#efnw14

The comic sequence that leekfish and I collaborated on in the Everfree Northwest con book! She did the writing, thumbnails, and pencils, and I did inks, colors, and text! HIGH FIVE FOR RAD ART MARES, PEW PEW

Also I just love how our styles melded together into this great mix. Seriously, awesome.

Everfree Northwest 2014 Follow-Up

Um, gosh! Wow! Okay! So Everfree blew us out of the water this year. We basically order 300 decks to keep us for our cons, and figured we might have to replenish after BronyCon. HAHA. Turns out we sped through all 300 at Everfree lightning fast.

The only reason we didn't sell out entirely by noon on Saturday is we held back a box of 30 to sell Sunday. Those were gone in 7 minutes. (??!?!)

We were called "the herpes of the convention -- in a good way!" and apparently everyone was playing it everywhere. (If anyone has any photos from Everfree of our game in the wild, we'd love to see them!)

I had to take my commissions sign down in the first 15 minutes because we were so utterly swamped that I couldn't even imagine having enough time to draw things for people. What a great problem to have!

By the end of the second day, our booth looked like this:

It's too bad I didn't get a picture of it at the end of the last day. It was pretty much completely picked over.

We also had raffles each day -- sorry to those who didn't win! But we grabbed a picture of at least one of our raffle winners:

And then of course our friend invaded the Your OC Sucks sign with Kefentse:

We had so much fun getting to hang out with friends, meet new people, and see so many folks enjoying our ridiculous game. :D Thank you all so much for coming out and especially thank you to all the people who took the time to come tell us what you thought. Seriously, wow! And I don't think I've ever felt so flooded with compliments about my art. ;u;

TL;DR: I was so busy that I couldn't write my usual daily summaries because I just didn't have time. Instead I'm writing one big summary here at the end.

-Day 0-

Thursday July 3rd

Day 0 I woke up at about midnight PST and got in the car. I had an 11-hour drive all the way to Seattle, mostly alone. This was the longest I'd ever driven, by more than twice my previous longest (Which was the 5 hour drive to BABScon). The drive was pretty much uneventful really. I picked up a few people in the Portland area for the last leg of the trip. The nice thing about driving between 12AM and 6AM is that there is no one on the road with you. 

So I got to the con hotel at around 12PM and checked into my hotel and all that stuff. At around 1PM the vendors were allowed to begin setting up in the vendor hall. My original table-mate Valcon wasn't able to get to the con until Friday so I had to do the initial setup myself. It took me several hours to figure out a way to setup our table that would at least kind of  work. The rest of the day was pretty boring for the most part because most people weren't there yet.

-Day 1-

Friday July 4th

I already wrote a summary of this day, but I can add more here. In short: I realized I was going to be incredibly busy the whole convention. In the first day, I totally sold out of both my Game Night print and the Too Many Lunas print. Luckily my printer was at the con, so he printed another batch of both that lasted me almost to the end. The interesting thing is that my medium and small prints sold almost zero all day, but the Game Night went like hot cakes. 

Apparently, there was a huge line just to get into the vendor hall to buy stuff pretty close to all day, so that was good for us. I definitely noticed that the rush never slowed at all. It was just a constant stream of people. That was both good and bad, it meant I couldn't leave my table to go around the vendor hall and explore the other tables or even talk to my table mate(s).

One of the con staff approached me and offered to upgrade me to a full table near the end of the day, apparently the official Merch table moved elsewhere and left a space which they gave to me. Valcron and I both agreed that it was a good idea, as we were both extremely cramped while sharing.

But enough about the vendoring this day, more things happened afterwards too! After I got finished packing up (Which took a while because I had to totally tear down and set up at a new table), I had been invited to go to the "Meet the Artist" event. I got there and hung out with some friends of mine for a bit, and then sat with Bernd01 and Flutterguy317. They asked me for tips on how I draw Luna (Which led to that video I posted earlier). 

Unfortunately, in the midst of having fun at that event, I missed the one musician I had really wanted to see at the con; 4everfreebrony. For anyone who doesn't know, he's soon going away for 2 whole years, and this was the last event he would be performing at. He's my favorite pony musician right now and I would have killed to hear him live. Oh well, maybe we'll get lucky and ponies will still be a thing in 2 years so I can hear him again.

Anyway, after all that fun and stuff, I crashed in my hotel room. I skipped dinner that day, as it was around 11PM by the time I realized I hadn't eaten since breakfast and I was getting hungry.

-Day 2-

Saturday July 5th

Unfortunately, a lot of Saturday and Sunday are blurred together for me, since I didn't make the daily summary posts as they happened, but I'll try to sort them out.

Day 2 opened pretty much the same way as Day 1, except I was at a new table. Oh and this day was when the CAC did their first interview of me, which I posted. My sales went almost exactly as well on day 2 as they had on day 1, except that this time they were more spread out across all my designs instead of heavily skewed toward Game Night (For the most part. Game Night still sold around 3x as many as anything else I had).

After the vendor hall closed on day 2, I hung around with Bernd01, Flutterguy317, and another artist Ardail for most of the rest of the day. We went to dinner with some of the guys from EQD and a couple other artists at a nice sushi place. That was good fun. After we got back, Bernd and flutterguy did an interview with another artist with me and Ardail sitting in on it, then we filmed the "How to draw Luna" video I posted. 

-Day 3, the final day-

Sunday July 6th

Sunday, the last day of the convention... Once again, the vendor hall opened pretty much like any other day, but I decided not to even bother selling my buttons this day. I'd only made around $40 off of them total so far, and it wasn't worth the stress of keeping track of them all.

I'm pretty sure it was Sunday that the highlight of the con happened, for me. You see, kolshica was at this convention, along with some of the other folks with JapanPonyCon. I had apparently met Kolshica at BABScon previously, but I didn't know it was him until he told me online later that he had come by. This time around, I knew he was coming and I asked him to stop by my table, even though he doesn't speak much English. I had tried to go by the table he was at, but I had very few chances and he wasn't there when I did get to check. But today, he and Sakura-cheetah came by my table to see me, which was just awesome. Sakura-cheetah translated for us, and I got to tell Kolshica how much I loved his work in person. They then handed me some adorable original drawings of Luna and some prints, and I gave them gifts of prints as well. Like I said, this was the highlight of the con for me. It meant a lot that they would take the time to come by my table, and even bring me personalized drawings. 

After the vendor hall closed on Sunday (Which was a couple hours early because it's the last day), I spent some time tearing down my table as usual and attempting to make trades with other artists. Unfortunately, a couple of the artists I wanted to trade with or buy from the most had disappeared by the time the hall closed, so I didn't get to get some of the prints I wanted the most (I would have even paid for them if they hadn't wanted to trade)... But I still did get to do some other trades with other awesome artists and got all my stuff packed up for the most part.

My friends from the gamingcolts had invited myself and some others to dinner that night, and I brought along Bernd and Flutterguy here too to hang out on the last day. It was a lot of fun sitting around eating dinner with the friends I made last year and some of the ones I made this year. Went back to the hotel and started winding down to prepare for the long drive home the next day.

-Day 4, the drive home-

Monday July 7th

I won't say much about this day since not much really happened. As usual at cons, the venue is eerily empty immediately after the con ends. It's kind of depressing. I left the con around 1PM and made it home at 2:30AM with a few extended stops to make sure I stayed awake. The following 24 hours or so were spent unpacking and reorganizing for Bronycon (Or at least starting to... I have a lot left to do).

The loot

I'll post another post with all the prints and plushes I got at the con shortly.

Okay but seriously, here's the real summary.

Today started out at around 8AM for me. I went and had a nice breakfast with my roommates, then went into the vendor hall to start selling. The vendor hall was totally busy all day. Seriously, there was a line wrapping around the building until like 3PM, just to get into the vendor hall. It never let up. 

This con, my best selling print is the same one as last con, Game Night with Luna and Twilight. Literally around 45% of my profits have been from that one design. The second best has been the Moon Flower picture, though it's waaaay behind.

Near the end of the day, I was offered to upgrade to a full table, because someone didn't show up for their table. So at the end, I started moving all my stuff over to the new table. I'll be at table 22 now. 

So I actually sold out of the Game Night picture and Too Many Lunas, but my printer reprinted them for me, and I have more tomorrow. He's awesome.

After that, I went into the "Meet the Artist" panel to hang out with some people. I got to hang out with some cool people. More on that later.