Success
40 minutes before the opening bell, I am beckoned inside, duly credentialed, and begin wandering the familiar alleys of Bayside, as dealers are still rushing to finish setting up.
I wanted to get in early for two reasons: first, and most obviously, to simply avoid waiting in a Big Honkin' Line(tm). But I don't come to conventions just to mingle with the international jet-set and engage in wry banter with a former Booker Prize nominee. That's just gravy. I really want to add to my art collection. Any large con is filled with artists desiring to turn this trip into a revenue-positive experience, or maybe just earn some beer money or simply interact with fans. Either way, they're often willing to sketch, and usually for a quite modest price. Some even sketch for free, out of goodwill.
Trouble is, many artists are hot enough that their dance cards fill quickly. Some are so popular that you need to get on their sketch lists on the very first day, or else they'll be booked for the whole weekend. With others, you'd need to get to their table shortly after the show opens. And then there are those for whom even that isn't good enough: if you want to stand any chance whatsoever, you need to find a way to get inside ahead of everyone else and know precisely where your quarry will be setting up.
If one of your goals is indeed to get sketches, there are two different ways to succeed. One way is to be an obnoxious idiot, spending all of your time thinking about nothing but art, art, art. You certainly aren't going to waste any of your precious time or energy in being nice to people, nor should you stop at any moment to ask yourself "The items I'm pursuing are pieces of paper with lines and colors on them, and not donor organs for terminally-ill relatives. Am I behaving in a manner that shames both myself and my ancestors?"
You'll probably want to give Method One a miss.
Which leaves you with Method Two: just do a little homework and arrive at the show with some sort of game plan. It's really not a whole lot of work. The convention website lists all of the artists who'll be attending. You hit a couple of comic art sites and plug some names into some search fields, which usually returns a few examples of the artist's convention work. Once you're down to a dozen Persons of Interest, you poke around for message boards and artists' personal websites, to find out if an artist plans to be sketching, how much dough they'll be asking, some sense of how busy they're going to be, and most importantly where their table is going to be.
So I entered the convention center with about eight names and table locations on a list. I knew which table to stake out before the opening bell, and the two or three artists that I'd want to visit before the con was more than a couple of hours old.
It sounds like a lot of obsessive, geeky work. Geeky? Okay, that's a fair cop. But it's hardly obsessive, and it amounts to just two or three hours of web research. It's time well-invested: the payoff is a much, much more enjoyable con experience. You come in with a good sense of what you want to accomplish, realistic expectations, and a firm plan.
So after a casual lap around the show floor to get my bearings, I delivered myself to Table 18 in Artists' Alley a half an hour before WizardWorld was scheduled to open, where I became not the first but the second geek waiting in line for Josh Middleton to arrive. He's a popular artist of some of Marvel's mutant books. I don't really read them, but I love his covers and interior art; they're just spectacularly well-articulated. His message board indicated that he'd only be doing a handful of sketches over the weekend, and that lots of folks had tried and failed several times.
Sure enough, by the time the doors swung open to admit the less-devious, there were six people in line and moments later a couple of dozen people were there watching the artist hang his banner and set out his merchandise. Twenty minutes later, Josh had my money and a sheet of character reference. Five minutes after that, I had dispensed the same commodities to the second artist that I Re
Success
40 minutes before the opening bell, I am beckoned inside, duly credentialed, and begin wandering the familiar alleys of Bayside, as dealers are still rushing to finish setting up.
I wanted to get in early for two reasons: first, and most obviously, to simply avoid waiting in a Big Honkin' Line(tm). But I don't come to conventions just to mingle with the international jet-set and engage in wry banter with a former Booker Prize nominee. That's just gravy. I really want to add to my art collection. Any large con is filled with artists desiring to turn this trip into a revenue-positive experience, or maybe just earn some beer money or simply interact with fans. Either way, they're often willing to sketch, and usually for a quite modest price. Some even sketch for free, out of goodwill.
Trouble is, many artists are hot enough that their dance cards fill quickly. Some are so popular that you need to get on their sketch lists on the very first day, or else they'll be booked for the whole weekend. With others, you'd need to get to their table shortly after the show opens. And then there are those for whom even that isn't good enough: if you want to stand any chance whatsoever, you need to find a way to get inside ahead of everyone else and know precisely where your quarry will be setting up.
If one of your goals is indeed to get sketches, there are two different ways to succeed. One way is to be an obnoxious idiot, spending all of your time thinking about nothing but art, art, art. You certainly aren't going to waste any of your precious time or energy in being nice to people, nor should you stop at any moment to ask yourself "The items I'm pursuing are pieces of paper with lines and colors on them, and not donor organs for terminally-ill relatives. Am I behaving in a manner that shames both myself and my ancestors?"
You'll probably want to give Method One a miss.
Which leaves you with Method Two: just do a little homework and arrive at the show with some sort of game plan. It's really not a whole lot of work. The convention website lists all of the artists who'll be attending. You hit a couple of comic art sites and plug some names into some search fields, which usually returns a few examples of the artist's convention work. Once you're down to a dozen Persons of Interest, you poke around for message boards and artists' personal websites, to find out if an artist plans to be sketching, how much dough they'll be asking, some sense of how busy they're going to be, and most importantly where their table is going to be.
So I entered the convention center with about eight names and table locations on a list. I knew which table to stake out before the opening bell, and the two or three artists that I'd want to visit before the con was more than a couple of hours old.
It sounds like a lot of obsessive, geeky work. Geeky? Okay, that's a fair cop. But it's hardly obsessive, and it amounts to just two or three hours of web research. It's time well-invested: the payoff is a much, much more enjoyable con experience. You come in with a good sense of what you want to accomplish, realistic expectations, and a firm plan.
So after a casual lap around the show floor to get my bearings, I delivered myself to Table 18 in Artists' Alley a half an hour before WizardWorld was scheduled to open, where I became not the first but the second geek waiting in line for Josh Middleton to arrive. He's a popular artist of some of Marvel's mutant books. I don't really read them, but I love his covers and interior art; they're just spectacularly well-articulated. His message board indicated that he'd only be doing a handful of sketches over the weekend, and that lots of folks had tried and failed several times.
Sure enough, by the time the doors swung open to admit the less-devious, there were six people in line and moments later a couple of dozen people were there watching the artist hang his banner and set out his merchandise. Twenty minutes later, Josh had my money and a sheet of character reference. Five minutes after that, I had dispensed the same commodities to the second artist that I Re