Monday, April 18, 2011

Stumptown Comic Fest 2011

Woot. Stumptown Comics Fest is by far my favorite comic convention. The exhibit floor has great stuff. From $1 mini comics to stores and publishers bringing tons of graphic novels and trades. We planned out our money well this time and got to spend a fair chunk of change on a lot of awesome stuff. I will go over what we got in more detail later, but my favorites were Liz Conley who does book binding and letter press, Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg, and of course Julia Wertz.

We also got to go to a number of panels, which are all included in the no-kidding $7 admissions. First we went to Making Comics with four of the 22 artists that work at Periscope studios. They each told us about how they go about making the drawings for their comics. One idea that interested me was how Erika Moen (of DAR fame) had a font made of her handwriting, and since she does her pencils digitally using Photoshop, she also puts in teh letter. Then she prints it all in blue, including the lettering and gets the look of hand lettering but with the accuracy of a font. There we also learned of an intersting comic coming out in October of this year, Dear Creature by David of Periscope Studio and it sounds awesome. We stopped by his booth later and grabbed up a postcard and he kindly drew on it for us. Then they took questions and we got to learn a lot about Periscope Studios. I read their blog, but I had no idea. Sounds like a crazy house! 3 Pages of notes from this panel.

The next panel for me was Color in Storytelling. It was ok. I am not sure what I was hoping for, so I am not sure what disappointed me. The best part was when she went over some of the things that different colors evoke (in American culture). I took a lot of notes (6 pages), so it couldn't have been that bad. Haha. Abe wanted to go to Writing for Graphic Novels. He was a little disappointed too. He said he got lots of good information but that the speaker didn't cover the information he said he planned to talk about. Ah well.

I think How to Publicize Your Comic was the best panel we went to. The speaker is currently a publicist for Fantagraphics, which she came to from Dark Horse, which she came to from Top Shelf. She almost missed telling us that marketing is what takes over after publicizing ends. Which I thought was good to know. Publicizing means sending out your comics for reviews and getting interviewed, all even before the book comes out so people will want to run to the stores the day it is available to grab their copies. She was very explicit about the steps to get reviewed and how to track all the information. Great panel. 7 1/2 pages of notes. Not bad.

The final panel was Illustration Portfolio Mastery. I think my mom might have gotten more out of this than me, but I did take 5 pages of notes, so I can tell her all about it when I go up on Thursday.

Anyways, while we were there, I thought of some short comics to do. One of which involves this sasquatch and little girl.

We also got tons of ideas about what to get ready and do when we show at a convention, hopefully this fall. In anticipation, I bought some book binding equipment and sumi-e brushes.

Anyways, after the show, we headed straight home because we were exhausted and worried about the dogs (though my cousin kindly checked in on them and fed the dinner and let them out. Thanks!!). We were excited to stop at a Carl's Jr so I marked the exit down this time since last time we didn't see any signs on the northbound side, only the southbound side. But alas, there was still no Carl's Jr. to be had so we ended up at Applebee's because we were so freakin' hungry. I took the opportunity to do some sketches because I was inspired by Julia Wertz.

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