Artists Alley Information Thread

Selling at Cons is best during the...

Spring	11.5%	[ 117 ]
Summer	29.4%	[ 300 ]
Fall	7.2%	[ 73 ]
Winter	5.5%	[ 56 ]
Any time!	46.5%	[ 474 ]
Total Votes:			[ 1020 ]

[kimberleyislove]

Where wil the expo be?

[jungleguu]

kimberleyislove

Where wil the expo be?

Anime Expo is in Long Beach this year from June 29-July 2nd. Anime dash expo dot org.

[Moe SahChan]

Yarr~

Question: Has anyone ever made homemade stickers to sell at a con?

I saw some sticker printer paper yesterday that I thought would be a good investment. I've never used it, though, so I'd like to get some feedback on people who have... If...they actually have @_@

[Vicemage]

The girl next to me at Detour was offering sticker versions of her prints, but she was giving them free if you bought a print (or if she liked you, or for various other reasons) rather than selling them... I've also seen some people who appear at a lot of different cons selling various little stickers of either "clever sayings" or original art, that seem to do okay.

Sadly, though, I don't have any first-hand experience yet.

[Shadow Ivy]

P h 1 s h y

Yarr~

Question: Has anyone ever made homemade stickers to sell at a con?

I saw some sticker printer paper yesterday that I thought would be a good investment. I've never used it, though, so I'd like to get some feedback on people who have... If...they actually have @_@

I tried my hand at homemade stickers at AWA last year, and they were my top-selling item. Mainly because they were chibi-fied versions of various anime and game characters, not to mention I was charging a buck a pop. surprised

If you have a good printer, the quality will turn out great--I'm thinking of using a different brand of sticker paper though; I used Post-It brand, and while it's decent, the reverse side is only sticky in certain parts. I may just sell them as "reusable stickers", i.e. stickers you can use again and again since they can be removed pretty easily and be stuck elsewhere. sweatdrop But yeah; if you have ideas you'd want to try with them, by all means go for it!

[[Kako]]

mrgreen

[[Kako]]

ninja

[Vicemage]

I just wanted to put in an update, now that I FINALLY received my order of flyers from Ka-Blam.

Quality: They're... okay. They look and feel for all the world exactly like the stuff I used to print out on the laser color printer at college, just cheaper than what I paid there. It's very plain paper, and not very heavy at all. Also, the print quality looks a little "dirty" around the edges of some colors, like when you see JPG artifacting on high-compression images. (Not THAT bad, but if you look at it, the artifacts are there on some of the flesh-tones and lighter colors.) My PSD files are all clear, and my print quality on color areas from ComiXpress was likewise clear, so I suspect this has to do with the fact that Ka-Blam only accepts TIFF files, and that the artifacting happened during that conversion. Darker colors (where the artifacts are harder to see) look okay, but around the lighter colors, it looks dirty or out of focus.

Service: While EXTREMELY slow, they did actually do the special trim I requested (I wanted the pages all cut in half) with no additional charge.

I really wouldn't use them, though, for any sort of prints or books where you want your quality to really shine. Heck, I might just go to Kinko's or another local printer for the next round of flyers, with the poor quality. I do want the flyers to reflect well on my work, they're intended to show off my quality of work, not my starving-artist pocketbook. blaugh

Basically, not recommended.

[[Kako]]

Thanks, vice. biggrin I was going to go with Ka-Blam, too. sweatdrop

[Nabu_020]

very useful information.

[Vicemage]

Yeah, with the quality lower than what I would get carrying a disk over to Kinko's or a local shop, and the amount of time it took them, I really can't recommend going with them. I might still use them for fliers, but I really hate how blurry these ones look, and I know the original files are clear. sweatdrop

[Nabu_020]

I would need much more practice before I would enter into something of that sort.

[Vicemage]

Heh, I have to add this one last comment about Ka-Blam, now that I'm cutting the two flyer stacks into one for next weekend's con.

At least one page of these had the back side printed UPSIDE DOWN.

Seriously. This is not a quality printer.

[R a i r e n]

Shadow Ivy

P h 1 s h y

Yarr~

Question: Has anyone ever made homemade stickers to sell at a con?

I saw some sticker printer paper yesterday that I thought would be a good investment. I've never used it, though, so I'd like to get some feedback on people who have... If...they actually have @_@

I tried my hand at homemade stickers at AWA last year, and they were my top-selling item. Mainly because they were chibi-fied versions of various anime and game characters, not to mention I was charging a buck a pop. surprised

If you have a good printer, the quality will turn out great--I'm thinking of using a different brand of sticker paper though; I used Post-It brand, and while it's decent, the reverse side is only sticky in certain parts. I may just sell them as "reusable stickers", i.e. stickers you can use again and again since they can be removed pretty easily and be stuck elsewhere. sweatdrop But yeah; if you have ideas you'd want to try with them, by all means go for it!

are you talking about that new post-it sticker paper? I wanted to try it but if it's only sticky in certain parts then maybe not D:

[xXamielleXx]

~bump!~