This year marked the 25th Anniversary of DragonCon and my third year actually getting to setup at the show. I was extremely excited, yet nervous worring about my placement in the show and the cancelation of a few big named guests. When Nikki and I arrived to the show and after jumping around from hotel to hotel we located our badges and our table. Led by Thom Trainer, for whom Ive known a few years now, the staff in charge of artist alley were nothing but awesome and nice!
Our placement in the show was great! We were right in the middle of the show and surrounded by some really talented people. To our left was Michael Gordon and his crew with their comic Tiki Zombie. They had a really cool setup of a tiki umbrella and grass skirts bordering around their entire table. It was very clever and very much an eye drawer. They being next to us worked out great because Bobby Nash, the writer of many books and also the writer of my current graphic novel, BLOODY OLDE ENGLUND, is really good friends with them so he was next to our booths the entire show hanging out and signing.
Straight across from us was Daniel Gorman, which if you don't know about his work, go check him out: www.dangormanart.com
He's a very talented artist and all around nice guy. We actually got to talking about the sketch cards he does and it turns out he's done hundreds of sketch cards for Upperdeck, Unstoppable cards, and many other companies. He even gave me some contacts that I talked to and now have a deal in place to work on a new card set coming up in October!
Unfortunately though, when you do shows, you sometimes get some haters and that was def. the case of the guys next to us on our right hand side. I got a chance to check out their products they were selling and though the products themselves were nice and actually clever their attitude and setup were very unapproachable. Im sorry let me rephrase that: Of the two guys at that table their was a bald gentleman that was really nice and actually was the seller of the two. Whenever he was at the table he was def. making the sells and chatting it up with the people. The other guy with his weird mustache was very distant and acted like money was the only thing on his mind. He even got mad at us on the first day of the show and got up and started rearranging his table to make it look nicer and said our stuff was "blocking" peoples views of seeing theirs. We ignored it and on Saturday morning after asking Thom if we could move our table down away from theirs some, removed ourselves from them so they wouldnt have any more "issues".
The show itself was insane! We had more foot traffic in the spot we were in this year compared to the placement we were in last. Tons of people loved the new pieces and as always, my versions of the turtles I always make seem to be the biggest sellers. I did a lot more sketch commissions this year as a pose to last which was good and this year also debuted the preview edition of the first 22 pages of the BLOODY OLDE ENGLUND graphic novel. Bobby and I agreed early on that we would be raffling off the original double page from the book on Sunday afternoon. If anyone purchased a sketch or a copy of the preview they would get a ticket. We ended up selling 17 copies of the book! And on Sunday we were shocked to see that almost all 17 people plus tons more stood around at our booth waiting to see who would win the artwork. The piece went to a lucky girl named: Chelsey. You could tell that she was very happy to have won the artwork.
By Monday, as usual, the show started to slowly come to an end. The crowds died off around three pm due to artist alley closing around that time and after closing down and putting our stuff back in the car we got our first and only chance to look in the dealers rooms. After we left it started to rain pretty bad and we later learned that their were some tornado warnings in the area. Thankfully they passed long before we got outside. Nikki and I were exhausted and we went to eat and called it a day really early that night.
Over all DragonCon this year was AMAZING! We had an awesome time meeting so many new people and seeing tons of other familiar faces. Special thanx to everyone that stopped by the table to buy something, or just say hi. Shout outs to Brian and Kari, Trevor and Ashley, James Burns, Bobby Nash, Michael Gordon, Daniel Gorman!
Thanx everyone! I look forward to next years show!
I'll be posting pictures from the show real soon!
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