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 ]

[Nyawyn]

this might be a stupid question, but did you make sure stickers are allowed to be sold?

i only ask because two conventions in my are don't allow stickers because of the building's rules as they can be potentially used for vandalism (i.e. attendees sticking them on walls of the con center or hotel)

[Jayde Panda]

I'm back from a month-long hiatus from Gaia... I read over most of what I missed, but won't say much to avoid dated replies. I just have one question though (probably dumb), what is ACEO? Maybe I'm just brain-dead at the moment, but my mind is blanking completely...

Nyawyn: I've never heard of stickers being banned at any of the cons I've been at, but then I'm finding that each AA has their own peculiar rules, so it'd probably be worth checking. I wouldn't have thought to ask though if you hadn't mentioned it.

I did end up with a table at Animazement (which is why I went poof from Gaia--tried to get as much as possible done in one month). I had a lot of fun, and I made enough off the table and some cross-stitches I had in the auction to pay for the con and made enough profit to buy books for my kids' school this year (I home school, so I have to buy all their curriculum materials). It was a little difficult because Animazement bans all non Japanese related items, so I couldn't sell my beaded lanyards or the chainmail jewelry my husband makes. I was really excited because I got some of my first original stuff finished (some character archetype badges--my husband wrote up profiles to put on the backs) and I almost completely sold out of 3 of the designs out of 4. I'm working on more designs for Anime Weekend Atlanta. All in all, it was a definite success--unless you count the fact that I failed to sleep and have suffered from that all week cause I made myself sick. xd

I hope things have gone as well for everyone else here. smile

[Kye Lin]

useful thank you.

[Vicemage]

Those badges sound like a fun item, Kasyrrah! smile

ACEO (aka ATC) stands for "Art Cards, Editions, and Originals" (or "Artist Trading Cards" wink . They're very small drawings or prints, about the size of a baseball card (ie, small enough to fit in a standard trading card holder). I've tried a couple, but didn't get them done for the event they were intended to be distributed at. >.< I've got some packs of paper, though, and am considering adding an ACEO option to my commission list, because they are kind of fast and fun.

[Jayde Panda]

Thanks for the response. I've never heard of those before. How do the cards work? Like, what kinds of things would you draw on one? Is each card an original, or are there a limited number of prints? I'm just curious, and I've never seen anything like that at any of the cons I've been to.

[LavenderMintRose]

I'm living with false hope

And my eyes just want to see a ray of light

I'm gonna find it in my fairy tale...

ACEOs

You can make the prints or just sell the originals, or just trade them and not sell them at all (which is what they were originally intended for).

I'm personally planning on doing a limited amount of prints of my art cards. Like 25-50.

Yeah... you can sell stickers at Otakon. I read the rules thoroughly. I know Anime Boston bans stickers, though... I was going to get a table there, but the hotel was way too much money.

[InstantOatmeal]

Freiheit

the bigger prints do tend to sell well from what I've seen at the con I attended, they were priced at 15 to 20$ and I know ka-blam prints them at 1,50$ the unit + shipping so there's enough profit to be made on that. Perhaps the fact they're not regular old printer size makes them look/feel more "special"?

How high of quality are the Ka-Blam prints?

[LavenderMintRose]

I'm living with false hope

And my eyes just want to see a ray of light

I'm gonna find it in my fairy tale...

I was reading the early pages of this thread a few days ago, and I think I remember seeing some negative stuff about them in here. Then again, that was a while ago, and things might have changed since then.

Edit: From page 13

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.

[Jayde Panda]

Thanks for the answers, everyone. It looks like a cool idea. smile

[Seijaku_Ishida]

Does anyone have a favorite site to get custom greeting cards made? Or know of a cheap one?

[Vicemage]

Haaah... that was a long time ago. biggrin I'll add to that, that the comic prints I got recently from Ka-Blam were a nice enough quality overall. Interior pages (b/w) looked pretty good, covers looked pretty good but were much thinner stock than I would have liked (my books from ComiXpress tend to have heavier "floppy" stock). I sadly don't have any on hand to check for the comments I made about artifacts, etc, but they still take weird formats. I do recall the covers of those books looking overall nicer than the flyers I had Ka-Blam make, but at the same time, the cover art was done in watercolor (gradient fields), whereas the flyers were cel-shaded (flat fields), so it wouldn't have been as noticeable on the cover versions.

[InstantOatmeal]

Question: Forgive me, as I don't know squat about printing, but would printing at 200 dpi rather than 300 kill the pic?

[[Kako]]

Not at all. Honestly, I've found acceptable quality printing as low as 150 dpi. Give it a try, and if you don't like the results then start working at 300 dpi from that point on.

Edit: By the way, here is the blog I'm doing. If you have a story or something that you'd like to contribute, PM me or email me. (pf27 at sbcglobal.net) I'm just trying to touch on the most basic stuff right now.

[Konbanwa_megami]

I have an artist alley table at metrocon this year and I was wondering, how long to you guys stick around your table? The dealers room is open friday 12-7pm, saturday 10am-7pm and sunday 10am-5 pm. The default check in time for the hotel room is at 4pm friday should I try to arrive earlier that day to open my table?