Comic Cons VS. Gallery Shows
Thumbtack vs Framing Mentality
I exhibit in 2 types of shows: casual comic conventions and fancy art gallery shows. There are a lot of them in the spring and here’s an inside scoop on aspects of each kind!
Even though I didn’t exhibit in BICS this year, Blake and I checked it out for fun. We had a wonderful time reconnecting with friends, meeting new ones, and getting cool comics! Now in it’s 4th year, I’m so happy that the show has improved from years past. As a convention organizer myself, I know there are challenges to running a successful event. BICS has come a long way from battling cold & rain outdoors the first 2 years, to the elevator conking out when the show was indoors (but on the 6th floor), plus bad lighting and few customers. I was cautious in January when the call for artists listed 2 different room options: the main Red room, and ones without temperature control for a lower price (at least they warned people!). Luckily, even with our crazy weather fluctuations of almost 80 degrees last Friday and a low of 34 degrees last night, BICS happened to fall upon beautiful spring weather in the 60s, and thankfully the artists in the side rooms of Blue & Yellow were comfortable and neither freezing nor boiling. Most exhibitors were in good spirits! It’s truly inspiring to see the positivity in the comics community at BICS. Artists have different measures of success:
Sales
Growing your following (mailing list, social media followers)
Networking
I hate the term “exposure”. but yes, exposure
When I exhibit at comic cons, all of these are important, but the main one for me is sales - can I make my table fee back with some profit? Even if you don’t do well in sales, you can ALWAYS focus on the other 3, and that can keep your spirits up.
The next comic con that I’ll be in is Free Comic Book Day! This is a nation-wide event where comic stores offer a selection of comics for free, and often have creators like myself in the store selling our indie comics. This year I’ll be at Everyone Comics in Queens - stop by, get some free and not free comics, and meet artists!
The next fancy art gallery show I’m in is THE TOWER SHOW by Arts Gowanus, which opens THIS THURSDAY at Union Channel! Important note: it’s the same venue as last year (240 3rd Ave.) but has a different entrance on the Union Street side. This is a specially themed show focusing on the beloved water tower, which is an icon of Brooklyn and the logo of Arts Gowanus. Each artist gets a template of an outline of a tower, and creates their own version of it! And now, the reveal:
This is Space Tower 2: Mars Landing! This art reuses assets from AER HEAD 3 when Aer & friends go to Mars. I don’t usually make custom art for a themed show, but if I recombine elements of art I already made, it saves time, is still in my style, and is no big loss if the art doesn’t sell. Since the art sells for more $$$ at a gallery, fewer pieces sell. I’ve been in a growing number of group shows in galleries and my own solo show last year, but I’ve only sold one piece of art at the shows directly, with a few sales afterwards. My main focus for being in gallery shows is exposure, with those other 3 bullet points as a bonus.
I’m so happy with how the print of the Mars Tower came out! This is a high-quality print on watercolor paper from Solas Studio. The colors are so rich! The paper texture really highlights the watercolor feel to my Martian background. For most of my backgrounds for AER HEAD, I paint real watercolors and scan them in, but the comic prints on smooth comic paper. It’s nice to treat my art more lavishly, which is suiting to the price point for a gallery. This premium print cost $40, and all the towers sell for a $200 flat fee (all of which goes to the artists - rare for an art show!).
Talk about lavish - the print even came with gloves! Since having an art studio at TI Studios, I’ve learned how to think of my art more highly and present it better for fancier circumstances. This did not come naturally to me, but seeing how fine artists like painters present their work has really rubbed off on me.
Even something like framing my work was alien to me pre-residency. Why spend money on a frame? Why not just use thumbtacks? For my solo show, Storyboard to Stars, Nicholas the studio manager encouraged me to “elevate the art” (figuratively, but it also turned out to be literal), so I magnets as a hanging mechanism - a technique I’ve seen a few other studio artists like Dean Haspiel use in previous group shows:
When your original art has scribbled notes to yourself on it, it screams thumbtack, right? But I felt like the suspended magnets (they’re connected to screws) was a happy medium between thumbtack and frame. How you hang the art shouldn’t call too much attention to itself, as the art is the real focus. And really, the thumbtacks would’ve looked, well, tacky (is that where the term came from?)
Happy to say that I’ll have 6 framed pieces of AER HEAD art at the Honey Badger Motel Art Gallery! Spanning art from all 3 issues, there’s a mix of original art and high-quality prints. This is a group show that my studio mate Bill Roundy is in as well, and we’ll also have some comics there to sell.
So that’s 3 events in 10 days!!
The Tower Show
Opens Thursday April 23, 7-9p
Union Channel 240 3rd Ave. in Brooklyn (Union St. entrance)
Large group fine art show with over 300 contributing artists
Ink at the Honey Badger Motel Art Gallery
It is not an actual Motel, but used to be
Opens Friday May 1st, 7pm (til… a few hours later?)
145 Sterling Place in Brooklyn
About 10 participating artists
Free Comic Book Day at Everyone Comics
Saturday May 2nd, “all day,” according to a recent IG post lol
41-26 27th St, Long Island City, Queens
All of the comics in the store are not free, but a select few are!
I’ll be at all of these for the opening days and it would be wonderful to see you at any of them! Hope you’ve found this post insightful, and feel free to share by forwarding to a friend or restacking!