This year, lemishie and I shared the table at Ninja-con 2016. There was a lot of changes this year (and one notable con regarding noise level), but I still had a fairly enjoyable time.
[ Particulars ]
Ninja-con 2016 was held on June 4, 2016 at Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. The location was the same as last year’s, by the way. The biggest change this year was that artist alley was held outdoors for the first time. I had my reservations over this arrangement, but it was surprisingly not awful. If anything, there was more natural air circulation, so we weren’t sweltering like in the past years when we were indoors with limited air conditioning. It got windy on some occasions, so some of our displayed prints would sway from time to time.
My partner helped register for our table this year. We were at table 1, which is nearby the outdoor stage. There was tents provided for all tables, and we were lucky to remain in the shade throughout the day. The rows in the back weren’t so lucky- the direction of the sun overtime eventually cast light onto their display, which I imagine was quite unpleasant for a long period of time. The weather wasn’t scorching as I imagined, but it was still hot nonetheless.
[ Preparation ]
This time, I changed my luggage to a more standard one that could hold my tabloid-sized prints more easily. I liked this change, because it was much easier to pack.
Like my previous artist alley event, I brought my entire wire cube display with me. Also, I didn’t produce anything new either, sorry about that. At most, I reprinted some of my most popular prints.
[ Report ]
Much like the year before, I drove to the event, and we parked at the nearby parking structure. I think I had grown acclimated to the pricing, because I no longer balked at the pricing.
If I recall, our setup was barely finished by the time the event began. A recurring issue with our table placement was the volume of the stage. More often than not, it was much too loud- unpleasantly loud at that. Therefore, I found it somewhat difficult to casually enjoy the events on stage, because it often interfered with our interaction with artist alley patrons and passerby. There was a brief lull when the volume was lowered, but it later escalated back to earlier levels.
Most of the time, I remained planted to my table, haha.
I had a brief time wandering around, but otherwise, I remained seated. To kill time, I spent time making watercolor doodles. There was a point where I was recorded working on one, haha. I wonder if it’ll surface somewhere.
Here are some artworks I worked on (sorry, twitter modules seem to dislike my WP entry):
..and with scrap watercolor paper.. I doodled and colored one of my fox spirit OCs that finally got a name: Ayako. pic.twitter.com/cGT3qldP2g
— kariavalon/asa+kari (@evatrice) June 6, 2016
Quick chibi doodle of my FFXIV chara Runelucia Plines.. after I forgot all of my chibi samples at home LOL pic.twitter.com/sSDK8fxfEQ
— kariavalon/asa+kari (@evatrice) June 6, 2016
Doodled and colored a random portrait of her FFXIV chara K’dyalani Mahsa for @nyamomask :> pic.twitter.com/eZJp1OBMda
— kariavalon/asa+kari (@evatrice) June 6, 2016
Also, what we did the first time was making some grab bags. We had some leftover small merchandise we no longer want to keep long-term, so grab bags was easily a option. We sold a couple if I last recall, so that was great.
Oh, another sore point was that we weren’t careful with counting out a customer’s change.. so that customer went off with a free extra poster print… hopefully that doesn’t ever happen again.
[ Conclusion ]
Performance was somewhat better than last year, but it still squarely fell on breaking even on everything. I appreciated the better air circulation due to the location change, but the noise volume otherwise was largely unpleasant, so this is certainly a aspect the convention could improve on. My fears of artist alley being held outside was fortunately unwarranted for me, and my display prints didn’t suffer from being outdoors.
It’s quite likely I’ll attempt to table again the following year (it’s kindof a tradition at this point), but it’s up in the air whether I could secure a table once more.