Boomslank at the con, part deux!
Yes folks it's that time again. Boomslank just got back from another con! This time around, it was Animazement in beautiful Raleigh NC, USA (our home base by the way). This con has a special place in our hearts. Why, you ask? Well our artist got his first bit of recognition in the art gallery/auction room, winning 1st place in the 2D art contest. We knew we had to go this year, we just had to. We had learned a lot in our first con (IchibanCon), and we were not going unprepared this time around. We planned weeks in advance. First of all, we were not able to get in as sponsors like we did at IchibanCon, as a result we did not get as large a space. This meant we had to optimize what we had.Check out the pictures below of our rocking table setup.
Here's the table before.....
......and after. Pretty nice if I do say so.
Just like Ichiban, we had some pretty sweet neighbors. It's very good for those times when things slow down, and you can just turn around and shoot the breeze with a fellow artist. The few free minutes I got, I took a stroll around the alley, and my goodness, the raw talent on display. The kind of stuff you see there should be hanging on museum walls. I will give a special shout out to one of our immediate neighbors Danielle of Danielle Sylvan Illustrations (http://daniellesylvan.com/). She was supper nice and super skilled. She's a beautiful young woman with a bright future ahead of her, and you should all check out her gallery online or her Deviant Art page (I got the Hunger Games print :D).
How does Animazement differ from IchibanCon? Simple. It's about 5 times as big. Maybe even more. Before this weekend, I have attended it twice as an individual, and even then it seemed overwhelming. So you can imagine just how much more so it was when you actually have to work. So many things we had planned to do kinda went out the window because of how busy we were. Like I said several times over the weekend, it was a good problem to have :). The strangest thing was i seemed to get even less sleep for this con than for the last, even though it was right in our backyard. I'm not so sure what it was. Maybe because we had so much more stuff to lug around this time around, so we came home every night exhausted to the brink. Who knows?
Unlike IchibanCon, Animazement was unique in that it had actual Japanese celebrity guests. I had tried to contact the con-ops to see if we could have the same arrangement we had at Ichiban, where the guests could come by our table and pick up free gifts. Unfortunately I never got a response, which wasn't great. I went to the con resolved to not being able to recreate the same experience we had with Lisa Ortiz and Vic Mignogna at Ichiban. But wait!!!! Who should come by our table around the end of day 2 other than manga Artist Mayu Shinjo (Sensual Phrase, Ai Ore, and others) and her entourage? It was a lucky thing that our artist had stepped away and missed her, because he may not have been able to control himself. She was super impressed with all our work, especially the Long Distance poster, and the Sound Flow t-shirt. She advised us to send our work to a Japanese publisher! Talk about high praise! We later learned she was a judge for the art contest, and without hesitation, had picked P-Shinobi's Airport on canvas as the winner for 2-D art contest! Check out this picture of her with her brand new t-shirt. I hope she likes it.
It was also super awesome to see people wearing their new shirts around the con. At the moment, we absolutely plan on being at Animazement every year to some capacity. Thank you all for making it such an amazing (or should I say Animazing? That's right I said it) experience. From our artist P-Shinobi, and the rest of our Boomslank team, we love you all, and hope to see you at the next con.
