Artists Alley Information Thread

Selling at Cons is best during the...

Spring	11.6%	[ 83 ]
Summer	30.3%	[ 217 ]
Fall	7.0%	[ 50 ]
Winter	5.3%	[ 38 ]
Any time!	45.7%	[ 327 ]
Total Votes:			[ 715 ]

[Seijaku_Ishida]

Heh, glad you found it useful. I was a bit put off initially by some typos in there, but apparently Larry Elmore uses it for his business cards and stuff.... O.o

[Cetriya]

that link is amazing! I've been trying to find affordable art book printers.

[[Kako]]

I did the Fanime artist's alley for the second time last week... it was awesome. biggrin Things went way better than last year. I got about $200 worth of sales, which still left me slightly in the red, but far less than I had been afraid of.

One thing that hit me is how big of a difference having a unique item can make. I had a little box of hand made lip-balm for sale ( http://darkkako.deviantart.com/#/d2op7r8 ), and I had a lot of people coming by just to see what was up with it or see what the samples smelled like. It was awesome publicity. Has anyone else had that sort of experience?

[Seijaku_Ishida]

A lot of people loved the fact that I had playing cards at my table. Yeah, a unique item can go a long way.

[Fiammetta Rey]

I've been wanting to experiment with making candles to sell in AAs. Only thing is, I spend 3/4 off the year in school, where I have no time, money, or space to do that kind of thing (or any other craft, for that matter). (Plus, even if I did have time, money, and space... candles are banned in the dorms.) And then when I'm at home, it's not enough time to really get into a habit of doing something like that with all the other stuff I have to do.

Also, I know there's a good reason for the no-selling-food rules at cons, even besides the convention center food contracts, but I would love to be able to find some (preferably anime-related) way of making a bit of money off of baking. I love baking, but I can really only do it for myself. Though I have almost convinced my anime club to let me do a bake sale for them. I'll see how that goes.

[[Kako]]

When you say candles, do you mean dip-candles or pour candles?

How about getting together some of your favourite recipes for anime-related baked goods and making an illustrated recipe book? You could get it printed staplebound, like you would a comic book, so it wouldn't cost very much.

[Vicemage]

I know some friends of mine have had various ideas for unique food-type items, but food is just too heavily regulated to actually pull off...

I'm thinking of custom-painted parasols as an item, I could hang something like that on one side of the table... I don't know if it's something people would want, though, especially for the aggravation of carrying the umbrellas and paints.

Edit: Also, a comb-bound book from a place like Office Max, etc, isn't too spendy to have done either.

[[Kako]]

Painted parasols might be a little tough, I can see the paint flaking off from people opening/closing them too often. What about bento boxes? I custom-painted the bottom of bento boxes as christmas presents last year, it seems like people might like seeing those in alleys.

[Vicemage]

I've considered bento boxes, but I feel like I'd have better luck keeping the paint on paper parasols than on plastic bento boxes...

[[Kako]]

I had a bit of a problem with that, so I primed the bottom with a white spray paint designed for plastic. :'D The paint stuck to the primer and the primer stuck to the plastic.

[Vicemage]

That could certainly work...

I'm not overly worried about flaking paint on parasols, but it's certainly something else I could play with, since I know where to get relatively cheap bento boxes and all.

[ninniku]

This question is about OC print subject matter: Do any of you have any guidlines or rules for yourself when creating prints with original characters? Like, is there a boundary where you feel that your character is just too random or specific for it to appeal to the general masses? Or do you think that no character/scene is too specific for someone to buy, it's all in the execution?

For example, I have this print that's like five years old now so I really want to update it. It's just a guy with wings standing with his back to the audience for maximum wing display. When discussing with a friend a new pose for wingy guy, we got joking that he was flying fast because he was late for a fancy dinner party. So now I kind of want to draw this guy zooming along in a top hat and pin stripe suit and pocket watch, but I feel that this could be a little bit too random to be appealing?

Thoughts?

[Kaxen]

I'm probably biased on that. EVERYTHING IS BETTER IN A SUIT. Especially Neil Patrick Harris.


>_> Myself, I kind of draw whatever when doing OCs. Last year, my vampire OC did the best...

This year, I'm not sure who will do the best. The more repeatedly appearing OCs are a small boy in pretty clothes, a vampire, and old-timey pin-up girls.

Though my fanart theme is also "little boys in pretty clothes" since I'm drawing Ciel from Black Butler and Czes from Baccano. @_@

And my table theme this year is seafoam green unicorns... I have no blithering clue how that will do, but at least you can't miss it!



>_> Illustrator made it even eyeburningly brighter while converting it to JPG for some reason (the actual one is slightly less bright since CMYK can't do neon green).

[ninniku]

Does your table theme extend beyond the banner?