Kid's Con this year went as to be expected - I actually made the same amount as I did last year - only like $30. They didn't advertise well this year because the coordinator had his hands full doing lots of other conventions. Not much crowd flow because it's really hard to get to. Not only is it in the Bronx, but once you get into the college, it's all the way in the back building. Maybe next year they could try for a new location? In any case, it was still nice to see comic people, meet new people and hopefully inspire kids that may not have seen anything like this before.
I debuted my brand new banner! Staples had a 40 or 50% off merchandising sale and I got this 3ft x 1.5ft outdoor quality full color banner with 4 grommets (holes at the corners) for only $25. I've been wanting a banner for awhile, and totally jumped on the sale. A lot of comic exhibitors have huge banners, so it's not revolutionary or anything, but I'M SUPER EXCITED about my banner! When I look at other banners at comic cons, I'm attracted to cool characters. My old Mindy Indy sign says my name, but doesn't represent my drawing style (except for that Japanese sun-burst line thing). I found out a super cool way to vectorize drawings. My drawings for these mini comics are done on 8.5x11 paper, scanned at 600dpi, but even that wasn't big enough for the banner because scaling photoshop images up pixellates them. But if you import any drawing into adobe Illustrator, select Object>Image Trace, and it converts the art into vector graphics that you can scale to enormous proportions! It's not perfect and kind of puts more "bumps" on the curved lines for some things (like the balloon dog), but it's pretty cool. As for color, I realized if I colored it naturally it would be mostly skin tones, which don't really stand out. Instead I went for big bold colors and it separates the images well to be distinguishable from afar.
My favorite sketch from Kid's Con: Killer Bee from Naruto, based on the character below. I love to have fun with the sketches!
And... what's this? A Misfortune Cookie/Lucky Penny crossover??? A little teaser for ya ;)
Both years I've done Kid's Con there was a sudden torrential downpour out of nowhere near the end of the day. THANK GOD it didn't happen as we all dragged our suitcases to the subway, but it was close.