Last year I attended New York Comic Con as my very first convention. Afterwards I wrote a blog post on lessons I learned as an exhibiting artist during the convention. You can find said post here: 10 things I learned at NYCC. A few weekends ago I had the sudden chance to attend the Society of Illustrator’s MoCCa Arts Festival in New York City. The table-mate of a cartoonist named Bill Roundy cancelled the night before so I was invited to take his spot. Normally I would spend a few weeks preparing for my convention setup but that wasn’t an option this time, for good reason.
I have chosen to write this blog post as a continuation of the lessons I learned at NYCC in hope that it may be of some help to other new conventions goers who are looking for some advice. If you are a new artist about to attend your first convention, please read the post on lessons from NYCC first.
The table I shared with cartoonist Bill Roundy.
Lesson #1: Visual vomit – Don’t clutter your table!
When preparing your convention table you want a nice clean presentation that makes your work stand out, whatever it be. Too many items on display and your work will be competing with itself and the visual confusion can be a huge turn off for your potential customers, so keep a nice clean setup. The photo of my table above is actually an example of how NOT to do it. Granted I only had an evening to prepare, so I forgive myself for the clutter.
For comparison here’s a photo of Tim Paul’s MoCCa table – and this is a good way to do your table! Get a good display rack (or make one) to present your work in a nice and neat manner:
Tim Paul at his MoCCa table.
Lesson #2: Stories sell!
This probably doesn’t surprise anyone. Stories sell, human beings LOVE stories. We move movies, comics, books and cartoons for this very reason, so when it comes to your artwork; consider the story. There are several ways to go about this, one is to simply consider the story in the image: Does it tell a clear story or is it just “something pretty”. If there’s a story behind the illustration engage your potential customer in it, they’ll find the artwork all the more interesting.
You can also take it a step further and consider how can you tie your illustration in with stories – consider selling $5 booklets where you have illustrated a simple story. (Be careful of copyright here) – in my case I like drawing fairy tales and I quickly realized at MoCCa I would have garnered a lot more interest had I had booklets with my fairy tale illustrations combined with the story they are from and fairy tales aren’t copyrighted – so there you go. Worth considering. […]
Please read the full article here: http://wicked-fairytale.com/5-learned-mocca-arts-festival/
