Month: November 2019

Bonjour !

I hope you are good this is the last days of November and I’m really itching to decorate the tree. But before that I have a big event next week and I must get ready for my first convention in almost 10 years!

The venue is a medium small convention in a small town an our away from where I live and I will be sharing the booth with Mefisheye. The convention will be over the weekend and we are allowed to come the Friday afternoon to install the stand. And it’s time to get ready for this convention!

Preparing products!

Since we will be tabling, we do have to have products to sell during the convention. This venue only allow products under 20€ to be sold for the kind of stand we picked. It means that we will have to prepare cheap art products like :

• Prints
• Stickers
• Handmade sketchbooks
• Linocut prints
• Enamel pins
• Original artworks

I had a few more ideas but since I’m still not 100% sure of what will come out of this (I’m talking about some print on fabric experiments that I am not sure will come out great).

Preparing prints

This require first illustrations, that I did during Inktober for the most part. And I had planned on printing them at home, since I have a very nice Canon printer that does a really nice quality of print. I had a few difficulties with the paper I picked because it turned out the quality paper I had chosen gave print of very bad quality. I just changed it, it’s ok, it can happen.

When creating products you are expected a few loss.

Printing and cutting stickers.

Stickers are my little pleasure, I love to stick them on my sketchbooks. So if I can share the love I will!

For these ones as well I used my printer on vinyl paper. The hard part was the cutting as it is all homemade but it is part of these little repetitive tasks that makes creating products so satisfying.

For the designs, in my Etsy shop I already have 2 types of designs available so I didn’t have to create much for the convention. I just created one new design with a geek theme since the convention organisation explicitly asked to have geek themed artworks to sell. And you know me I don’t have many of those…

Making handmade sketchbook

Creating little sketchbooks to sell is kind of an experiment but also kind of a little pleasure as well for me? I love sketchbooks and I love making it myself, picking the paper, designing the cover and I actually already made a bit of experimentation a while ago. So I just made a few to test the market.

Getting linocut prints ready for the convention

Linocut prints is also kind of an experiments, firstly because my linocut prints are very non geek related and maybe it won’t fit with the public there. But also because as with every item here I am trying to find out if there is a market for it in this kind of convention. Creating these was very easy since I had all my linocut prints already!

When I did my travel series two years ago I actually never went to the point of selling any print. So let’s see how it goes.

Packaging enamel pin for the convention

The Kickstarter is now ended, and as I told you in my post about the Kickstarter success, I received my first design of enamel pins. After sending the polls to my backers to know what pins they would like I still have a few pins that I can sell.

Some are for my etsy shop customers because I know the pins has had a lot of success there. I just want to packaged it differently for it to be more attractive to event shoppers. I will package the enamel pin in opaque tissue paper for the backers but for people window shopping like on a convention, I thought it would be nicer to put the enamel pins in clear bags.

It fit quite well that I have leftover compostable clear bags from my sticker packaging. So that’ how it turned out:

Selling original artworks at a convention

This one I’m kinda torn, as I told you the maximum price allowed for me is 20€ and there isn’t many original that fit in that price range. I managed to do tiny watercolors that fit that price. I will be selling the original art that I made into stickers.

To have the original artworks ready for the convention, I bought some frames in a local garage sale. It’s a lot cheaper than brand new frames and often there is new or close to new frames. So it’s a really good way to make everyone happy.

It’s really nice to see these little watercolor framed.

Presenting your products on the table.

Now that you have all your products, you have to present everything on a table. This I will have to do a test before the big day. I am planning on doing it this weekend so there isn’t much I can say about it now, but I’ll be sure to talk about it when I can with some pictures as well!

During this convention I want to test the market, see how my artworks are received and what kind of products has the most success. I can understand that testing the market and starting convention is hard. Especially because you don’t know what will sell and it is one of the reason why I have prepared such a wide range of products.

I will be very glad to share my experience with you in the future and in another article!

The convention is the BGF Winter and I will be there (pour toi français qui ne lit certainement pas cet article!) :

Thank you so much for reading this long post!

Bonjour!

Did you know? The Kickstarter to create my enamel pins was a real success! I was funded and the pins are now coming to life. I want now to take you with me into the creation process of an hard enamel pin.

Getting your idea for the pin.

This is I guess the first step to think about, what to make as a pin? For my case I can’t really remember how the cat mask idea came about. I think it was a mix of the japanese mask stickers set I had just made and also the fact cats are just adorable.

I first sketched my ideas but also started talking about it around me.

I think at that time I wasn’t really sure I wanted to do a Kickstarter but when you do a product you have to talk about it and I like sharing the process. Like I am doing now!

Creating the enamel pins design for manufacturing.

Manufacturing a design into pins require various constraints. You have to create a vector file, decide on the colors, mind the gap between each lines to allow the enamel to be poured.

Deciding ont he colors was the easy part. Once the design picked I just cleaned it up and added some colors to have an idea of how it could look like. I even did a few propositions and asked my followers what colors they liked best.

Once the design is sure and settled I put the design in to vectors. I used Adobe Illustrator to do so as it is the software I am the most confortable with. Manufacturer only take vectors files as it is easier for them to cut the design into parts to create the product.

I also need to say that I knew nothing on enamel pins but the internet being the awesome place it is, I found a lot of advice and guidelines on how to make enamel pins. A special thank you to The pink samurai and Pin Lord both offer very clear and simple help to create your own enamel pins.

There ressources helped me get my file ready to send to the manufacturer. At that time I had already started my Kickstarter. But since pin production took a lot of time and I had enough fund for 1 pin I send it to production ahead of time. I was also curious of how the production would go and if the pin would turn out great.

Finding a good pins manufacturer.

Finding a manufacturer was easy, there is so much manufacturer on Alibaba and when you start talking about enamel pins on Instagram or Kickstarter they just send you direct messages to propose their services. But I was not confident to trust the creation of my enamel pins to some random manufacturer.

It was my first pin after all. You want some trust!

Luckily there is a place to find a good manufacturer (didn’t I told you the internet was a great place?) There is a Facebook group of pin creators that give advice and helps each other with all the manufacturing issues and success. I found a well graded manufacturer there and started the collaboration.

The production of enamel pins.

Honestly there isn’t much you can do at this step aside from waiting for the updates, or asking for updates on the production. For my pins it took around a month shipping included. In the end it was quite fast.

In the meantime the Kickstarter got funded, I got to celebrate a little and a few days later here they were:

I am very glad about the result, they are all of very good quality and so far I haven’t seen any defect in any of them. It could happen sometimes but I guess I got lucky and picked a good manufacturer?

Enjoy!

I dearly enjoyed creating enamel pins. I love having my design coming to life in a physical form. How better than creating a collectible!

Now that the Kickstarter is funded I will go on and ask for the production of the second design. And I’m quite sure I’m not going to stop here! So let’s see go creating new enamel pins designs!

I hope you enjoyed this little experience, there is still a few pins left on my Etsy shop. You can pre-order it from here. You can also check out more details from my video here:

See you soon!

Bonjour! I love to do challenges, It pushes you and prouves that you can do it. You are able to do things fast, and above all, have fun.

This challenge is all about fun and not much seriousness.

The goal of the 25 hours of comic challenge is so hard to complete that no one really try to have the best art in the comic or the best story but just to have a comic made in the end.

The challenge is organised by the same crazy french people that does the 23 hours of comic challenge. An even crazier challenge since you have to do 24 pages in 23 hours. You can find the official website of the 25 hours of comic challenge here. I’ve already taken part in the 23h of comic twice so I was really excited to do this one as well. Check out my comics for the 23H of comic in my short comic series here.

The event of the challenge took place the 26th and the 27th of October.

Being really tired already by Inktober and the overall change of season, I decided this time to have a partner to do the challenge. This way the work shall be divided in two and it should be easier.

My partner in crime for this challenge was Mefisheye.

For the event we joined a few artist and comic enthusiasts from Bordeaux.

The challenge starting the Saturday 1pm to the Sunday 1pm we had to be in a space that could take us in all night. And a nice café let us use a room for the night.

The collaboration went great with Mefisheye, it was our first time doing such a project together and we had great fun. The story we made is absolutely nuts but we love it.

We started slowly on writing the story and the storyboard.

The story came out of a joke and in the end it’s what we choose. The story is about a duck called Godwin that can travel through time and wants to destroy all of Hitler’s ancestors.

After the storyboard we split the work for the sketching of the page. To keep a consistant look we decided that the person that was doing the sketch of a page would be doing ink of the other’s person sketch.

Since we were two we only had to sketch 7 or 8 pages each, which means that around 8 pm we were ready to do the cleaning/inking step. We picked the dip pen and indian ink to clean the sketches. We used a light table to help us transfer the drawings.

Actually we really felt like the challenge was too easy in some way.

Maybe it was because we were used to such a dreadful challenge as 24 pages in 23 hours. But we kinda made a mistake here as well. We were supposed to add colors with watercolor above that inked line. But we discovered the ink we used wasn’t waterproof. Such sadness.

We had to give up on that dream and in fact it really shortened our work. We uploaded the comic to the 25 hours of comic website, got our medal, and went home.

Well it’s ok, I was quite tired so I was happy to go home… at 4am … it’s still night and not the day after…

You can now read the result here or read it here in french.

I hope you enjoyed this little challenge and the crazy result that we got. So much things could have been better. But it’s the difficulty of that challenge.

Tell me what you think of the comic in the comments, and would you be ready for such a challenge?