A couple new chibi pieces!

Not much to report! Prepping for Baltimore Comic Con next week and drawing to de-stress. Haha. 

These are just for fun, mostly. And to keep myself sharp with my coloring and linework. Plus I can always use them for magnet sets, mini-print postcards and I'm actually thinking of getting the Frankenstein couple made as a sticker set this fall.

Tex Avery's Red and The Wolf

"Franken-FINE"

Little Asian Sweatshop on Heroes of Cosplay!

Holy craaaaaaap I'm so proud!!! My BFF Fenny of Little Asian Sweatshop, whom I'm frequently work with at conventions and design for totally had one of her GLaDOS hair flowers on the teevee!

Chloe on Syfy's Heroes of Cosplay was totally ROCKING her GLaDOS hair flower in the confessional segments of the Emerald City Comic Con episode.

(Which I happened to design... ~__^ )

Eeeeh! It looks so good!!

You can get your own hairflower here!!

 

Did we mention it LIGHTS UP?

Check out Little Asian Sweatshop's etsy store for this and other awesome accessories!!!

Cake the Cat and Fionna the Human!

"It WAS a date! There was singing and junk!"

Scrambling to get some new art together for Baltimore Comic Con in a couple weeks! I'll be in Artist Alley with Little Asian Sweatshop and Maria Danalakis Art!

My *6th* year attending in Artist Alley!

 Did some more chibi-pairings that I use for mini prints and magnet sets! I managed to get the above Fionna and Cake from Adventure Time art to the printers in time for Baltimore Con, so I'll have 5"x7" mini prints of these two for the show! Also doing two more pairings- which I should have magnet sets of but unfortunately won't have prints in time, of Tex Avery's Red Hot and The Wolf, and of my absolute hero in life Pee-Wee Herman and Miss Yvonne, the Most Beautiful Woman in Puppetland!

"Oh Wolfie!"

SCREAM REAL LOUD!

 It is as I feared, though. I draw two Pee-Wee's Playhouse characters and now I want to draw EVERYONE.

Aftermath: Visionary Tattoo Arts Festival

One of many giant posters of my flyer for the show!

Holeeeey crap whatta weekend! 

The Visionary Tattoo Arts Festival in Asbury Park, NJ was a fantastic experience!

This show was on par with some of my most successful comic conventions and I look forward to designing the flyer for and attending next year's show.

(Which means I need to top this year's flyer, which is one of the best things I've designed ever- but no pressure. ;P)

Asbury Park by the way is ADORABLE. I'm by no means a beach person, but I absolutely must come back and enjoy the sights on an actual day trip (and it's only 1.5 hours away by NJ Transit!). Not only is the Asbury Park Convention Hall a beautiful, grand building but the boardwalk has cool stuff like a pinball museum (that I regrettably was too tired to go into after the show). 

The beautiful and historic Asbury Park Convention Hall

Taking place right on the beach at the Asbury Park Convention Hall, the Visionary Tattoo Arts Festival  was a helluva show. This being my first tattoo show I attended professionally I was set up with a booth right at the entrance of the show and right in view of the stage where they had burlesque, suspension, sideshow and a pinup contest that I actually got to judge in for the title of Miss Asbury Park! They even blasted rock music on the show floor and served beer and liquor at the concession stand. HELL YES. It was a welcome little break from comic shows (not that I don't love my comic shows...) and recharged my batteries creatively and gave my confidence in myself and my work a much-needed boost after a few not-so successful shows this year.

My booth!

My artwork and merch was incredibly well-recieved. Which when you consider how 'scary' all the bikers, metalheads and heavily modded folk at a tattoo show would be (and some were at first glance) it was great to see how happy and friendly everyone was. Moreso even than some comic shows I've attended. I brought a 4" thick stack of postcards, 100 moo mini cards and 200 stickers and they were ALL GONE by Sunday evening. It was crazy! My booth location was beyond cherry. Everyone who entered the show had to pass by me and my wares. 

The shirt for the show featuring my artwork!

It was kinda like this at the show:

(not really but it's hilarious anyway...)

I def want to thank Shannon and Jon Jon of Triple Diamond Tattoo in Brooklyn did an AMAZING job of putting the show together and inviting me to take part in the festivities. Seriously I can't wait til next year. I'm already planning on having Little Asian Sweatshop as my booth buddy so we can just tag team the show floor with our super sales powers. And I can take more breaks, cuz omg 12 hour Saturday shifts physically destroyed me. But made the 8 hour Sunday shift a piece of cake. Go figure.

12 hour Saturday shift: Before

12 hour Saturday shift: After

It was also strangely freeing being at a tattoo show compared to a comic show- other than my friends directly involved with me at the show and a handful of artists I had no idea who anyone was. And other than me plugging the fact that I did the poster for this year's show no one had any idea who I was either! No childhood heroes to stalk? No established comic artists to win over? No editors to pay mind to? No worrying about what potential job creator just watched me be a jerk to a table barnacle? No cosplayers? No FANDOMS? NO CON DRAMAZ? 

(At least not from my perspective. I'm sure the regulars have all sorts of inside info on what happened after hours and at the hotel bars and after parties, but I was in a fool's paradise. Which was a welcome change of pace to the 15 years of anime and comic conventions I've attended.) 

Tattoo show hours DO NOT FUCK AROUND

It was also awesome to be at a show where everyone who attended had a point of reference for familiarity with my work already coming into the show, with the flyers, tshirts, coasters and billboards all emblazoned with my sword-swallowing mermaid, tattooer Tillie and victorian-styled logo. As opposed to the underlying feeling I constantly had something to prove as I tend to feel at comic shows, I was able to relax, hang out and enjoy the scenery. It was interesting too to be one of the few artists attending who wasn't a tattoo artist and thus was free to interact with walk-up customers instead of hunched over a person's leg or back to the rear of the booth. I definitely would like to look into even more tattoo shows in the future to vend my merch at, as it seems a perfect crossover for me.

So yeah, any tattoo shows interested in a swanky flyer for themselves get at me! Maybe we can work out a deal? ;)

Visionary Tattoo Fest is THIS WEEKEND YOU GUYS!

Meanwhile, on a billboard in New Jersey...

Visionary Tattoo Art Festival is THIS WEEKEND, July 26th-28th in Asbury Park, New Jersey!

I'm a GUEST! And I'm selling stuff! 

I designed the flyer for this year!

I hope I see you there!!

There's also a pinup contest, ladies!!

Pearly Whites.

See the full shots of these creeps and scoundrels on my Pearly Whites page.

Logo by Phil Balsman!

This is Amy, one of our heroes.
See the rest of my characters here.

In preparation for actually sitting down and doing my fabled magnum opus comic series Pearly Whites, I'm drawing character studies and other fun stuff. I consider this separate from my usual pinup work, so it's all going in here.

The long-winded 'elevator pitch':

It's best described as almost an east-coast version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but from the monsters perspective. (I'm not even gonna pretend people aren't going to make comparisons.) It could also be considered a superhero team book if the superheroes all didn't wear costumes and have no actual mission to carry out. It's got action, horror, comedy, romance, drama, powers, drugs, fashion and pop culture references out the wazzoo. Alot of the stories and characters come from my 4 years of playing/DMing tabletop dice-and-paper RPG's like Vampire and Shadowrun in high school.

The main story follows our main character Amy, an amnesiac who is of unknown origins. She is haunted by two girls, Suzan and Fiona, who could be either ghosts, figments of her imagination or incorporeal aspects of her own personality. Or all of the above. Or something else entirely. She comes to live in a sort of halfway house for the supernatural called the Monster Lodge, which is occupied by a rotating cast of various werewolves, vampires, demons, witches, Frankensteins, mad scientists, fairies, and ne'er do well's. Many who comes to live at the Monster Lodge are there because they're running from something, which results in several character's pasts eventually catching up with them. Depending on the character, this can result in anything from riotous hijinks across the country (and sometimes across the world) to heartbreaking realizations that can shake the characters to their very cores.

As of right now I've got 16 characters down, a bazillion to go. Look for more designs soon! With the summer weather being absolute shit right now, this is basically all I've been concentrating my free time on. It's like I'm in high school again. I'm proud to say I'm further along to a cohesive plot than I've ever been in the 15+ years these characters have been running around in my head, and I'm taking serious steps to organize my thoughts and get my shit in gear to do my own goddamn comic. Woot.

I added an actual page to my blog up above under the title banner of this very blog where you can see my character designs as they progress. Or just click here. Be sure to check it out every few weeks as I plan on adding more characters and concept drawings and who knows, maybe some comic shorts as I get back into the sequential game.

Aftermath: HeroesCon 2013

Another HeroesCon down in the books!

Little Asian Sweatshop, Maria Danalakis Art, and myself in Artist Alley!

After show drinks on Saturday!

Let it be known that this and Baltimore Comic Con are my two favorite shows of the year. HeroesCon is a fantastic show that is comic and artist focused and always has a fantastic guest list with amazingly friendly fans and attendees and a supportive staff who are ready and able to help you out with whatever it is you need. Heroes is the one show I will go out of my way to attend and is my main 'away' show where I stay at a hotel and actually socialize with fellow con folks after hours. 

OMG it's "Pee-Wee"!

My harlequin-print Jenny dress from Pinup Girl clothing!

Not that there isn't some criticism. This year seemed a transitional one for the show, after the insanity of last year's 30th anniversary show plus having Stan Lee as a guest it seemed the showrunners assumed that the enormous crowds of last year would carry through and had an even BIGGER floorplan than any year previous. What resulted was a GINORMOUS show floor with GIANT aisles that spread out the attendees so thin that it gave the illusion that the show was kinda dead all weekend. Which from the opinions I heard around resulted in a lack of enthusiasm from the fans and exhibitors and a lack of money being made at Artist Alley tables. I know there were large swaths of time where practically no one came by my table and I actually ::gasp:: SAT DOWN. I know, I know- I'm just as disappointed in myself. :\ 

ALSO- and by no fault of Heroes, traveling down this year was a NIGHTMARE. My husband and I will usually make a 2 day journey down to NC from NYC due to the sheer volume of merch I bring with me requiring us to drive. We'll take a Megabus down from NYC to Baltimore and borrow my parent's van, then we pick up Fenny in DC and drive the (what's supposed to be 7 hours) to Charlotte. Which we usually have done on Thursday, but figured we'd do it this year on Friday as that's a dead day anyways for most, and we assumed we'd get there at at 2ish since we were on the road at 7am. Ugh, but constant torrential downpours and traffic jams destroyed any hope for smooth sailing and setup on Friday was left for a hectic final hour of the show that day. And I must admit I got really snippy with people who stopped to talk to me while I was trying to setup.  

"Little Stepford Sweatshop"

My husband Phil "Ballsy" Balsman and I!

All was not lost at Heroes however. While I did financially take a hit this year (hopefully the rest of this year's shows will fare better on my wallet), one of the things that makes the show really worth it at the end is the Dead Dog party for all the professionals/workers/volunteers on Sunday night after the show at the comic shop that throws it, Heroes Aren't Hard to Find. The after party has an awesome spread of tacos, beer and I got some discounted comics- though as always when I actually go into a brick-and-mortar comic shop I get a case of buyer's amnesia and forget EVERYTHING I want to buy. What's super-duper awesome about the afterparty is also that it gives me a chance to mingle and catch up with my contemporaries and I even got some hugs *initiated* by some longtime artistic heroes, which put me on cloud 9. Especially since I'm chained to my table during con hours and rarely get a break to pee let alone go around and talk to people. I also for the third year in a row donated art to the Heroescon Saturday art auction, this year it being the original to my chibi Poison Ivy pinup, which went to a huge fan of the character. Which I'm aways glad to see.

So very, very tired.

Me and my FAVE cosplayer DJ Spider as golden age Batwoman!

Something I did notice however with Heroes regarding my own work is that this being my 6th year tabling I feel like I'm starting to get pigeonholed as the 'pin-up girl'. Which is awesome thing to be known for and I love the genre, but my true passion has always been comics and I feel like there's so much more artistically I can offer. Like drawing guys. And ugly people. And having characters act in a way other than 'Were you just looking at my bum, naughty boy?' So I'm trying to really focus on actually putting out my magnum opus comic Pearly Whites in the next 5 years, which is honestly a VERY generous time frame and it will hopefully be in even less time then that. I already started my final character designs and I've been writing and outlining like crazy trying to streamline 15 years worth of story notes into a cohesive narrative that doesn't suck. Thankfully my BFF Fenny of Little Asian Sweatshop was an English Lit major in college and is helping me out with all the fine tuning and is an AMAZING sounding board for ideas. Look for future blog entries where I'll share some tidbits on the craziness that is Pearly Whites.