Monday, April 23, 2007

APE Con Report

I haven't typed anything on this blog in a while so I figure I oughtta, eh? A post-con report seems like a good excuse...

So, we went up to San Francisco for APE Con, which I have not been at before, to set up a table and do caricatures and sell comics. We had a lot of fun and we met lots of nice people and had some great Chinese food (which SF has lots of, but is very hard to find in LA), and TGF and I got some quality relationship time on the long drives up and back... when she wasn't sleeping! :D

Here are the caricatures that I did:









We also sold this caricature-like piece that I drew quite a while ago:



However, as you may guess by seeing that I only did three in two days, financially it did not go so well, as our table was not in the greatest location and the traffic in our area was very light. I was told by many of my friends who were also set up to vend there that their sales were also disappointing. Most of them were at a loss to understand why, as they had previously had good success there. Ah well... such is the nature of business in general. You never really know how it's going to go.

Unfortunately, this is probably going to hurt our chances of doing other conventions this year. I'll know once I actually run the numbers tonight. I've already crossed off trying to do San Diego as a business function, I'm just going to go down there on Saturday and do some schmoozing and show some artwork around to try to maybe pick up some cover painting work. I'd like to do Wizard World in both Chicago and Texas this year, so we'll see how that goes.

I really, really need to redesign my entire website. I need to do it like, now.

Friday, before we left, I bought a new Apple MacBook Pro laptop computer. I will spare you the Mac fanboy geekery, but suffice it to say that it's awesome. It will now be my main computer, supplanting my dual G4 desktop that I've had for 4+ years - that one will now become the recording studio machine. Shortly, I will be able to dismantle the huge computer desk setup that dominates one end of my living room, and thus make my apartment more livable. As cool as that setup is, it's just too much. With the laptop I can work anywhere in my apartment - or anywhere else. I can plug it into a monitor, or even my HDTV, if I feel like I need more screen real estate, but it's got a pretty big screen so I think I'll be fine. I took it to SF, and it came in very handy, running a slide show of my portfolio at our table.

There's a lot more I should type about I guess but I need to get back to work...