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Back from Anime Weekend Atlanta!
18 years ago
Conventions are fun, but they still end up being expensive one way or the other. It really puts "Overpriced Japanese Imports" into perspective when you notice you're spending twice as much on Chick-Fil-A as you ought to be, so you may as well go for the exotic stuff.
Didn't see nearly as many furries as I was hoping to, though there were a few good Furry Artists there (including Fred Perry of Gold Digger - but dammit, I was too shy to speak up!), and a couple of Pokemon fans were more than willing to show me ample photographic evidence to the contrary.
And with that, conventions go dormant for a while - at least until Phreaknic, but that's a whole other can of worms, and it's back to toiling away in the comic mines until Furry Weekend Atlanta in February.
Convention PostMortem:
- While the new pamphlets featuring Gangrel's explanation of souls and the Dead Inside received some good commentary as far as artistic merit goes, Gangrel herself seemed to backfire on me a little; a few people dismissed my stuff outright because she looked too 'cute' on the cover, and thus made the style also look simplistic and overly shojo/chibi based. Admittedly, laying down the heavy world-building may have also turned people off. It's likely that I'll be retooling Gangrel's appearance again pretty soon, but not without asking for a few opinions.
- Page 35 (the one with Addy's shirt flying open) on the website picked up a heavier-than-normal response, and the hosting statistics for that week indicated another 100 distinct visitors to the site. How much of that was from the barely-censored page and how much was a result of my efforts at Dragon*Con are debatable, but that's still a 20% increase compared to pre-con statistics, so hopefully some of that spike will stick around.
- No new donations have surfaced yet; I'm not expecting them, but compared to July when people were donating I'm slightly shocked that I haven't received more response. I'll probably take the donation wallpaper off the site fairly soon.
- Getting a domain now is looking more and more like a good idea, if not for the tiny detail that lastresort.com is already taken. I have a few ideas on a good workaround for that, but it's still probably something I need to go ahead and do, most likely when the next stage of site overhaul takes place.
- I need to start taking a more 'active' stance on working at Conventions; merely running around and hoping people find me where I am isn't working. Of course, I'm still ill-equipped for the task, but at least I'm more willing now to take a little more risk to get the rewards.
- Random High-school folk are friending me on Facebook now. I believe it's related but I'm not sure how.
- Making Badges in time for FWA isn't out of the question, but working on them there is. I actually found myself purchasing one this weekend (I'll say from who when I find their business card again!), so I have a slightly more concrete idea both of what I like in a badge and what I want in one.
My main concern with badge-making is finding a way to make mine look different from what is normally considered a badge; Having a drastically different style is all well and good, but ultimately I feel I have to offer something unique in more than just the art style. I'd like to see a repository of conbadges (and their different varieties) to get a better feel of what I want to do and how difficult-expensive that idea might be.
Ah well, I'll get a good idea for how to go about that soon. If anyone wants to show me their favorite badges / badge types, that'll help my decision.
Didn't see nearly as many furries as I was hoping to, though there were a few good Furry Artists there (including Fred Perry of Gold Digger - but dammit, I was too shy to speak up!), and a couple of Pokemon fans were more than willing to show me ample photographic evidence to the contrary.
And with that, conventions go dormant for a while - at least until Phreaknic, but that's a whole other can of worms, and it's back to toiling away in the comic mines until Furry Weekend Atlanta in February.
Convention PostMortem:
- While the new pamphlets featuring Gangrel's explanation of souls and the Dead Inside received some good commentary as far as artistic merit goes, Gangrel herself seemed to backfire on me a little; a few people dismissed my stuff outright because she looked too 'cute' on the cover, and thus made the style also look simplistic and overly shojo/chibi based. Admittedly, laying down the heavy world-building may have also turned people off. It's likely that I'll be retooling Gangrel's appearance again pretty soon, but not without asking for a few opinions.
- Page 35 (the one with Addy's shirt flying open) on the website picked up a heavier-than-normal response, and the hosting statistics for that week indicated another 100 distinct visitors to the site. How much of that was from the barely-censored page and how much was a result of my efforts at Dragon*Con are debatable, but that's still a 20% increase compared to pre-con statistics, so hopefully some of that spike will stick around.
- No new donations have surfaced yet; I'm not expecting them, but compared to July when people were donating I'm slightly shocked that I haven't received more response. I'll probably take the donation wallpaper off the site fairly soon.
- Getting a domain now is looking more and more like a good idea, if not for the tiny detail that lastresort.com is already taken. I have a few ideas on a good workaround for that, but it's still probably something I need to go ahead and do, most likely when the next stage of site overhaul takes place.
- I need to start taking a more 'active' stance on working at Conventions; merely running around and hoping people find me where I am isn't working. Of course, I'm still ill-equipped for the task, but at least I'm more willing now to take a little more risk to get the rewards.
- Random High-school folk are friending me on Facebook now. I believe it's related but I'm not sure how.
- Making Badges in time for FWA isn't out of the question, but working on them there is. I actually found myself purchasing one this weekend (I'll say from who when I find their business card again!), so I have a slightly more concrete idea both of what I like in a badge and what I want in one.
My main concern with badge-making is finding a way to make mine look different from what is normally considered a badge; Having a drastically different style is all well and good, but ultimately I feel I have to offer something unique in more than just the art style. I'd like to see a repository of conbadges (and their different varieties) to get a better feel of what I want to do and how difficult-expensive that idea might be.
Ah well, I'll get a good idea for how to go about that soon. If anyone wants to show me their favorite badges / badge types, that'll help my decision.
I picked this conbadge up at MFF '06. It is by far the most unique one I've gotten thus far.
http://dmfastats.dyndns.org:7845/MF.....adgeDBruin.png
It's an honest holographic conbadge. As your perspective moves, the hand waves and the wings move.
It's an interesting idea though. :) One that I've seen online that I'm still debating the merits of is using Shrinky-Dink materials - they make a few that work with printers, which then become rigid, clean, vivid, but small. It'd be pretty cool to do that for something like cell-phone charms.
Obviously in order to do that, I'd have to time my printouts and commissions appropriately to get as much use out of a printer sheet as possible, but...