GenCon 2011 ReCap: Part 1

First I would like to send a big 'Thank you' to everyone who stopped at my table, said hi, and picked up a piece of my art to take home with them. The turnout was far more than I had hoped for and it was great to meet you all. I would also like to send a word of thanks out to my fellow artists I met at GenCon whom have helped me over the last few months by answering my questions online and at the show over the weekend. I hope the show was a success for all of you.

I met a lot of great people at the convention. A few of these people in no particular order: Lorraine Schleter, a fellow freelance illustrator currently working on her own graphic novel. Her work can be viewed at http://lorillustration.blogspot.com/. Derek Miller, a fantastic sculptor who had one of the tables next to mine. He has created sculpts for many of the major toy companies and works on creating his own personal sculptures in between projects. To see his work you can visit his site at http://mentalmalfunctionstudio.com/. His Medusa bust is awesome. I had the great fortune to meet that maestro of monsters, Chris Burdett, in person. While there I picked up a copy of both of his sketchbooks that he has released: Creatura Libri 1 & 2. To see more of his work go to http://www.christopherburdett.com/ and http://christopherburdett.blogspot.com/ and be sure to pick up a copy of his sketchbooks too.


So here is me at my table all set up and waiting for the hordes of gamers to descend upon the main convention hall on Wednesday. The banner I designed and had printed at M&B graphics, a local print shop, turned out awesome. I even had some people stop just to take a picture of it. As for my table set up to the left 12”x18” art prints laid out to be flipped through, my pricing sign in the middle, and my sketchbooks plus a B&W print on the right.


I am glad I was able to put the sketchbooks together in time for GenCon. They proved to be really popular and added more variety to my table. I will definitely keep making new ones for each convention I go to in the future. The buttons were also well received. I left them out as free takeaways to anyone who made a purchase. Thankfully setup on Wednesday went smoothly and I did not forget anything vital back at home. After setting up and meandering my way through the convention I have come to the conclusion that for future cons I need to come up with a better organizational system for behind my table.


It looks fine from the front, but behind it was really cluttered making it somewhat hard to process larger orders for prints, especially since I needed to put them into the mylar sleeves with backing board every time I sold one. Plus having the prints simply stacked proved to be an ineffective way to store them especially when I needed to find a specific print that was somewhere in the middle of the stack. I think I am going to start storing them in a larger box in 12x18 folders (if I can find them). This would make it so much easier at conventions alone.

I would just like to thank God for answering my prayers and having my experience at GenCon exceed almost all my hopes and after months of fretting and preparing it was a complete joy to be a part of the Artist's Alley. Over the four days of GenCon I met many more amazing artists, gamers, and authors. I will highlight more in my next post this coming Monday. Next up- GenCon 2011 ReCap Part 2: so what did I learn about having an artist table at GenCon.