The
Central Canada Comic Con went very well for me this past weekend. It was the most successful Con I've had, and I have to attribute a huge amount of that to my assistant
Kelsie! She did a fantastic job watching my table for me when I wasn't there, promoting the heck outta my artwork and photography, and just generally dancing, singing, looking cute, and entertaining everyone in sight. I definitely want to work with her again in the future!
Almost half my table was devoted to my
Goth Photography, and it was a wise decision. Not only did the photos sell very well, but I received several job offers for photo shoots using the same theme, including at least one local shop wanting to carry the photos for sale.
For my regular art prints, the biggest hit was the
Angel of Tatters: Window piece. I had thought that might happen, due to how it sold out at that store appearance I did a couple of weeks ago, and was very pleased that it continues to do well. The
Angel of Tatters series of illustrations are something I very much enjoy working on, being somewhat more personal than some of the other work I do, and now want to do many more new ones.
The
Guitar Gun series continues to gain a lot of interest. Making 12"x18" prints of all of the finished pieces available for sale in my portfolio was a great decision, as they get people even more excited than the 8.5"x11" pieces do. The most recent one (with the Union Jack imagery) attracted a lot of attention. I've really got to have some t-shirts made up for the next event I do.
Interestingly enough, the original sketches did not sell as much as they usually do. I think that has to do with the larger variety of colour work (including bookmarks of both the illustrations and the goth photos) I've got available. Even with 16' of table space, I wasn't able to show off the sketches as much as I have in the past, so they were somewhat overlooked.
Angelica wore three different costumes to the show. I'm sure the fan favourite was her
Slave Leia costume, and her
Inara from
Firefly was very nice, but my personal favourite was the
C4 mascot character she wore. The idea of someone building and wearing a costume that you designed...well, it made me very happy to see it in person. I'm still kicking myself for not getting a photo of the two of us together when she was in the costume. However, it was a very hot and uncomfortable costume for her to wear, especially as she said she hurt her back and had difficulty with super hero style posing. At least I got a few of the two of us together with her in the
Slave Leia outfit.
I was a judge in both the
Miss C4 costume contest on the Friday night and the general
costume contest on Saturday afternoon. The number and quality of costumes continues to improve and impress from year to year at this event. A big congrats goes to
Alicia for winning the title of
Miss C4 for her
Zatanna costume on Friday night! The work she did on it was just stunning!
I'd also like to single out the great work done by
Jamie Isfeld. She's the other half of this year's art team for the Con, and she did a fantastic job with the website, advertising, program guide, and just generally making my art look good. If you saw an ad for the Con (including the animated ads outside of the Winnipeg Convention Centre and the big ones on the movie screens during the summer), it was her hard work that made them look as good as they did. She has impressed a lot of people, not the least of which one very prominent comic book artist.
Speaking of which...
The single most important thing for me about this year's Con was getting to meet the enormously-talented
Bob Layton. As readers of this blog are familiar with, I have been working with Bob since 2004 and, most importantly, I have been a huge fan of his all my life. Until this past weekend, however, I had never had the opportunity to meet him. Well, not only did I get to hang out with him a bit at the Con itself, but we ended up going out for dinner (along with a few other prominent comic book professionals, including
Joe Rubinstein,
Gordon Purcell, and
Marv Wolfman) every night of the Con. Bob even treated
Victoria and myself to dinner for my birthday!
I had an absolute blast hanging out with him, discussing our work together on
Colony, his work in Hollywood, and his involvement in
Iron Man 2. He's a hugely entertaining guy and I'm really looking forward to hanging out with him again in the future at other events.
That meeting alone would have made this the most successful Con for me ever. Many other interesting things happened at the Con, including the reason why
Victoria was not my assistant at my table this year. Instead, she was at the table of
Evan Quiring, as she is colouring his book
LOS LUCHADORES MYSTERIOSOS. I thought it was fantastic that she would actually be showing her own work at the Con this year! Still, she did manage to help out once in a while when both
Kelsie and I had to be away.
Also,
Jamie and I hosted a panel/workshop with acclaimed artist
Echo Chernik on presenting artwork at conventions, including discussions about professionalism, appearance, and assistants. That hour just flew by!
Unlike previous years, I didn't end up meeting any of the media guests. I ended up just being far too busy, which is funny considering it felt like I was hardly at my table. Thanks again for
Kelsie for having the table run better when I wasn't there than when I was. But it seemed like there was something that always demanded my attention. I didn't even get to talk to many of the other artists there, which is too bad. There was a lot of fantastic work on display -
Victoria even picked up a print by the lovely and talented
Jessica Redekop for my birthday. The funny thing about that is that I had meant to go by to her table at the end of Sunday to purchase that precise print, but I never got a chance to. Later on Sunday, however, Victoria handed it to me - awesome!I did take a lot of photos at the Con, whenever I could find the time and opportunity. In particular, I tried to take as many photos of cosplayers and people in costume as I could. You can find much of this photography
by clicking this link to my Facebook gallery. There were far too many there for me to post to this blog, so please take a look at the gallery.
