Sunday, July 29, 2012

Stockton-Con Prep

I have been preparing for the past few months for the Stockton-Con, which will be Stockton, California's very first comic convention. As an active local artist, I wanted to support the efforts of those organizing the event by being a participant and helping spread art to a culture other than the usual gallery goer.
Typical of artists who exhibit in Artist Alley at a comic convention , I will be selling prints of fan art, which is art created by an artist that depicts popular culture, such as comic book characters, movie characters, book character, etc. With my prints, I am using my usual illustrative style of using watercolors and India ink as an approach to rendering the subjects. Since my style is a combination of fine art and commercial art techniques, I think it makes for an interesting take on these pop cultural icons. I am hoping that by not using a conventional comic book artist's approach, that I will be able to offer something a little different than the norm. Actually, I'm just hoping people will like my exhibit enough to buy my prints. My financial goal for this experience is to simply break even on all the money I've pumped into this project.
Along with the prints, I want to sell art that is created on the spot, again, typical of what one would find in Artist Alley. What often happens is that artists will take commissions from convention attendees, and draw whatever comic, movie, book character that they suggest. Some artists fill in time slots during the convention of when they will work on commissions, and commissions can be carried over well after the convention is over. So an artist may have to work on art for the next week or so until all assignments are completed. Well, I don't really want to do that, so I have been bumping a few alternative ideas around.
One idea I though of was having a "Barbarian Art Blitz" where for 15 minutes, I draw as many barbarian drawing as I possibly can. If I do a blitz once an hour, that will give me more to sell and time to engage my audience. A variation of that idea would be to create a canvas painting of a pop culture subject once every hour. I think both ideas would be fun, and so for the next day or so I going to work out the feasibility of doing these activities. I better hurry it up, because the Con is coming up this coming Sunday! No pressure, right?
Here are the designs that I will be selling as prints. These were created on 14" x 20" watercolor paper, but they will be shrunk down a bit to fit on 11" x 17" paper. The prints will have text on top indicating the title of the piece and text on the bottom listing me as the artist. I have already printed off three designs and they look really nice.

3 comments:

Tim said...

Very cool designs. I like how Mystique almost blends into the background and the looks on the faces of both Hulk and Wolverine.

David R. Vallejo said...

I'm glad that is how you perceive the effect of my Mystique design because that is exactly what I was going for.
As for Hulk and Wolverine, if I could draw nothing but old guy faces, I would be a happy artist. Well, maybe not just faces, but I really like doing them!

Unknown said...

I hope your prints are a success it sounds like you're going to have a lot of fun at the con.