animorphs was probably my very first fandom, and it was a huge part of my life back in the day. Honestly, even now, I think about the series regularly and am in a perpetual state of rereading random books from it.

A full page color commission!

At some point, Robin Sevakis stopped by to drop off my backer copy of the most excellent Anime News Nina collection, which was pretty awesome. SPECIAL DELIVERY! Here’s a big fat book full of great comics! Chip, of social justice class button fame, also happened by at some point to sell buttons to artists who weren’t able to hunt her (or her NPCs) down themselves, haha.

A few commissions rolled in in the afternoon as well, but I was able to finish everything just before we closed at 6pm. After throwing a sheet over the table, I got delicious phở with fluffy before going home to watch a whole bunch of Girl Meets World episodes (what).

Overall, it was a strangely well-rounded day? The morning lull was offset by art trades with friends and while things never got busy in the afternoon, there was just enough activity to keep me entertained and the crowd was very pleasant all around. Morning traffic went by at a brisk pace as people were cautious not to spend too much or get too interested in anything right out of the gate, but afternoon traffic moved along at a much more relaxed pace, with people stopping for conversation and more in-depth browsing. A lot of people came back multiple times before finally settling on something. It was nice!

Numbers for Saturday were much better than I expected — I actually made more Saturday than I did the entire weekend last year. :o

Phở! I love phở.

Sunday

Awkward selfie go! Bowties are cool!

Sunday’s hours were from 9am to 5pm, so my morning went about the same. I didn’t cosplay again (my wig was pinching my head all day Saturday and got pretty uncomfortable towards the end), but I decided to dress fancy again just because.

There was almost no traffic Sunday morning though, and the hours before noon passed very slowly. GGC was sold out for the weekend for all badge types, but it seemed Sunday was filled with the most first-time attendees, which meant they didn’t know where the Artist Alley was based on knowing where it was last year. They did finally get a sign to put outside the room, but I guess it was still pretty easy to overlook.

Since it was so slow, I finally went up to take a look around the third floor Exhibit’s Hall. It was good to be able to say hello to friends upstairs, including Wendi Chen, Robin Robinson (the Gorgonist), and the fine folks at Unicorn Empire, but as always, I was antsy leaving the table unattended and didn’t browse as thoroughly as I would have liked.

I was kind of annoyed at how spacious it was on the third floor too… they could have easily mashed in the entirety of Artist Alley without crowding the floor. There’s no reason to split up the vendors, especially as there was no real distinction between Artist Alley and Exhibit’s Hall aside from default size of tables — there were tons of artists in the Exhibit’s Hall. I really, really hope they move AA back upstairs next year…

GGC Exhibit’s Hall. Look at all this space!

In the morning dead period, I also finally properly introduced myself and said hello to Jake Richmond of Modest Medusa, who was just two tables down from me, haha… I’ve seen him at a ton of other shows and really like his comic, but this was the first time I said hi because I’m terrible. :)

Traffic improved slightly as the day went on, but I definitely heard a lot of “we didn’t realize this room was here” and “we had no idea Artist Alley was here” from attendees. There were fewer buyers compared to Saturday, but of the people that made purchases, they bought more stuff?

Xib sold one of my Animorphs zines for me while I was browsing the Exhibit’s Hall in the morning, and later in the afternoon, that person came back (wearing a cute Andalite hat!) with a friend, who bought two more copies. *__* Honestly, I always have low expectations for zines and feel like only other artists are ever interested, so I was really happy that people liked them (and doubly happy that Animorphs is not a dead fandom, though I really knew that already).

Such a stylish Sherlock!

Sunday afternoon went by at a weird pace. Since it was pretty slow, I was doodling a fair bit and also talking to Xib a lot, but getting engrossed in drawing and conversation made me less attentive to the people that were browsing. Ah well. Since I basically only see Xib at conventions, it was nice to hang out and talk about whatever we were talking about, lol.

There were a lot of blogs, vlogs, and podcasts going around doing interviews throughout the weekend. These always kinda weird me out because I don’t feel like I have much to say, but Deborah Pless of Kiss My Wonder Woman made a circuit around the Alley asking a short series of open-ended questions that were pretty fun to answer. That was the only interview I gave all weekend, haha.

Things stayed pretty slow through the end of the day Sunday, and when closing time came, I packed up in kind of a rush because I needed to tear down and drop everything off at my apartment as quickly as possible so I could head over to Bellevue for someone’s birthday dinner.

It was a lovely weekend.

Overall

Geek Girl Con is a good show.

It’s does well to promote feminism, inclusion, and diversity in all kinds of nerd things, and everyone involved is pretty rad. It’s a good size and the attendees are great, and walking distance from my apartment makes it a great location for me, of course.

I made double what I made last year, with equal distribution between Saturday and Sunday. I really don’t know why I did so much better? I had about the same space in the same location, but I’ll peg it on a much better display and a more cohesive body of work. Commission interest at the show remained low (14%), but Square usage was extremely high (42%).

Actually, both last year and this year, GGC had the highest percentage of purchases made via card of all the cons I’d attended. I’m really grateful Xib let me use his wifi hotspot all weekend because I had zero reception (texts barely went through half the time) in the building and the convention center’s free wifi was spotty at best. This is my one big gripe about the convention center, but there’s not much to be done about it.

Geek Girl Con swag! Awesome Hannibal-inspired tote from Unicorn Empire and stickers from Modest Medusa!

Unfortunately, my two critiques from last year stand: Artist Alley really needs to move upstairs for better visibility and so all the vendors can be in the same space, and pre-show organization, communication, and administrative stuff could stand significant improvement.

There’s plenty of room on the third floor for AA, so I’m honestly not sure why they chose to keep it on the second floor this year. I might go ahead and just spring for an Exhibitor table next year, but regardless, I feel that all the vendors should be together.

As for the pre-show stuff… I feel like it’s probably a mix of things piling up and being forgotten, and GGC being short-staffed in the off-season. I think a majority of GGC’s core staff have prior experience working other shows (PAX, ECCC, and Sakura-Con are all huge and local, so it’s not small-con experience either!), so they should know what they’re doing, but only having one or two people handling certain things during the prep months makes things hard for everyone. Or, on the flipside, having one duty split between multiple people and having that task depend on all of those people’s availability can slow things down a lot too, in addition to allowing more things to get lost in the shuffle.

Who knows. I’m not sure what caused the mix-ups both this year and last, but I’m definitely disappointed with my pre-show interactions, especially since on-site and at-con, GGC staff is stellar.

They were plentiful and easy to spot in their red “Agent” shirts and all around good, helpful people. There were one or two Agents manning the Artist Alley at any given time, and there was a table set up in the Exhibit’s Hall upstairs all weekend to handle vendor-specific questions (this is another reason AA should move upstairs too though).

I have no idea who this person is cosplaying, but they were pretty!

Still, I feel like my gripes with GGC are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. I really like the show overall and am looking forward to next year. :) Mark your calendars for October 10-11, 2015, ’cause I know they’ll sell out again!

Right on the heels of Geek Girl Con was Bellingham Comicon on October 18th, a small, one-day affair up near Bellingham, WA, though more accurately, it took place at the Ferndale Events Center in Ferndale, WA.

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much out of it, especially since the other one-day comic show in the area I’ve done, Jet City Comic Show, has been thus far unimpressive. But hey, overhead was low and I’ll do most shows at least once… And I ended up being totally blown away by how amazing BCC was.

Bellingham Comicon, go!

This report is 2,424 words long.

Pre-Con

I don’t really remember how I first learned about the con, but it was some time in February/March when I was scouting all over the place for shows to do this year. The show is organized almost entirely by Eric Burris, who responded promptly to emails. An exhibitor application was emailed out to interested parties at the end of March. This was the same weekend as Emerald City Comic Con, and conveniently, Eric would be on-site at ECCC Sunday to accept completed applications and cash payments there.

Since the risks were very minimal, I jumped at the chance to get everything confirmed and finalized as soon as possible. I also mentioned the show to Laura and Dordji, who were also at ECCC, and who also ended up eagerly applying. Since I didn’t have a table to rush back to this year at ECCC, I spoke to Eric a fair bit about Bellingham to get a better idea of what it’d be like. He was very eager to promote the show and to reassure me that it’d be worthwhile, but I didn’t really need the convincing, honestly. I’m a fan of one-day shows in general and would like to see more of them around. They’re the perfect way to combat the unwieldy beasts that many conventions have become.

BCC takes place in one room, reminiscent of JCCS when it was still at Seattle Center, but even smaller!

I got a physical receipt when I paid, but Eric followed up via email a few weeks after ECCC to re-confirm that he had my application and payment.

In early October, an email went out to check that everyone signed up was still interested, and to note that if anyone needs to cancel, they should do so ASAP so their spaces could go to eager waitlisters and so they could be refunded more promptly. A week before the show, an email with detailed information about policies, load-in, and other things came, and the day before the show, a final email went out with Eric’s phone contact information, as he wouldn’t be able to check email during the show itself.

All in all, a very pleasant pre-con experience. Eric made sure he was easy to get a hold of, was responsive to emails, and did well to keep everyone updated with the information they needed. It’s doubly impressive since it seems like Eric was handling basically everything by himself — this is the level of professionalism that all showrunners and con staff need to aspire to!

Never tired of Loki cosplayers.

The Show

Bellingham is about an hour and forty minutes’ drive from Seattle. The show opened to the public at 10am, with exhibitor setup starting around 7:30am. I wanted to have around two hours for set up. And so, Jer, Laura, and I were up stupidly early so we could be on the road by 6:30. It was really, really nice of them to have agreed to that plan since Jer and Laura can set up in like, twenty minutes. ^_^;

The Ferndale Events Center is just two turns off of I-5, so it was very easy to find. We got there a little after 8am and the (free) parking lot was mostly deserted. The location seemed very nice though. Not only was it right off the freeway, but there were a lot of food options right across the street, and various other things within walking distance, including some banks and a grocery store.

Setting up at BCC.

Check-in was very painless, and our tables were easy to locate. It was just a one-room con, after all. Most of the “exhibitors” were ringed around the walls and outer circuit of the room and most of the “artists” were set down the center aisle. I put the terms in quotes because, as usual, there were a handful of artists who went ahead and got exhibitor spaces since the difference was just two feet of space.

It was good that there were food/bank/etc close by, as that meant Jer and Laura could go off and forage after they were done setting up their table. Jer stopped by the bank for change and picked up some snacks at the grocery store while Laura went and got a proper breakfast at Denny’s. Meanwhile, I set up my fortress of prints in a surprisingly short amount of time. I think it took just over an hour? Either I’ve gotten faster or I underestimated again how quickly I can work when not distracted.

My table and Laura/Jer’s table, haha.

In the time I had before opening, I made a slow circuit around the room. A lot of artists weren’t set up yet, so I mostly lingered around the exhibitors, which seemed comprised mostly of local comic shops.

I know longboxes with deep discounts are pretty normal at most comic cons, but I was still surprised at some of the prices. Out of print manga for $3 a pop? Man. I would’ve dug a little more through some bins if I wasn’t so strapped for shelf space at the moment. There was also a vendor with the Funko Pop figures from Disney’s Lion King and Robin Hood that I was really tempted for… (Scar!! Sir Hiss!!)

When Jer and Laura came back around 9:30, I was surprised to hear that there was actually a line of people outside waiting to come in.

My expectations for the show were pretty low, but that’s not no fault of BCC’s. I just tend towards skepticism, and in this case, it was particularly because JCCS has been historically underwhelming for me. I wasn’t sure about the expected attendance for BCC, but ~500 seems about on par with other one-day shows, including JCCS and ChibiChibiCon. And neither of those shows really had people raring to go.

Fake Lemonade Stand @ Bellingham Comicon.

Bellingham Comicon did open to quite the enthusiastic crowd though, and because the room was fairly small, things got busy pretty fast!

Compared to Jet City Comic Show’s venues, the venue for BCC was very small — probably half the size of the space JCCS had at Seattle Center, and an even smaller fraction of what they have now at the Tacoma Convention Center. This meant that even if BCC had half the attendance, it would have felt more crowded. Crowded doesn’t always mean busy, but in BCC’s case, it definitely did!

Laura/Jer’s table at BCC.

And the crowd was such a pleasant, eager, and friendly one too. There were a lot of first-time con-goers in the mix, a lot of families, a lot of kids, but also a lot of teens and twentysomethings. It was the perfect combo of basically everyone, and the best part was that they seemed fairly receptive to basically everything!

As I said, most of the exhibitors were comic shops, but the artists were incredibly diverse. The guest artists were primarily known for their contributions to mainstream, Big Two properties, but there were also some fantasy artists and a bunch of independent/small press folks as well, not to mention Jer and Laura, proponents of the indiest of indie, copybon/ashcan minicomics and zines, and me, weird hybrid anime person and fantasy creatures in Asian-inspired brushwork.

All of our stuff was different, but the attendees seemed interested in all of it. It was amazing.

Look at this crowd!

Judging by the cosplayers, the crowd was still very much comics-focused/dominated — there weren’t many anime cosplayers in the lot and relatively few people talked to me about anime, but the ones that were there were very eager for anime content. I only have three tiny buttons to contribute to the Attack on Titan fandom and they take up a very tiny portion of my table, but I almost sold out of them. o_o With my telling fortress of prints, I was the only anime con regular at the show, so I guess it wasn’t hard for “my people” to find me. ;)

I’d meant to restock a few buttons between GGC and BCC — even though I didn’t actually have buttons out at GGC, I was running low on a bunch of things after the barrage of September cons. I ended up not getting around to it though, and I regretted that because in addition to the AoT buttons, I sold out of a lot of other designs at BCC! I also sold a surprising number of original and very old prints that I hadn’t moved in ages, which always a bit of a relief.

Commission interest at one-day shows tend to be very low, and I didn’t have a lot of room to display my commission sign anyway because of the space my new Animorphs zine took up… But I actually took down the sign at several points during the day because I was too busy handling continuous sales to actually work on the tiny handful of commissions I did get. o_o Amazing.

Crowds!

The intimate space meant pretty much everyone got equal attention. There weren’t any “dead zones,” and the aisles were fairly narrow.  There were also a bunch of large, inconvenient pillars, but I think they actually helped divide by traffic nicely down the middle of the aisle. There weren’t many other events at the show either, so the primary attraction was just lots and lots of browsing and shopping. Perfect, especially since there was food nearby and attendees could leave and come back as they wanted — a stamped hand was their proof of admission; only vendors had badges.

This is kind of the opposite of what I felt the problem was at JCCS last year — there wasn’t much else other than the exhibit’s hall there either, but since JCCS is at an actual convention center with limited on-site food options, attendees had to leave for food, and I’m sure that many of them never came back.

In the setup email we got prior to the show, Eric mentioned that cell reception in the building was poor and provided a wifi network and password for vendors. I actually didn’t have any problems with cell reception and ran Square transactions smoothly all day, but it was great that the wifi was provided and I don’t think any of the other vendors had trouble connecting to it.

In the mid to late afternoon, things did slow down a fair bit. I got to finish up my commissions and talk to a few people for longer, since there weren’t others waiting on them. The busyness of the morning was never overwhelming, but the afternoon never felt dead or slow either. Bellingham Comicon was open for just seven hours, 10a-5p, but they were all lovely.

And there was an epic sunset after we packed up.

Overall

Bellingham Comicon ended up being my best one-day show ever.

Actually — it was the most I’d made in a single day after Saturday at Otakon 2012 and Friday at Rainfurrest this year, which is saying a lot because Otakon probably had 30x the attendees, and Rainfurrest was almost 70% commissions on Friday. BCC was just 3% commissions. I was absolutely floored by the amount of interest and support at the show. o_o

Look at all these people.

The downside of one-day shows is that I didn’t have much of a chance to talk to other artists and vendors while there. I didn’t want to bother people in the morning while they were still setting up, and there was really no chance at the end of the day to mingle. So I’m not sure how universal my experiences were, but Jer, Laura, and Dordji all seemed to have a pretty good day. Everyone enjoyed themselves.

I think that moving forward, I want to do more small and mid-sized conventions and fewer large ones. This was the direction I was going in anyway, especially where comic cons were concerned, because of shows like ECCC and Rose City Comic Con. Those shows have become less art-focused and their overwhelmingly large vendor halls mean it’s easy to get lost in the crowd, not to mention their high costs. Even the large conventions of other genres make me a bit wary these days. My one-time stint at Otakon wasn’t the best and Anime Central this year, while not terrible, was still a bit disappointing.

So 100% of the cosplayers I took pictures of at BCC were Loki. FIGHT ME.

BCC is the perfect antithesis: it’s a tiny show run by one person, taking place in a one-room building over the course of one day. All of its guests are artists. Its primary attraction is artists. All the vendors are comic and book dealers. It’s very art-focused, no one gets lost in the crowd, and costs for everyone are very low.

I don’t know what the official attendance was for the show — I’d still guess around 500. But I will happily take 500 attendees that are very excited and enthusiastic about art and comics to 40,000 attendees that aren’t especially so.

This isn’t to say that ECCC and RCCC and other large shows aren’t still great in their own way, or that the attendees that go to them are lesser somehow — everyone wants something different out of their convention, and it’s great that there’s a variety to choose from. But as a vendor, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep doing shows that haven’t been receptive to me.

Comics and comic people.

So yeah, I had a great time at BCC, and I really appreciate the time and effort Eric Burris has put into this show. Maybe I still have an audience with the comic crowd after all. I’m already looking forward to next year. :)

The con season for me ended this year with Jet City Comic Show, November 8th in Tacoma, WA, and while the show has always been a slow one for me, it was still a quieter end to the season than I’d have liked. Oh well!

Fake Lemonade Stand @ JCCS 2014.

This report is 1,225 words long.

After an exceptionally busy October, Xib and I were both pretty much running on auto-pilot for JCCS, so it was fortunate for us that JCCS hadn’t changed much between this year and last and that we didn’t need to do any prep ahead of the show at all. We left Seattle around 7am, got to Tacoma around 8, and parked in the convenient $10/day parking garage with the elevator that went straight up to the fifth floor of the Tacoma Convention and Trade Center, where the show was being held.

Things were still pretty quiet when we got there. Badge pick-up was straightforward, as it’d always been, but since it’d slipped our minds to request tables near each other, Xib and I were fairly far apart. In fact, I was pretty far away from everyone I knew that was there, but that’s how it goes, I guess.  The exhibit space for the show had expanded again too — this year there were 100 Artist Alley tables (up from 80 last year) and 90 Dealer’s booths (up from 50 last year). Especially considering the fact that at least half the AA tables were split between two or more artists, that’s a lot of vendors for a small, one day show…

They provided vendors free coffee during setup!

The show didn’t open to the public until 10am, so we had plenty of time for a leisurely setup.

After seeing her at approximately a dozen other shows in the area, I finally sort of said hello and introduced myself to Jennifer of Dancing Heron, because she was tabling adjacent-behind me. Other than that, my circuit around the room before the show opened was mostly to say hi to friends, including Laura, Dordji, Hannako, Tony, Unicorn Empire, AJ, Errow, and Tara, and to grab a few business cards.

There was a table providing free coffee to vendors at the far end of the room too, which was a lovely surprise. Since it was conveniently near a bunch of friends… I might have hung around for two refills of my thermos.

Not sure who these guys were cosplaying (uh, presumably characters from Dragon Age?), but they looked cool!

The show opened at ten to a light crowd. The huge exhibition hall and wide aisles gave everyone plenty of space to move around and browse, but unfortunately, as was the case last year, no one really wanted to browse.

I entertained myself through the slow morning by doodling various characters and scenes from my NaNoWriMo project, but at no point did things really pick up. There were people around, but none of them stopped for very long, and not many people circled back once they’d passed through… More than once, a kid would stop at my table, only to be shooed along by their parents, who noted “we have all these other tables to go through too.” It was apparent that the size of the hall was intimidating and that attendees felt like they didn’t have time to give any table a proper look. :(

I had one commission the entire day, and I think a majority of my sales went to other vendors — as in years past, only vendors were given badges; attendees were marked by wrist bands, so they were easy to tell apart.

We closed down at 5pm. I didn’t get to talk to a ton of people post-show, but I think the consensus was that it was slow all around, and a handful of folks mentioned that they probably wouldn’t return. Bummer.

Pencil sketch in sketchbook commission.

OVERALL

My feeling at the end of the con was that I probably did about the same as last year, but when I ran numbers, it turned out that this year was down 17% from last year, which had already been down 14% from 2012. For 2015, JCCS is growing to a two-day convention, and their prices are for vendor spaces are doubling accordingly.

I don’t think I’m going to go.

It’s a huge shame because JCCS is a very well-run and organized show — I have no complaints whatsoever about the folks who run it — and Tacoma’s not a bad commute from Seattle. It’s probably a great show for attendees, especially those who’ve never been to a convention before or who have small children. There are tons of vendors and the guests JCCS brings in really appeal to the older, nostalgic family crowd. Jet City Comic Show is a good show, but in the three years I’ve gone as a vendor, I’ve never done well, and I think I need to stop being stubborn and stop doing stuff that obviously isn’t working.

I wish JCCS the best of luck with their continued growth, and I hope vendors that do return for 2015 do better than they have, but for now, I’m out.

No idea who this kid’s cosplaying, but that beard was great.

A big issue for me is still probably genre/crowd/audience stuff — as I’ve said before, comic con crowds have never been my best.

Bellingham Comicon was a huge fluke in an otherwise consistent pattern. JCCS, ECCC, RCCC, even Comicpalooza — all these shows had a crowd I couldn’t seem to jive with. Things might change when I get some books done (though they will probably be picture books and not comic books), but aside from those I’ve already committed to for the 2015 season, I’m probably not going to seek out any other comic cons for the time being.

JCCS badge.

The 2014 convention season was a super stressful and hectic one for me, but what a learning experience it’s been! Fifteen shows is the most I’ve ever done in a year, but I feel like I’ve improved significantly in many areas, and it’s encouraging to know that I can handle this much. It’s weird thinking that it’s already been six years since I started doing this stuff though.

But I guess now’s a good time to mention that moving forward, I will probably not be writing any more extensive con reports. They take a ridiculous amount of time and effort and at this point, I feel like many of them have gotten repetitive and unnecessarily cumbersome. Not counting this report, this year I’ve written over 60,000 words worth of con report! Insane, man.

Because I’m an obsessive record-keeper, it’s likely I’ll still do some kind of recap or summary post for shows, especially ones I’ve never been to before, but I’ll likely stop writing the play-by-plays. All of the details were mostly for me, anyway, since I have a bad memory, but now I kind of have Twitter as my journal and the long reports just aren’t needed? I’m sure most readers are more interested in the “overall” sections anyway, yeah? We’ll see what happens, I guess. I’m hoping to write more pen/supply reviews though!

As always though, thanks for reading.

I’ll be returning to Austin for the new year to spend the first weekend of 2015 at IKKiCON, January 2-4th! It’ll be my fifth year vending there, and I’m looking forward to seeing old and new friends alike. :)

Shockingly, it’s been almost three years since I last made major changes to this website. I’m actually still reasonably fond of the old layout, but I figured it was about time I made this thing responsive and better suited to the plethora of devices people browse with these days.

The new layout is based loosely off Anders Norén’s Wilson theme, because honestly, I didn’t feel like doing a responsive theme from scratch.

As someone who doesn’t do a lot of mobile browsing, I’m still kind of grumpy about having to account for the big changes in viewport sizes. Though there are still tiny inconsistencies between modern browsers, cross-browser compatibility has been way less of an issue since IE6 died its slow, slow death and IE in general is on its way out. But responsive design is the browser compatibility problem of this smart phone and tablet era, and I guess it’s only going to get more crazy from here.

In addition to giving the site a mobile version for small screens, I wanted to take better advantage of the huge desk monitors people have now. For portfolio display, the site is now full-width so images can display much bigger. Comic pages are back to going in a lightbox (though they still display full size) because I realized that there was really no reason for me to need a comment area on the pages. All of my comics are short oneshots or stand-alone strips and there are commentary venues on other sites I post on. In the unlikely event I ever do a longform, ongoing comic, I’d make a separate site anyway.

The main design problem I had with a full-width site is what to do with pages of mostly text. Image display is easy, but I personally really dislike when paragraphs stretch across the entire screen, making them long and narrow. I wanted a max-width on paragraphs, but with the sidebar on the left, would it be weird have blocks of content next to it at a max-width, leaving the rest oft he screen blank on large screens? But it’d also be weird to center the contents of the rest of the page to the middle of the area, right?

Oh well. In the end, I went with off-center because it bothered me least of the two options.

Responsiveness isn’t perfect on blog entry pages, as large images aren’t being auto-resized at the moment. I was running into some conflicts between the scripts handling the portfolio and the scripts running native gallery configuration and auto-selecting images in blog posts for display based on browser size is something that would’ve made both of those things even more difficult. :’) I think most people reading my essay-length blog entries are at a desktop anyway, probably with a big cup of caffeine, ready to kill 20 minutes with my verbosity.

Other than the new layout, I did also update almost all the pages of the site. I added more social media icons… I guess that’s about it.

My business cards for the last three years have matched my site layout, and I still have about a thousand cards of that design left. Hopefully people won’t be too confused though! All the same themes are there. My favourite colors are still painfully obvious, anyway.

For 2013 and 2014, Devastator Press and The Beat put together a survey for comic convention exhibitors about costs and profits. The results are pretty interesting. I really wanted to see similar data for artists at anime conventions though. Though they’re two sides of the same coin and are similar in many ways, there are still huge differences in the convention cultures at comic and anime shows, and I wanted to see the figures for it.

So I made and ran a survey myself and used the Artist Alley Network International and How To Be a Con Artist communities as launch pads to collect data. The survey was live for about a month and collected 195 responses for 13 conventions from an unknown number of artists. The results are compiled in the first PDF linked below, along with some of my observations and commentary.

I know there are many more ways to analyze and sort the data than what I’ve done though, so the raw data is also provided, sorted by convention, and sans timestamps to maximize the anonymity of respondents.

The 2015 survey is now also live, with some additional and modified questions, which will hopefully help provide additional insight!

The Important Stuff:

• Permalink to 2014 Survey Report
• Permalink to 2014 Survey Raw Data
• 2015 Survey!

I think I originally had a lot more to say, but I’m currently in the middle of three back-to-back conventions and am very tired. :’) I really wanted to get this report published though, especially since we just had one of the biggest convention weekends of the year! I hope folks will find this report enlightening and that there will be more respondents for the 2015 survey. More data is better data!

Despite acknowledging that fountain pens aren’t really for me practically, I keep…picking them up.

Actually, I pick up pretty much every new brush pen and fountain pen that Daiso Japan stocks because how can you lose when everything’s $1.50? But while I use brush pens for art and go through tons of them every year, I rarely have reason to use other types of pens, which is why I don’t need fountain pens. I still like the idea of them though, so I guess that’s why I’m slowly accumulating a pile of fountain pens.

I like that the packaging translates everything for once.

This is actually the second Daiso fountain pen I’ve picked up, but I never got around to reviewing the first one, and now I’ve misplaced it. Daiso’s stock of pens (and other supplies) varies a lot from month to month and year to year, which is one of the reasons I almost always pick up something new when I see it — who knows if I’ll ever get another chance? Some of the Daiso brush pens I’ve reviewed in the past I haven’t seen in stock since I reviewed them.

Components of the pen and the pen put together. The ink cartridge is very small.

No one can expect much out of a $1.50 fountain pen, so I was actually pretty impressed when I opened up this package. The pen has a good weight to it, and the metal body has a smooth matte finish. The pen posts and caps securely and with a nice click. It doesn’t look or feel like a $1.50 pen.

One of my weird particulars is that I really hate aluminum body pens — I hate the way the aluminum sounds and feels against aluminum and other metals. Once upon a time, I resold my Copic Multiliner SP set a week after I got it because I just couldn’t stand sound the pens made rolling into each other on my desk or in my bag. It’s just one of those things. They’re like nails on a chalkboard to me. So! I was really glad that this pen wasn’t aluminum and that the metal body wasn’t offensive to me.

Ignore the “part II” in the writing sample. I thought I’d reviewed that other Daiso fountain pen, but that’s a lie~.

The pen writes nicely. About as nicely as it looks like it should, if that makes sense. The nib is smooth on the page and the ink flow is even. I’m not all that picky with the pens I write with (compared to the pens I draw with), so rating a writing experience is kind of weird for me, but I can definitely say that writing with this pen was pleasant.

The only real downside is that the ink cartridge for the pen is very small, barely half the length of the pen body. Daiso had refill packs for the pen with five cartridges each, so that comes out to 30 cents a cartridge. Not bad, if you can find them in stock!

Comparative sizes may not be to scale.

It’s a pretty normal-sized pen to me, but apparently some people care about these specs?

Ink cartridges aren’t waterproof, but they’re alcohol-proof!

I don’t like medium nibs for drawing, but this nib is at least smooth enough that I can doodle without thinking too much about what angle I’m holding the pen at. Dry time for the ink isn’t bad, but even when completely dry, one drop of water will wash everything out. On the bright side, the ink doesn’t run much under water, and it’s reasonably alcohol-proof (against Copic inks, at least).

Daiso fountain pen nib. It says “iridium point” on it.

It’s been a while, but I think this Daiso fountain pen writes pretty similarly to the Pilot Varsity while looking and feeling a lot nicer. It definitely surpasses the medium nib Platinum Preppy in all categories — though based on others’ reviews, I think my Preppy wrote more scratchily than most. All in all though, I’d say it’s a pretty good fountain pen, even a great one when you factor in the price. I don’t need fountain pens, but I don’t regret this $1.50 purchase in the least.

If you don’t have a Daiso in your area, you can make a habit to check their online store regularly — like their physical stores, it seems stock changes pretty frequently, so finding a certain thing is, sadly, often a matter of luck.

So DragonFlight is a small tabletop gaming convention, run by Seattle Metro Gamers, and held annually in Bellevue, WA. This year it was August 8-10, the weekend after KuroNekoCon.

I knew it was a risky venture — I’d never done this sort of show before, it’s outside my usual, and expected attendance was low compared to most anime or comic cons at ~500 — but it’s more or less local, and I convinced Xib to give it a shot with me, so at least I’d have company. I was hopeful that the roleplaying crowd would have plenty of original characters to commission sketches of, and I also figured I’d be able to do some promotion for ‘Souls RPG, the collaborative writing roleplay I help run.

DragonFlight banner.

This report is 4,098 words long.

Jump to: Pre-Con, Friday, Saturday, Overall.

Pre-Con

When I stumbled over the convention initially in March, the information on their website hadn’t been updated yet for 2014, and their website in general looked like it was stuck in 1995 or so in terms of layout and functionality. General info was sparse and confusing, and it was hard to tell if contact info was outdated or not, since they seem to create new emails on a yearly basis (with addresses like dealers2012@dragonflight). DragonFlight has been around since 1980, so the outdated web practices weren’t surprising. This is the opposite of KuroNekoCon, run largely by college kids younger than me; DragonFlight is run by the generation before me.

I emailed the general info email and received a pretty prompt response back from Amy, the Dealer’s Room coordinator, that they weren’t accepting applications yet. DF doesn’t have a separate Artist Alley, but vendors of all sorts are apparently welcomed in the DR. Spaces were $110 for a 6′ table and two badges.

At the beginning of June, I noticed that the website had been completely overhauled with a slicker, modern layout, and that registration and event scheduling were being run through a third party (Eventbrite). I pinged them again about dealer registration and was sent an application a few days later. I emailed back the application and got an invoice in another few days. Painless all around.

Eventbrite sent out a bunch of emails about the show in July, and Monday before the con, I emailed Amy about setup and public hours. She again responded back pretty quickly, then sent out a general vendor email with some additional information.

Last minute ‘Souls RPG promo poster I threw together using last year’s birthday art.

FRIDAY

Setup Friday started at 10am, but the room didn’t open to the public until 2pm.

That was plenty of time, so Xib didn’t pick me up until around 10. Traffic was very light, and we got to the Bellevue Hilton from downtown Seattle in about 20 minutes. It was kind of weird being back at that Hilton, since the last time I was there was for the disaster that was Aki Con 2012. I didn’t look too closely at the parking garage when we passed it, but there were cars in it, at least, instead of tables and other stuff.

The DragonFlight Dealer’s Room was in the first partition (of four) of the main ballroom on the lower floor of the hotel. Registration was right by the lower level’s entrance and they directed us towards the ballroom for vendor badge pickup. When we pushed open the door, Amy, the Dealer’s coordinator, was there and immediately greeted us with, “You’re Kiri and Xib, right?” We’d never met, so that was kind of creepy! But she explained that it was process of elimination, since we were the only vendors she hadn’t met yet.

Xib and my DF table. No Fake Lemonade banner to save on space!

It was a challenge figuring out how to set up since Xib and I were going from each having our own 8′ table at KuroNekoCon the weekend prior to needing to share a 6′ table, but we made it work! More or less. I was trying a new thing with my letter-sized prints (individually boarding and sleeving them for display), but unfortunately that new thing took up a lot of space. Xib always insists that he doesn’t care if I have my Fake Lemonade Stand banner up when we share tables, since he doesn’t have a banner anyway, but I think ditching it this time was a good call because we really had no room, haha.

Since we got there so early, we finished setting up with more than an hour to spare. When we’d arrived, only one other vendor was there. When we finished, there were maybe four or five other pairs or small groups, all in the process of setting up. The vendors erecting bookshelves of tabletop RPG books and board games, I expected, but I was pretty surprised to see a fandom tea blender, Friday Afternoon Tea, amongst the other vendors. There was also a leatherworker, a steampunk jeweler/metalworker, and a builder of adorable little terrariums that also housed tiny miniatures.

Dealer’s Room setting up.

The Dealer’s Room was pretty small. There were only 12-15 of us total (I never got an exact count, since some vendors took up multiple spaces), and the other three partitions of the ballroom were being used as the main game room. All the vendors were lined up against the walls, and the middle of the room had two round tables and one long table (see above) to be used for game demos.

There were also some vendors out in the hall, including one fantasy artist. I think most of the others out there were promotional groups though. Just outside of the hall, the Hilton had available a variety of conference-style, semi-catered food options, including pizza and sandwiches and salads (similar to what they had at Aki Con in 2012). Apparently, some of the proceeds from these food sales went to DragonFlight. Upstairs on the main floor of the hotel was a Tully’s Coffee and the hotel restaurant, so food options were fairly decent overall.

Dealer’s Room (still early in setup; vendors at the table against the wall hadn’t arrived yet).

At 2pm, there was no real indication that the Dealer’s Room had opened except that the gatekeeper was no longer shooing people out.

The flow of attendees into the room was minimal, and certainly no one had been waiting around for us to open. Instead, all the action and interest was concentrated in the game room, where there were end-to-end rows of tables filled with people running various board and card games. Out across from registration, there were more game tables. Out by the bathrooms, more game tables. There were signs noting that various other games were on the upper floor as well. Everywhere, tabletop games.

Main game room, before it got even more crowded. Photo by @Chiparoo.

In the first hour, I got several inquiries from game makers about doing art for their games and roleplay books. New contacts and potential future gigs are great, but I tend to be skeptical about them until project details are on the table and a real dialogue starts. At the business card exchanging stage, these jobs are still mythical beasts to me. What I really wanted from the con was at-con work and at-con sales. Something real and substantial to keep me busy in the present. Unfortunately, traffic was absolutely abysmal throughout the day.

They actually opened up part of the wall partition between the Dealer’s Room and the game room so people could pass through more easily, but this didn’t actually improve anything. There was never more than ten attendees wandering through the DR at any given time… And those that did come by did not seem very interested in browsing, shopping, chatting, or even making eye contact. It was the most disinterested crowd I’d ever seen.

Close-up of our table.

Shy and awkward can describe a great many con-goers, and I think I’m pretty used to dealing with shy and awkward. I am also shy and awkward. I get it.

There are conventions where I feel a bit out of place (furry cons) or at a loss as to how to connect with attendees (most comic cons), but this was the first where I felt that people were…standoffish? Condescending? A majority of those that passed by the table wouldn’t return basic greetings and rushed on as soon as they noticed that we noticed them. This in and of itself isn’t super atypical, but it was, admittedly, more jarring to see from grown men in their 40’s than teenagers, and the former was what DF’s attendee pool was comprised of.

The main crowd for anime cons is squarely in the teens and early 20’s demographic, with a smattering of older folks, but it’s very diverse in terms of gender and race. The crowd for furry cons is older, 20’s-40’s maybe, but still very diverse. The crowd for comic cons combines everything, with people of all age groups and backgrounds. DragonFlight seemed to be primarily white men in their 30’s-50’s. It was the most homogeneous crowd I’d ever seen at a convention, and also the demographic I’ve sold to the least, but surely not for lack of trying.

I don’t doubt that some of it may have been paranoia, but I got the distinct feeling that most passed by our table, judged harshly, and moved on, even before we could get a word in. It was weird. And discouraging.

Ask me about my RPG! Few did.

Not everyone was like that, of course. The small handful of people who did actually stop by our table for more than a second were very nice and polite, teven if still very shy and awkward. One guy was super enthusiastic about both Xib’s and my art, and that made us both feel better about things for a while, but sadly, the multitude of briefer, negative interactions stick with me more. It’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re not really welcomed.

I was disappointed, too, that I felt like I couldn’t really promote ‘Souls in the way that I wanted. The RP board has gotten a lot more diverse in the last few years, but there’s no pretending that it isn’t still a majority women and queerfolk in their teens and 20’s. I don’t know how to pitch that to an older, cismale crowd, but few stopped long enough at the table for me to mention it, and honestly, the demographic clash was so obvious that I’m sure that even if anyone had checked out the board, they wouldn’t have been interested anyway.

Bored doodle of random demon.

Both Xib and I had one commission each the entire day and could count total sales on one hand. As usual, I found it maddening to be at the table with nothing to do. I took some sketch requests from Twitter and spent as long as possible on the one commission, but ultimately still spent a lot of time doing absolutely nothing and feeling bad about it.

Three other conventions come to mind when I think about painfully slow shows: EXPCon 2009, Delta H Con 2010, and Aki Con 2012. All of these were anime cons though, so at least I could relate to the attendees, enjoy the cosplayers, and bond with other artists in our collective misery.

EXPCon was one of my first conventions, so I was still learning a lot. That con also happened to be over the weekend of a hotelmate’s 21st birthday, so we found other ways to entertain ourselves through the otherwise lackluster weekend, lol. During Delta H Con, all seven of us in the Artist Alley were so bored, we mostly spent the weekend commissioning each other and chatting a lot, but at least it kept us entertained. Aki Con went similarly, with me keeping busy with art trades and doodles until things finally sort of picked up Sunday.

Spiked milkshake. It was one of those days.

DragonFlight though… I felt out of place enough that I didn’t really feel comfortable mingling with others.

As a show run by Seattle Metro Gamers and which has been around for many, many years, it seemed that a lot of people already knew each other. Amy, after all, greeted me and Xib by name by process of elimination, and even though there were several first time vendors there, my guess is that they’d been around the game group or otherwise knew people in it. Most of the vendors in the back of the room chatted heartily amongst themselves throughout the afternoon.

Things were going slowly for everyone though, so I guess my out-of-place feeling wasn’t the only contributing factor. It was obvious that the crowd at DF just wasn’t there to shop or buy. They were there to play games.

Xib’s partner Vinty showed up an hour or so before we closed for the day (7pm), so afterwards, we all went to dinner at Lunchbox Lab. My spiked milkshake wasn’t spiked enough.

Lunchbox Lab food.

SATURDAY

After mulling over some things Friday night, I decided to come prepared Saturday with things I could work on if it was dead again. Namely, I was going to work on the silly 10-page Yowamushi Pedal doujinshi I had thumbnailed out on a whim a week or so prior.

I think I’ve had a hard time entertaining myself at the table recently because I filled up my little sketch commission examples binder a few cons ago and now have no where to put new examples, so there’s less incentive for me to work on more. I have plenty of room for more ACEOs, I suppose, but I’ve had a harder time thinking of interesting compositions for the small space. Even I get tired of drawing floating heads sometimes… but I keep remembering that in my last quarter of college, I did three conventions while busting out pages for senior project, so there was definitely a time when I could do more substantial work at the table.

So I brought paper for comic pages and tried to be as optimistic as possible about Saturday, which had hours from 9am to 7pm.

Four pages penciled.

In the first hour we were open, we had two people look at our table for more than a few seconds, and I penciled two pages of comic.

In the second hour, I penciled two more pages. By the end of the third hour, I had eight pages penciled. Meanwhile, we’d had zero sales. I felt a ton better having something to focus and work on, but I felt really bad for having dragged Xib in with me. He was doodling and listening to music, but he was obviously still bored out of his mind. I’d never seriously considered not coming back for the last day of a convention before, but I considered it then. Even EXPCon, even DHC, even Aki Con, I came back Sunday. For those cons, I still had hope, somehow.

DF… honestly, I feel bad about the whole ordeal because DragonFlight itself was not a bad convention.

It’s small and intimate and they used the space well. The showrunners are organized and Amy was helpful, accommodating, and understanding in every conversation we had. The attendees were there to game, and it seemed, for the most part, that they were having a good time doing just that. They even had free badges for visitors, which seems like a neat idea. Visitors were free to mill around the show and visit the Dealer’s Room, but they couldn’t participate in any games. I think DragonFlight probably a great show to go to as an attendee if you’re into the genre and have some friends to bring along with you.

But it’s not a show for vendors.

I finished penciling around 1pm and started lettering.

The Dealer’s Room remained dead through Saturday afternoon. I heard one attendee remark that the games in the DR weren’t “priced competitively,” which is why they weren’t buying. The demo tables in the DR weren’t being used all that much, especially compared to the game tables in other areas of the con.

Since I was too shy and awkward to chat much with the other vendors, I can only speculate as to how everyone else did, but the easy guess is that a dead DR meant few sales all around. Xib and I made our first sale at 1:30pm, more than four hours after DR opened. In the mid-afternoon, I briefly considered packing up and leaving before we even closed for the day. Even with my doujin to work on, I was getting restless and feeling perpetually guilty about Xib’s boredom. At some point, he swapped to reading an ebook on his iPad, and he went an hour or two without interruption because there was nothing to miss.

All lettering done.

Around 6pm, I stopped working on the doujin because my general irritation with the con was leaking through and my work was getting sloppy. We coasted through the last hour, then tore down. We weren’t coming back to vend Sunday. I was convinced that it would be a complete waste of time to spend another day sitting at a table no one was looking at.

Amy was incredibly understanding about this, which I really, really appreciate. She mentioned that it was always kind of hit or miss with artists — that sometimes they’d do really well, and sometimes not so much. I should have really asked more about how other vendors usually did, and whether this was just an off year for everyone, but I didn’t have the energy to.

I entertained the idea of going back to actually check out the rest of the convention Sunday since, again, it did seem like a good con for attendees, but my apparent inability to mesh with the crowd made me nervous. It’s one thing to go to these things with friends, play games, whatever. It’s weird to go by yourself, maybe doubly so after already being made to feel like an outsider.

The nail in the coffin came, though, when Xib dropped me off at my apartment and I discovered that the elevator in my building was broken. I live on the top floor. And so after dragging 140+ lbs of luggage up five flights of stairs by myself, I decided I was pretty much done with the weekend.

Twitter sketch request for @KaloMermaid from Friday, of her kirin character.

OVERALL

From a vending perspective, DragonFlight was a huge bust.

I absorbed the cost of Xib’s half of the table because I felt so bad about the whole thing. Neither of us lost money ultimately, but we sure did lose time. I guess we got a learning experience though.

It’s really too bad, because it seemed like the show could have worked out if things had been just a little different, if the crowd had been a little more diverse and open, if a bunch of a little things. It still surprises me that there weren’t any roleplayers wanting art of their characters, or if they were, that they never came to the Dealer’s Room. I overheard here and there attendees mentioning that this was their first time breaking away from their game tables to see the DR, but even when they got there, their browsing was brief; they were mostly disinterested.

The tabletop crowd is probably closest to the sci-fi/fantasy crowd. The only SFF con I’ve done is AggieCon 2011, where I did reasonably well by being the only person in the room doing commissions, and that’s the main reason I had hopes for DF. I think AggieCon being a college con skewed things though, and there were definitely more younger attendees there than at the typical SFF con. There weren’t a lot of teenagers at DF. Most of the kids there were in the 6-13 range and were the children of older attendees. And of course, children under 13 are the people I am most uncomfortable with, haha…

Twitter sketch request for @Shazzbaa from Friday, of one of her D&D characters.

Pros

• Old, established convention. DragonFlight has been around for more than thirty years, and there’s an amount of stability and experience that comes with that.
• Staff communication & professionalism. Amy, the Dealer’s Room coordinator, is also apparently a Vice President of the show and the Convention Director, always responded to emails within a day, was good at answering questions, and overall just a nice person who was pleasant to deal with. I feel pretty bad that we abandoned ship early, but she was very understanding about the whole thing, which I’m still thankful for. All of the other staffers I encountered at the con were also very kind.
• Venue space & usage. The Bellevue Hilton doesn’t have a whole lot of space, which is one of the reasons Aki Con had such a hard time there, but for the much smaller DragonFlight, the space worked really well. The DR was in a pretty prominent location, right by the entrance, registration, and the main game room, and there was potential for good traffic flow if anyone had actually cared about DR. Parking at the Hilton is normally $20/day, but for DF attendees, it was just $3/day, and you could get a validation ticket at registration, nice and easy. Convenient on-site food options are also always a plus.
• Free visitor badges. I think badges for the convention were $35/weekend, but I really liked that they allowed visitors to watch and mingle for free. It’s a good way to encourage passersby to check things out while still keeping tabs on everyone at the convention.
• Small Dealer’s Room. Though I’m sure part of it is lack of interest in the DR, it was good that the DR wasn’t bigger than it was. 13-15 vendors is plenty for the ~500 attendee crowd. They didn’t even have different vendor badges because there were few enough of us that Amy and the DR gatekeeper relied on sight to recognize who was and wasn’t supposed to be in there before and after hours.
• Secure Dealer’s Room. The DR was locked down after hours every night. Vendors out in the hall could keep whatever hours they wanted (and you could choose where you wanted to be when you registered), but the one artist outside always hauled their display stuff into the DR when it closed, and that was allowed and fine too.
• Overall organization. From what I could tell, DragonFlight was a pretty well-run show. Registration lines weren’t long; visitors could get free badges fairly quickly, etc. There were a few speedy announcements shouted unsuccessfully over the din of the game room Friday, but later on they got the intercom system working for announcements.

Cons

• Very disinterested crowd. It became very obvious very fast that no one was really interested in shopping at DragonFlight, whether it was for games or art or other things. They were there to play games and that was it.
• Very homogeneous crowd. Even without making generalizations about individual demographics, it’s easy enough to say that the more diverse a crowd is, the better. I think most artists have a pretty good idea of who their work appeals to the most, and while we’ll do our best to sell outside of that audience, mileage will vary. For me, I don’t think I’ve ever met so much resistance trying to get people to stay at the table for more than a few seconds. If the middle-aged, white male audience isn’t your best one, you’re probably going to struggle here.
• Attendees not familiar with art/commissions. It’s been a while since I’ve encountered so much confusion about on-site commissions, and it clearly stems from these attendees’ lack of experience with artists at conventions. We had several people not understand the difference between prints and commissions, including one person who asked for a BW inked version of one of my prints and was confused when I quoted a price far higher than the cost of the print. Custom-made originals are gonna cost more than printed reproductions, guys, and I don’t make BW prints of stuff I finished and colored…

Truthfully, the pros outweighed the cons, but the first con is an absolute deal-breaker. For a vendor, it doesn’t matter how well-run and organized a convention is if they can’t engage the crowd or make sales.

I feel really lucky that I didn’t lose money on this, and I’m glad that I got as much work done on my doujin as I did Saturday. Mostly though, I feel bad that DragonFlight didn’t go well, especially since it was no one’s fault.

Oh well.