Well. That was a hell of a week.
(Conbook cover, click for full size.)
On Wednesday, I grabbed my usual con bag, some tubes full of art, and (as an experiment) my printer. I took an Uber down to the airport Hilton, where the con was going to be held. I checked into my room, which turned out to be a huge double king right next to the pool. Not bad.
I was the artist GoH of this con. It was my first ever GoH appearance, and I intended to make the most of it.
My art was all over the website, as well as the conbook cover; my artistic presence was felt throughout other parts of the con I had no hand in, as I’d created a style guide for everyone to use based on the poster I’d done a year ago to announce this year’s theme.
I even did the fursuit ID tag. That’s it hanging off my badge; they let me have whatever number I wanted, even though I wasn’t going to be fursuiting. I chose my current age. It’s all clipped to the inside of my black coat; I spent a lot of the con running around with it hidden inside that instead of hanging on the lanyard around my neck. And spent a decent amount of time without it at all; I figured, hey, half the staff knows me on sight as The Guest Of Honor, I don’t need to worry about wearing it. Especially when I was dressing as flamboyantly as I did at the con:
My table outfit on Saturday, which was probably the least glamorous thing I wore all con. Even with the Table Bra, which is a padded push-up bra that adds two cup sizes and creates Amazing Cleavage.
I went directly from the table to the GoH dinner. I didn’t feel dressed up enough for such an event but several people noted that this photo clearly had a Most Glamorous Person in it, and that person was me. For most of the other con functions I attended I was dressed to the nines.
There were some initial snafus; the publications director and I had conspired to make what we hoped would be one of the most beautiful conbooks furry fandom had ever seen. It would be full color with French flaps on the cover, rather than the color cover/B&W interior that Rainfurrest usually does. She’d even found a printer who could deliver it for less than the usual book. But at the last minute something went awry and they had to shift to their usual printer – and then that printer had one of their machines break down the night before, and was late delivering the badge inserts and conbooks, so I suspect a lot of people never even saw it. Which made me sad because I worked hard on that cover, trying to make a dense, complex piece that would set the stage for a weekend themed around The Dark Nineties Future Of Seattle, With Furries.
The person who was working on a light-up dragon costume for me didn’t come through on it; I was fine with this, as she’s a friend, and I knew that she’d been going through some crazy personal stuff these last couple of months. Now I’ll have a reason to come back to furry cons – I’d decided to take 2015 off to concentrate on comic cons, and consider what sort of hole they left in my life.
In proofing the conbook, I noticed one item in the scavenger hunt: 5 points, a badge by Egypt Urnash. Now, for those of you who are not furries, I probably need to explain the “badge” things. Pretty much all furries have a handful of their own characters, and they collect art of them; one of the forms of this is handmade badges, with a drawing and the character’s name on it. At the cons we’re much more likely to refer to each other as these names than as our legal names, and these serve as a way to remind folks just what kind of animal person we like to pretend to be. Making these things is a major portion of most furry artist’s con revenues. As a digital-only artist, I’ve resisted doing this at furry cons, preferring to focus on table commissions and prints and books, but that item made me decide to haul the printer in and experiment.
I’d made one for myself, of course. I mean duh. I used the same colors as the style guide, and made a template; I also made a couple badges for some of my friends.
My regular room-share and table buddy Amara got one.
So did Maly. She’s the one who suggested me for the GoH slot, so she also got a cameo on the cover of the con book.
And the publications director also ended up on the con book – sadly, she was on one of the flaps, and didn’t make the final printing. But she got a badge!
My friend Sigil also got one. Usually this character’s drawn a lot cuter, but I ended up going to a “scary netrunner witch” place here.
An old friend who would be appearing at a furry con for the first time in forever. Also the cover for the fiction anthology – I generally followed a policy of “use cameos of my friend’ characters” for the art I did for the con as much as possible.
And finally my ex-with-benefits. I printed all of these out at the con, and borrowed Amara’s laminator to seal them for use. (Furry character badges are ALWAYS laminated, because they see a lot of casual abuse – it’s not uncommon to have 3 or 4 of them dangling from your chest, bouncing off of each other and anything you may be carrying.)
When I set up my table on Thursday, I put these out as examples. Before I’d even managed to make a little sign with my price, I was getting orders for them at my initial price of $60; when I finally made the sign, I wrote $80 and still had people eagerly hoping to get one. Most badges are head shots, so I felt comfortable pricing these at the high end of the range a quick survey of badge prices had shown, but honestly I think I probably could have charged even more and still had a lot of takers.
I then proceeded to spend a lot of my time at the con drawing these things in Illustrator. I’m not quite sure how I feel about that, as I ended up not having much time left to dance. I really only got to hit the dance on Friday night; by the time I got out to the dance on Saturday, it was the very last DJ, who was playing music with an utterly simple beat at wall-shaking volumes; as the child of an audio engineer, I really can’t stand the aural mud that results from this, and didn’t get any dancing in, which made me sad. And on Sunday I was just too damn pooped to put in more than a token appearance at the dead dog dance. Ah well.
There’s a lot of IT types in the furry fandom, to the point where I’ve heard stories of people wondering if it would be discriminatory to look for non-furries when hiring people for their teams, so there’s someone left to hold down the fort when the entire rest of the group leaves for one of the major cons. If you want to mount an attack on a major American company’s servers, now you know when to schedule it. I was kinda surprised I didn’t end up with more people saying they wanted some form of hacker as their Cyberpunk Character Class. But on the other hand these are also some IT types with really imaginative private fantasy lives…
Like, say, these two guys. The first one is a little dimension-hopping stoatweasel, so it was pretty natural to have him selling contraband ala the Finn from “Neuromancer”. The dragon is his SO’s new character, who was being hashed out at this convention – a purple dragon with green accents, and a marijuana theme carried to the point of absurdity. I was not responsible for the pot leaf cheek-fins, the psychoactive breath weapon, or the horns that look like blunts, but I am delighted to have added “pot leaf treasure trail” to the mix. I’m told that these two badges inspired some smutty casual role-play that night, which resulted in a request for a more complicated table commission; I was closed at that point, but I feel like “your drawings gave us hot sexy times and we would like to see your visual take on them” is kind of a request I have a holy duty to honor.
If you’re not sure what kind of animal this guy is, the answer is “a Pokemon”. I couldn’t tell you which one as I only ever captured about 50 different Pokemon in an emulated copy of Red.
I took those (and a couple of more elaborate art commissions) on Thursday, then spent parts of Thursday night, Friday at the table, Friday night, and Saturday morning drawing/printing/laminating those. On Saturday I opened up for a couple more badges and other commissions again…
This was a friend asking me for a first stab at defining a new character he’s playing with. No model sheet, just a few phrases, and a color reference in the form of an iridescent pendant he was wearing. I joked that this color was “fuck you Orbus” (with a definite smile), then found ways to make it work because hey, that’s what I do.
“In the dark cyberpunk future of Seattle, what would you put on your character sheet for ‘class’?”
“…The Cigarette-Smoking Man.”
I’m really happy how this one came out; I muttered “No! LESS IS MORE” to myself several times as I was finishing this one.
“So which parts of the markings on your ref sheet are the really important ones?”
“The hexagon on his forehead. Otherwise, just, you know. Hexagons wherever. Like up one leg, across the back, and down the other arm.”
And then I ended up dropping the head entirely into silhouette because that’s what worked in the crazy parkour pose I ended up doing.
This is the only table commission I got done. I mostly did badges. This is for a regular commissioner, who has a bunch of pretty interesting characters who everyone else always just draws lounging around looking sexy; then he comes to me and I draw them doing things like “defending a dragon’s hoard and babies from dragonslayers while in the middle of nursing one of the hatchlings”. In widescreen. Because I am… what I am, I guess. I dunno. So much of the commissioned art in the furry scene is just ‘a character hanging around in front of minimal backgrounds looking sexy’, and the commissioners are perfectly happy with that, but I have to find the story; I have to create an environment. I feel like I’m cheating everyone involved if I don’t.
I have three more table commissions to take home; I kinda prioritized doing the badges to help create the aura of CYBERPUNK MENACE around the con. Two of them are dragons, as were four of the eight badge commissions I did. I think I may have a slight reputation as a Dragon Artist in the fandom. Not surprising given that my main character is one as well, and that I have a couple of UV-reactive dragon wings tattooed across the backs of my arms, I guess.
I think I may be buying a small photo printer before my next furry con. Badges are like printing money; none of these took much more than an hour to do when I filter out all the time I spent closing the computer and talking to people across the table. I’m really going to need a minion if I want to do that, though. I could probably have gotten most of these drawn the day I took them if I had someone else to handle giving the ‘I have prints, a Tarot deck, and a comic about a robot lady dragged out of reality by her ex-boyfriend’ speech, and taking money for those things.
If I do that, I will also be making a badge style guide for every con! Draw one or two for myself and friends to establish a palette based on the con’s theme, then just work within that. Creativity is a lot easier with a framework.
Midway through Saturday, this happened. That’s my Wacom stylus. In pieces. Thoroughly unusable. Someone who’d attended my Illustrator panel yesterday asked for a closer look at my process, which I was happy to provide; I moved the print books out of the way, then picked up the computer, tablet, and stylus and moved over to show him. I carried the stylus in my mouth, and when I went to wipe my spit off before using it, I grabbed the rubber grip too tightly and pulled the whole pen apart. I tried putting it back together but failed; I ended up with the circuit board kinda jammed partway into the rear half of the pen barrel, too tightly for me to get it out by hand.
I kinda freaked out. Kind of a lot, quietly. I still had two badges in my queue at that point, plus a couple digital commissions, plus whatever I was hoping to take the next day once I finished that queue on Saturday night. Luckily I was able to run to Con Ops and borrow some pliers to unjam the circuit board, then carefully examine the innards of the pen and realize there were two shallow grooves the circuit board fit in. I got it back together and it all worked.
When I got back to the table, the person I was about to draw Stash for was there. He helped me, ah, calm my nerves, in a way appropriate to the character. And I ordered a backup stylus so that if this ever happens again, I can simply swap pens and keep drawing.
Socially, the con was fun. All my dealer friends were pretty happy; sales were quite good all around. One of my friends made $2k cranking out tons of quick little badges on 3.5″ discs! There was the social upset of me not knowing that a Homework Party needs a certain amount of work put in to keep it from becoming a Drunken Party with the artists hunching in grumpy involuted corners trying to focus on drawing, but I’ll know that for next time if I try the badges thing again – I normally have very little homework at furry cons, so I’ve never had to worry about that.
And the combination of me as the GoH plus the theme brought Neogeen out of the woodwork. She’s from the same generation of furry artists as myself, but has drifted away from the scene. She told me why over dinner last night and, yeah, she had a damn good reason to do it. It was delightful to see her again and I hope we can show up at the same cons again sometime!
Also some things that made me happy:
This was the con’s T-shirt. It sold out of most sizes by Friday. It was completely sold out by the end of the con. I hear they were taking pre-orders for a second print run.
This was the cover of the con’s prose anthology (click for full size). It sold out. They’ve been doing one for five years, and this has never come close to happening before. They told me they suspect my art had a hand in that happening.
I think that’s about it. It’s an hour until checkout; time to kick my roomie until she wakes up and packs all her stuff. Mine’s pretty much ready.