Diary Entries Thus Far:
Dragon Con Diary 09: Pre-Con Prep
Dragon Con Diary 09: To Charge or Not to Charge?
Dragon Con Diary 09: The Rush Begins
Dragon Con Diary 09: The Calm Before the Storm
Dragon Con Diary 09: Matting Madness!
Dragon Con Diary 09: The Aftermath
Dragon Con Diary 09: Video & Photo Stream

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In order to give others an idea of what the life of a convention artist is like, I thought I’d keep an ongoing diary of this year’s preparation and main events for Dragon Con. I attend this convention every year when possible and have done so for the past 5 years or so since it’s the largest one local to me. I may be whipping out the video camera to document the chaos as well once my room is a proper mess of convention madness.

This will be my first year having a table in the Artist Alley and the largest size panel display possible in the gallery. That’s four beautiful 4×4 foot pegboards all for me! Now to figure out how the heck to fill them!

So without further ado, let the convention season begin!

Things I’ve done already:

Updated inventory files with new prints

Updated website with new shop (still need to make it pretty)

Uploaded products to the web (including zazzle & deviantart. Considering Redbubble and others as well). Gotta make sure my online presence is thoroughly fluffed and updated for ensuing convention driven traffic.

Purchased a 12 pocket rotating countertop rack for display of small matted prints and a tiered magazine display for showing off the larger matted prints (both from www.displays2go.com)

Purchased 500 foil accented business cards from vistaprint.com

Things I need to do:

Re-learn Microsoft Access so I can keep better books

Create convention budget and profit/loss projection

Recreate inventory master list in Access

Design and print the vinyl banner for the table

Start matting all the prints to fit in all my shiny spinny displays (50+ 4×6’s to mat?)

Handcraft about 25 more art tile and cameo necklaces

Estimate how many and which paintings I can complete for display at Dragon Con so I can get my control sheets turned in to the staff

Buy proper frames for already matted pieces to display

Order more print inventory from iprintfromhome.com

Tone up for the Dawn Lookalike Contest (Egads I’m going to be a model??)

With only 64 days left till dragon con, the next couple of months are going to be interesting!