The Truth Behind My First Artist Alley Experience
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- Опубликовано: 5 июн 2024
- I finally got into my first Art market / Artist alley! Will i make a profit or will it be a total flop?? I am a full time worker pursuing turning my art into a full time career! Following along as I share my journey at my very first artist alley/art market!
M A T E R I A L S U S E D
Printer- Canon Pixma G620
Cutter- Silhouette Cameo 4
Sticker paper- Lzerking
W E L C O M E T O M Y T E D T A L K!
My Name is Ruby!
I'm 24
Scorpio Queen
Clearly I love to draw
I've been drawing for over 10 years and i'm still improving every day!
I'm addicted to watermelon and i'm a tea fanatic
My biggest goal is to turn my love for drawing into a career and of course create a safe space for my fellow artists!
S O C I A L M E D I A
TikTok:
/ artsylifestudio
Instagram:
/ artsylifestudio
TAG ME SO I CAN SEE YOUR BEAUTIFUL ART WORKS!
C O N T A C T M E
**Business Inquires Only**
rubyporter.yt@gmail.com 
Развлечения
Hi there, I’m a new subscriber to your channel! I’m sure you don’t need a bunch of unsolicited advice, BUT I do own a small candle business that I’ve been running for the last 3 years and one thing I would recommend is having/ making more items so your booth looks fuller. It seems counterintuitive, but people tend to browse more when they have a plethora of options. I even notice that when an item is popular at an event, and I have sold out til only the display or one or two left out, people tend to not even look at it anymore.
No thank you so much!! I actually was thinking the same thing I added extra stickers, sticker sheets, another print, I added keychains, tote bags, cups and a couple enamel pins so I'm glad to hear it will help! I will be uploading my prep for my next 2 cons this upcoming weekend or next few days.
@@RubysArtsyLife Ok that sounds awesome! I’m so excited to watch!
Just found your channel with this video, THANK YOU for giving a realistic experience at a first artist market, I also want to say I really love your art style it's so stinking cute. Plus your booth set up is so consistent with a brand theme it awesome! Looking forward to seeing your journey c:
I am so glad my experience can be helpful for other people! Thank you for your support!
The first time I was helping my grandma with her booths at craft shows I was very slow with putting things up and taking them down, now that I've been doing it for a good 7 years and am much more familiar with her products and display pieces, we can zoom through the set up and take down process! You'll definitely get faster as you keep tabling and get familiar with your displays and how you set your things up!
Having things at eye level is very good, that change really helped your set up! For bigger cons, having things above eye level also helps if there's huge crowds in the artists alley and people can see something over the crowds.
Good luck to you!
Thank you! I changed my booth greatly! I'm hoping it's better
Thank you! I changed my booth quite a bit the set up is faster and the display I think looks much better! I'll be showcasing it in my next video
Thanks for this, I’m hoping to do an artist alley at some point so this is super helpful
I'm glad this could help! I definetly recommend looking out for sales for starting your journey! I'm doing my first official artist alley in a few weeks so hopefully it goes well!
That room looks amazing! 🎉 Love seeing the progress!
Thank you!
Dope art work and I'm happy that your first table was a good experience for you. I am going to check out your work and you definitely got a follow from me. Can't wait to see more. and love to see a fellow creator out there doing their thing.
So exited to see you go on this journey! A close friend of mine also vends at cons and I’m always so amazed at how much effort yall put into it. It’s really inspiring:)
Thank you! I'm super excited for my next one in may!
Your setup is so cute!, I love the yellow! I am also a Washington based full time worker/part time artist/part time odd jobber, so I am definitely subscribing. Glad to see you made a little profit on your sales, I hope you do even better at your next shows.
Thank you!! It's so hard out here everything is so expensive
I really love your table design. The yellow really stands out and suits your designs
Thank you!
Just stumbled onto your video! Excited to see your booth at Animate Columbus, that'll be my first artist alley!
Oh yay!! Hopefully I get to see you! I'm excited to visit Ohio for the first time
@@RubysArtsyLife Same here!
very cute set up!
Thank you!!
Wonderful video! Good luck with your next con! ^_^
Thank you!
That looked like it would be a small event, so I would call it a success :D Good job!
Yes it was! Anime impulse will be much bigger so I'm hoping I do really well
Your setup is cute! How are those cubes btw? Are they easy to set up? I'm surprised you got all of that built in an hour, I have these grids that don't have the panels, and it took me longer to build like half of what you have lol. I might have to get those ones if they're easy!
Also, may I ask where you get your sign and table runner made?
Thank you! I really love the cubes! I wanna get more of them because I want to incorporate more art for the display! They are sturdy and planning in advance helps a lot with the speed of the set up.
Bannerbuzz is where I got both my table runner and my vinyl banner.
Hey, seriously, that's great. :) And no, it's not reasonable to insist on counting *all* costs for your first time. Your displays and stuff are capital investment, and will (hopefully!) last you for a long time. Those costs should be... I think the word is amortized? over however many shows you do through the lifetime of the display items, until they break down or get grungy and you replace them.
Not so great -- I'm assuming you live in/near Tacoma [waves from Seattle] so it was just a matter of piling everything in your car and driving over to the venue. For events farther out, the cost of driving/flying, shipping stuff (if you're not driving), hotel rooms and food do, unfortunately, count as business expenses. Best of luck with those bigger, farther away shows!
I used to work SF conventions when I was young and healthy :/ and back in the 80s, the artist alley tables were *free.* At least down in the Bay Area where I'm from. The idea was that artist alley was for artists to sit and do at-the-con sketches for however much ($20 each was common) so there was no display or anything. Tables were first-come-first-grabbed, so you had to be there right when things opened up to get one, and you got half a table; hopefully you were sharing with someone you got along with. But it was just sketches -- people would have you draw them in their costumes, or draw their favorite character, or whatever. It was a service the con did for the artists, and it helped the con too because the attendees enjoyed it.
If you wanted to sell prints or other merch, you had to get a table in the dealers room, which IIRC was around $40-50 at the time for a regional con, something the size of Norwescon up here, or BayCon down in the Bay Area. By the late '80s, BayCon raised its dealer room table fees to $100 each. There was a lot of screaming, but we still got applications for three or four times as many tables as we had room for in the dealers room, so...? :/ A table came with a con membership, although if you had helpers you had to buy theirs seperately. But the idea was that the dealers room gave you the right to sell merch, plus the room was locked up at night, so you didn't have to pack everything up in the evening and set up again every morning.
Nowadays, the "artists alley" tables at SF cons seem to be all people selling merch, which would've made the dealers scream bloody murder back in my day -- they were paying for their tables and the artists got theirs for free, they were both selling stuff, WTF? Although maybe that's why artists alley tables charge now...? Dunno. It's weird, though, and I miss being able to watch artists actually arting.
I remember my first convention, back in '80. An artist named Steve Leialoha had a table with a big stack of prints, 11x17 I think, of this very cool dragon he'd drawn and had printed up on decent-ish paper (not watercolor paper, but not just printer paper), and a watercolor set. If I'm recalling his prices correctly, you could buy just a print for like $10. For... I think it was $25 he'd paint it for you, two colors, you pick. For... I think $40, he'd paint it in three colors, you pick. I was in high school and had very little money, but I stood there for like an hour just watching him paint. :)
Anyway, congrats on making some money on your first show, and best of luck on shows to come!
That's amazing to hear about how artist alley was back then! Being able to share your talent and draw in person must have been so stressful! But people probabaly had a lot more patience back then. Thank you for sharing this it's honestly incredible!
What type of art did you draw/paint when you did artist alley?
@@RubysArtsyLife I've never done it, actually. I was gofer/staff/dept.head/chair/BOD for about twenty years, did some writing, only got into doing art recently. At this point, my art still isn't good enough for me to even want to give it to anyone, much less try to sell it. [wry smile] I'm a hobby artist, and don't practice as much as I could. And I'm 60 and have health issues; I was at Norwescon a few weeks back, and spent two of the days I was there in my hotel room, alternately reading and napping and hoping things would settle down soon. My health isn't up to committing to staffing a table three or four days in a row, unfortunately. I enjoy seeing how the younger folks are doing, though, and rooting for you all. :)
About the stress, keep in mind that in the '80s and '90s, digital art really wasn't a thing. If you were an artist, you spent all your time drawing or painting anyway, and most of the artists seemed to be having a good time.
Oh, another piece of antiquity -- you know how online artists do sketchbook tours on video now? They used to do those in person. :D Every con I went to had at least one evening party by/for artists -- not as an official event, but some artist would just get a room on the party floor and leave their door open, and the room would be full of artists. All the serious (whether pro or amateur) artists would bring one or maybe two sketchbooks to share, and most of the party activity was going through or drawing in each other's sketchbooks. There were two kinds -- one that the artist themself drew in, and one that others drew in. The second kind was sort of like a high school yearbook, where you swap yearbooks and each write something in the other person's book?
That kind of sketchbook was either being drawn in if two artists had swapped sketchbooks, or an artist might be sitting there with a bunch of people around them, going through it. "Yeah, I met up with Kelly Freas at WorldCon and he drew this, and Lela Dowling did this for me at Sacramento Westercon, and this one's by Steve Gallacci...." Artists got social brownie points for the status of the people who'd drawn in their book, heh. If you had some big name artists, everyone was impressed. If it was just your friends that nobody'd heard of, eh, not bad, but not special.
The other kind of book was just for showing off. Same sort of thing, artist sitting there with people around them and looking over their shoulder, going through their sketchbook. "I did these at the zoo, looking for ideas for aliens, and this spread was trying to work out a new character that evolved into early [name drop of some published comic character], and here I was just messing around with anatomy, this is my girlfriend, this is six pages of gesture drawings so let's skip that, oh this was me messing around with the space ship for [another published comic], you can see how the hull design changed...." Those were really interesting too. I wandered in and hung around the artist party sometimes, despite not being any kind of artist at the time, and nobody really cared. I don't know whether there are still artist parties at cons; I haven't really hit a party floor at a con in like, a decade? Two? [wry smile] They were very cool, though, and in the days when the internet was just CompuServe and GEnie and The Well (which all charged by the hour), plus newsgroups if you had access, it was a major point of connection and networking for artists.
Hi!! I’m so happy for you!! This is exciting. What do you use for your digital art? ❤
I use my iPad Pro the 1st gen, procreate, and since I'm still new to digital art I will sometimes draw my sketch on paper then take a photo and trace it in procreate. I feel my traditional art has more life in it then digital.
I love your booth colors and setup! I'm vending at Galaxycon San Jose too. Hope it goes well for you.
Thank you!
congrats on your first artist alley!! those yellow cubes are beautiful, do you mind sharing the link to get them? I can't find them anywhere
Thank you! I'll be uploading anime impulse tonight! And here is the link to the website and brand
www.songmics.com/collections/cube-storage
Congrats on the profit at your first con!! Quick question- where did you get your panels on your display? I’ve been going crazy silly trying to find them :’)
Mine are I believe called songbird I bought them on Amazon. They are called cube storage organization. They come in different colors
@@RubysArtsyLife thank you!!!
I’m curious, you’re going to several events out of state (presumably), do you get a sales tax permit for every state you go to sell in before you go to the event? Your setup was so cute and this was helpful!!
It depends on the state. Some states only do your UBI number but for Texas I had to get a business license there for the San Japan San Antonio convention
You always got to invest when you first start out❤
Yeah I realized I'd have to do that. I just wish stuff wasn't so expensive! 🥲
Hi! We sent you an email! Looking forward to hearing from you! 💜🥰
Oh my gosh I can't believe I missed this market, I live so close to tacoma! All your stuff turned out so good tho
Thank you! I know it was small not well advertised but anime impulse will be much bigger I hope
If you want to earn the big bucks you have to drink the coolaid and draw for the furries. They spend big money.
I don't know if I'm ready to sell my soul yet
@@RubysArtsyLifeyou only live once so I say prepare yourself mentaly and go for it.