Joe Fitzgerald's Blog

Well I attended the Fort Lauderdale SuperCon this weekend. It was a disaster. My booth was placed in the back corner of the convention center. Thursday and Friday I had maybe 50 visitors to my booth. Saturday was better, but, not acceptable. Sunday was barely better than Friday.

My booth was facing a food court that didn’t serve food. The only people that came to that end of the convention center were cosplay people who needed to rest their sore feet.
A complete waste of money.

I mean, it was fun when I walked away from my booth and mixed in with he crowds. But, I could have bought a ticket at the front door and done that.

Needless to say, I’ll never booth at SuperCon again.

Next week I will be showing my work at, Fort Lauderdale SuperCon.

I’ve put together some 10 new pieces of artwork to put on display at my booth. This one, in particular, is Iron Man. It was my first, ever, attempt at drawing, Iron Man.

Drawing, Iron Man, is not an easy thing to do. You have to maintain a rigid line. Something that I’m not accustomed to.

I did enjoy creating this piece though. Especially the coloring aspect. It’s fun to paint reflective surfaces.

I think I’ll add another Iron Man piece in the near future.

If you’re able, please come out and show your support.

A year ago I set the goal for myself to put together 15 poster pieces and get a booth at MegaCon.

It had been a good decade since I had drawn and I was itching to get back into the game. MegaCon offered me the chance to realize my child hood dream of being a professional artist. If I could make money showing at conventions I could eventually quit my day job and spend my time creating art and traveling to shows. I could develop these, graphical, stories I have in my head and spend my days creating for myself instead of slaving for the man.

This weekend I took my 25 poster pieces and booth’d them at MegaCon 2017.

Actually MegaCon turned out to be my third convention. My first “major” convention, but the third overall I’ve attended. So, I’ve exceeded the goal I originally set for myself. So, if I were able to capitalize on my artwork, at MegaCon, I would try to attend one major convention per month until I could financially afford to quit my day job and do this full time. So, how did it go?

I can emphatically say, MegaCon broke me. It’s tough. It’s a grueling way to spend a weekend. My confidence is definitely shaken. I basically sit through every single lull in activity questioning my talent. Do I suck that bad? Apparently I do. I mean people come by and tell me that my stuff is good. And I appreciate it, I really do. But there isn’t enough financial gain to keep this anything more than a hobby. It costs money to booth at these shows and the cost exceeds the reward. It’s just not worth the expense; financially or otherwise.

Part of me, the competitive side, wants to set a goal to come back to MegaCon, next year, and rip the place apart. I think, next year my stuff will be so good no one will be able to deny me. But the truth is, I have other projects that I can work on, today, that will pay off immediate dividends.

It just makes more practical sense to develop my financially sustainable projects than to keep throwing money down the financial drain that these conventions are.

So, my next goal is unclear at this moment. But, definitely this was my last convention.

Yesterday I attended my first convention. The Hero Hype convention in Miami.

It was a small one day event, so, my expectations, going in, were mixed. I was prepared for the worst but hopeful for the best.

In my head I have this vision of all conventions being like Megacon; where half a million people attend. This was smaller and I was expecting a lot less people, but, there were only about 500 people in attendance. Which is fine. Also, the vast majority of the people were there for cosplay and not comic books. There was only two other people selling posters there. And one vendor selling comic books. The rest was toys, video games and they had a girl who I guess is a Cosplay Celebrity.

Never the less, this was to be a learning experience for me, to better prepare me for MegaCon in a couple of months.

Things I learned at my first convention

You do not suck

The convention hours were from 10am to 6pm. After the first hour or so, when nobody was even coming up to look at my booth I started to think, geez maybe I suck.

After lunch, Liam leans over and says to me, I don’t think we are going to get a single order today. I agreed, and the negative voice in my mind was telling me, your work is no good. People don’t like it.

But then, 3 pretty teenaged girls come running up to the booth and tell me, your posters are awesome, we’ve gotta have one. They bought 3. Then another group came up right behind them and so on. Then, later on, the one vendor who was selling comic books came over and bought a couple posters. He said to me, “I really respect what you do. You’re the only one here with any talent.” We went on to talk for a few more minutes. His words really meant a lot to me. More than he knows.

So what I learned is, you can’t listen to that negative voice in your head. Just because your product isn’t being presented to your target audience, does not mean you suck. You just have to persevere. You have to find your target audience.

No Free Stuff

I had printed up some cards with my art on them to hand out for free. Thinking this would soften people up and they would eventually buy something. But it’s the opposite. What really happens is people come up to your booth and think, I want some of your art. Then you hand them a free sample and they think, I have some of your art. And they leave. I know, now, if they want your art, they will purchase something.

Bring Push Pins

I had to tie up my table banner to the table and I could not hang up my pricing banner because I didn’t have any push pins. I had some table tents with pricing information on the table, but, everyone who made a purchase, inevitably asked how much the posters were. So not having a large banner with the pricing was a clear set back.

I had one guy tell me he bought a Harley Quinn poster from another vendor, even though he liked mine better, because he thought mine would be too expensive. So, I clearly lost out on some sales because of that.

More people pay with cash than with credit card

I have the square card reader with the chip reader. So, I was able to process orders that way, and it was a good learning experience. But, most people purchased with cash. I had my kids run to a vendor to buy a soda with a 20 dollar bill, just so I’d be able to make change for people.

Like I said, this was a great learning experience for me. I’m going to try to do a couple more before MegaCon. Because, I want to have my process down and get the most I can out of that convention. So, overall, I give the Hero Hype experience a thumbs up. I got a lot of what I needed to learn accomplished.

Today I finished my second mermaid piece. I thought I might talk about it a little.

My process for this piece was pretty simple. I drew it out roughly in pencil. I use a blue lead pencil because when I ink over top of it, it’s easier to scan in the inks. I then inked it with markers. The markers I use are made in Japan. I use the Tombow Fudenosuke brush pens. They come in two types. Hard and Soft. I use a combination of the two.

Then I scan my line art into photoshop to do the coloring process.

Right now I don’t have a Cintiq so I’m using a small Intuos to paint in photoshop. I use the standard comic book coloring technique of flatting the colors then I make a color layer to do the finished paints.

The brushes I use are from Kyle T Webster. He’s got a ton of awesome brushes up for sale. The ones I use are the Ultimate Watercolor Brushes.

I, also, use textures that I purchased from Jason Brubaker.

If you don’t know who Jason Brubaker is, he’s a self publisher/Comic Book Artist. He has some amazing coloring tutorials that I suggest you check out.

Anyway, for this piece I used a photo of a reef in the background. I blended the photo into the background with the water and sand. I’m a little on the fence about it because, I’m not entirely sure it goes well with the comic book art foreground. However, I’ve spent enough time on this piece that I don’t have the time to draw a reef for it. It’s not perfect, but it’s finished.

I’m on to the next one.

Here is my Mermaid. I hope you like it.