Heroes Con prep!

Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC is coming up the weekend of June 22-24th and I am SO EXCITED! 

I will be vending the show at a giant booth just for me, Little Asian Sweatshop, Maria Danalakis and Christy Sawyer. And since I will have a few friends at the table to mind customers and general comings and goings, I will actually attempt at convention sketches this show. I'm kinda playing that aspect of the show by ear, I really want to commit to sitting down at my table and drawing for people but I'm sure I will be slow as all hell and will have a very short list of commissions over the weekend, either out of general disinterest or me just being busy with taking on very few sketches at a time. I'm also making them a little more involved than the average sketch you can buy at a show, as my OCD refuses to let me give anyone any art of mine that looks rushed or hacked. It makes me cringe. Especially once it shows up later on the internet.  9_9;;

So I'm *planning* on initially sketching the piece out on scrap paper, thus removing the performance anxiety of using 1 piece of Bristol for the entire thing and also allowing for the inevitable 2-4 false starts I'll have trying to nail a pose. Then I'll ink it on super heavy vellum and on the flip side tone it it with warm and cool grey markers and white-out, much like an animation cel. This being a bit more involved a process I'm still trying to figure out a price point. 

I was experimenting with a few already-inked vellum pieces I had laying around the office. 

I also dug up some original inks to what would be considered 'classic' Paigey pieces, all but the mermaid inks I'll be hitting with greytone markers and selling off at Heroes, and if they don't sell there I'll have them either on my etsy or at my solo pre-Baltimore Con show in Sept.

I got a headstart on a couple of commissions for people at Heroes already:

DC Comics' Looker sketch

Inks on vellum.

Batgirl sketch

Batgirl inks

A Bettie Page/Lum mashup, just for fun/practice

What I'm pretty excited about is that this method can lend some new life to my 'originals', which I tend to discard to various piles around my work area once they're all scanned in and forget about them. Some of the guys I worked with at my old office job Freeze can attest- when I cleaned out my work area when we changed offices I had a pile of original inks and sketches about an inch high that I hadn't given a second thought to. I've got a pre-Baltimore Comic Con solo show happening at the Ottobar in September and now I think I'll be greytoning and throwing some older work in frames for purchase. Which is good, cuz otherwise it's just taking up valuable space in my Brooklyn apt.