The Art of Success: HOW ARTISTS SUCCEED AT CONVENTIONS!

Over the years, Lindsay Cibos and I have kept careful sales records, charting what pictures and products were successful with audiences at anime conventions. I started writing this document as a personal meditation on what works and what doesn’t at conventions, so that I’d have a better idea where to apply myself when it comes to creating images. What I found through writing this is that I was not only creating a list of factors that contributed to whether an image sells at conventions, but also a list of traits that helped explain why some artistic endeavors appeal on a broad scale. I thought my findings might be of interest to other artists, so I’ve taken the time to compile them. I hope that through sharing this info, other artists might also be inspired to share their own knowledge on the subject of creating successful art.

Conventions: Passing attraction. Picture yourself walking through a typical anime/comic convention dealer’s room. If the convention is worthwhile, then the floor is an overwhelming sensory experience. A vast diversity of people pack themselves into living channels that run down the length of cramped aisles. Strange and horrible smells arise from the crowd, assaulting your olfactory nerves. Ambient noise rings a deafening crescendo in your ears, forcing any conversations to take the form of highly focused yells. Your eyes dart from one visual highlight to another. You’re barely able to focus on navigation or destination. Everything around competes for your attention. You find yourself drifting along with everyone else.

Within the crowd, there are other distractions. Some attendees dress in elaborate costumes celebrating characters from popular shows, video games, comics, and anime. Other attendees wear bizarre fringe fashion and fetish-wear designed to display the maximum legal amount of skin.

Every aisle in the hall is lined with venders doing everything they can to attract people to their table. They erect huge displays featuring hard to find merchandise, they shout out enticing bargains, they stand on their tables and clash enormous replica swords together, and they play J-Pop music videos on large monitors at the maximum volume.

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Now imagine yourself as an artist attending the convention. You decided to take the plunge, and put down $50 for a table in artist alley. Somewhere in this chaotic carnival of freaks and fandom, you reside. You set down an 8.5x11 inch art portfolio, and wait for a tide of people to crash into your table.

Will you succeed in generating interest in your art? Will you lose your time and investment, earn back your convention costs, or make a killing at the con? Like a general following Sun Tzu’s Art of War, it all depends on what preparations you made before the event and how you handle yourself at the event.

To be a successful artist, it helps to understand your product and the marketplace. What grabs attention and makes people want to buy? To help, I’ve broken down the factors I consider important to artistic success in a tiered hierarchy. From the standpoint of a convention attendee – AKA your potential customer – they move up the hierarchy making small, often subconscious assessments on whether the piece of art is appealing. If the art passes the test, it becomes more interesting to the viewer, and then they assess the work according to the next tier. Art that registers strongly on any tier is often successful. The more tiers a piece registers on, the more success it has.

Hierarchy of Traits Affecting Artistic Success

• Venue
  
  • Quality
  • Size
• Familiarity
  
  • Famous Characters
  • Popular Themes
  • Popular Subject Matter
• Appeal
  
  • Cute
  • Cool
  • Sexiness
• Controversy
• Quality
• Price
• Personality

Over the next several blog posts, I’ll elaborate on this hierarchy. You’ll learn what makes an impact at conventions, and why. As you look over this list, you'll find these factors don't just apply to art at conventions either. The principles work just as well in the online marketplace, and can also be used to analyze the appeal of other artistic works, including fashion, writing, or even music.

In the next installment we’ll focus on the venue, the first and most important factor on whether your art will have an impact with an audience. See you next time!

American Values & a Critique

I present American Values, a critique by Demonlover11 of Deviant Art AKA Nicole, and my response. I indicated Nicole’s comments in red.

As always~ Loving your work! (umm... I'm just a student so I don't know if it's worth much but I kinda got into a critiquing-mode when I saw this and couldn't help myself ^^; )

Look at you, all critique and stuff. BTW, are you out of high school now? Got any big plans for college?

It's kinda dark compared to most of your pieces but I like the underlying meaning and the perspective play; however, there is something about the heaviness of the foreground that dwarfs the background both in an way that I'm almost positive you did to emphasize your point about American values and also in a way that takes away a bit from the loftyness of the perspective and the holier-than-thou and superiority complex that seems to be seeping out of the man.

The foreground is heavy for several reasons, including the character's girth. ;) For one, it's close to the viewer and brightly lit, so the colors are more vibrant, the range between light and dark is more intense, and the details are clearer.

As for the character, personally I don't see him as acting superior. I read him as a man supplicant in his beliefs. He's proud of what this nation represents. That's my reading anyway. At this point, I'm just another observer.

Is that a single tear in his eyes?


While we're on the topic, here are two interesting opposing concept s of American exceptionalism:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34T8zwOzW54&feature=related
(We're good because of the moral actions we have taken historically and continue to take.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf1kTiCWDe4&feature=related
(We're good because God (by this he means a specific Christian god) made this country and us exceptional.)

The heaviness of that corner robs the piece of the effect of the man towering over his conquered lands. It's the dark and bold lines/colors of the man and the trash upon which he stands that interfere with the illusion of height and distance and the absence of middle ground to establish a strong sense of background and foreground...

I'm going to cut you off there for a second because you hit something I was having trouble with. I wanted the trash piles uniform in color and composition. This leads to a sort of sterility across the landscape that's only broken by the play of shadows and the value diminishing effects of atmospheric perspective. While this was true to my artistic intent for this picture, I found the lack of a dramatic break between foreground and background unsatisfying.

I've considered placing shadows over a large segment of the background to make the break between sections cleaner. Maybe I'll try it when I'm cleaning at in the folder on my hard drive, just to see how it looks.

As I was composing this response, Lindsay read over your comments and did a quick color alteration to a jpeg copy of the image. She focused on the foreground elements, and increased the red saturation among other things. Here's how it turned out. I actually like it quite a bit. I think I might have to apply some of these changes to the full scale image.



Also, I'm not sure you "need" a middle ground to establish a strong sense of foreground and background, but it couldn't hurt. :)

maybe continue the floating trash from the bottom right a bit over the rubbish heaps with the same chroma and intensity of the things underfoot to really draw into the perspective and show depth? It also might be that the horizon line is a tad high from his placement- although you do have mountains... so it's difficult to decipher- (Although I am on cold medication so it might be my eyes- and if that's what's wrong I'm so sorry m(_ _)m ).

I'd actually argue the horizon is a little low. Look at how his body is angled and find a point where the lines converge. I haven't done this, but I bet it's slightly higher than the current horizon, like somewhere around his shoulders. Either way, I don't think it's very important. Maybe I'll look back in a month and slap myself for f-ing up the horizon, but right now, it looks okay to me.

Get better soon, and thank you for the thoughtful critique.