Sorry for taking so incredibly long to answer this! Tumblr UI is so bad I have no idea when this was sent and got no notification for it, I only found it because I went digging. This was probably sent like two years ago and I’d have no idea lmf. Anyway yeah my store is still closed, unfortunately! I moved interstate to attend animation school and basically didn’t have any spare time to get my store back up and running again. I’m so sorry! It’s probably been so long that I’m sure you’re not too fussed anymore, but if you still wanted to buy a print, I can probably just send one to you as a one-off, haha. I still have all my leftover inventory, I’ve just been too flat out to maintain an online presence.

OH GOSH, hello and hi, I’m so sorry I never saw this ask! I never seem to get notifs of new messages in here, sometimes it takes me a long time to see them. I hope this isn’t too late to be of use to you! (And thank you!)Sharing a stall at Supanova is pretty easy! Usually we have one person handle the sign up (filling in the form, payment, etc) while the other person forwards them their half of the money (rather than sending two different payments to the convention organisers). When you sign up, there’s usually an option to say how many badges you’ll need or how many people will be at the table, etc. You can purchase two tables as well, if you want one table each.

Or, if you’d rather have two tables but do your own paperwork and payments separately, you can both submit forms for tables but request that your tables be put together.

As for on the actual day, we kept our own separate tills and inventory separated. I always take the right side (because I’m half deaf), my friend always takes the left. If you share a table with someone, I HIGHLY recommend this method (keeping your tills and money and merch separate), unless you’re joint collaborators who work together on the same stuff. Otherwise keeping track of who’s earned what becomes too much of a headache.

As for finding someone to table with, I can’t help you with that-- I was invited to table together for the first time by an IRL friend, someone I already knew and trusted. I’m not sure I would opt to table with someone I didn’t already know and trust, but that’s just me!

I hope that helps somewhat!

Sure, no problem! I’ve only been doing this about 18 months myself, but here are some things I’ve picked up:

1. Get a Square reader. No seriously, get one. In this day and age, it’s becoming increasingly rare for people to carry cash on them. MANY people will ask you if you take card because they don’t have cash on them. The Square reader is the cheapest card reader on the market right now by a LONG shot. All you need to operate it is a smartphone.

2. Budget enough time to have all your prints finished NO LATER THAN the Tuesday before the convention. Many cons open on a Friday night now, and you do NOT want to be rushing around like crazy on Friday morning on no sleep, picking up your prints and rushing to the convention hall and setting up while people are already browsing. I’ve done this. It’s not fun. DON’T BE ME.Some printers can do same-day rush jobs, but they’ll often charge you a lot extra for it. So, send your files to the printer no later than Tuesday, and most printers should have them done for you by Wednesday or Thursday without a problem. Then you can sleep easy and be bright eyed and bushy tailed on the weekend!

3. This kind of follows on from the above, but get loads of sleep the night before the convention. I’ve done conventions on no sleep before. It’s really not fun. Resist the temptation to stay up all night drawing last-minute prints. Get organised in advance! Conventions are exhausting, your body will thank you. Being organised, not stressed, getting enough food and sleep are the best way to avoid con crud.

4. Bring snacks and water with you to hide behind your table. Interacting with customers all day long is super exhausting, you’ll want food and drink.

5. On that note, not mandatory but a nice extra is having someone who can watch your table and sell for you if necessary while you’re away from the table so you can go get lunch and go to the toilet. If you do this, make sure all your merch is well organised and labelled so other people can find them easily if they’re selling for you.

6. Get a cashbox from Officeworks or wherever to store your cash in! In general, I find the second-smallest size that they stock there is a good size. The smallest one they sell is (in my experience) too small unless you have fairy-sized hands. I learned this the hard way, and my hands are fairly small. I like to start the day with $100 in my kitty divided up like so: 4 x $10, 6 x $5, 5 x $2, 20 x $1. $100 is a nice round number and easy to subtract from your total at the end of the day to calculate what you made. And in general you will get a LOT of notes, and not very many coins, so it’s always better to start out with around $30 in coins.

Counterpoint -- if you’re selling things at round numbers only, like $10 or $15 etc only, forget what I said about coins and just keep 20s, 10s and 5s.

7. It’s up to you whether or not to print A4s, but generally I’ve found that they don’t sell very well. People tend to either want very large poster size prints, or mini prints, but often not the size in between. These days I print about half as many A4s as I do of A3s and A5s because they just don’t seem to sell well. For my first convention, I printed only ten of each print in each size, and that was definitely enough. Even these days, when I make a new print, I still only get 10 of them on the first print, until it’s proven itself to sell well.

8. That said, it’s sometimes impossible to predict how well a print will do, even if you’re drawing in the popular fandom of the month. So many various factors affect sales that are out of your control. I’ve had a print totally sell out at one convention, and then the next convention I went to a week later, barely sold any of the same print at all. It’s baffling! Try not to stress too much over it.

9. I said this in my last post, but DO NOT get your stuff printed at Officeworks. D O N O T. They are cheap and nasty.

10. Put some thought into how you’re going to set up your table. If you’re going to display your prints flat on the table, bring blu-tac to stick the display copies to the table so people don’t run off with them. (Shocking, I know, but it happens.) You’ll want some velcro-stickers to stick your stuff up on the walls behind you, too. This kind is what I get from Officeworks. They stick to the walls that most Australian cons provide you with VERY nicely. Consider what you’re going to do for signage too, if you’re going to have any at all.

(Pro tip: it doesn’t matter how visibly you display your prices. It doesn’t matter if you have your prices plastered all over your table. People will still ask you how much things cost ten times an hour. I advice that you have a price guide hidden behind your stall in your immediate eyeline so you remember what your prices are without having to pause.)

Also, things displayed vertically catch the eye much better than things on the table that are horizontal. Look, Exhibit A! You can see @shorelle​‘s vertical table display on the right there and mine horizontal, laying flat on the table– her display is MUCH more eye catching! I ended up making myself a similar display for the next convention for only $12 with A3 foamcore and collapsible dishwasher racks from the dollar store. Plus, you can hide your water bottle and cashbox behind it! Score.

11. If you’re going to get business cards printed (and you don’t have to anymore, these days you can just get a QR code and stick it on your table for people to scan if you’re just starting out and can’t afford the expense of cards), DO NOT GO THROUGH OFFICEWORKS. Vistaprint is the best value for money the last time I looked but it could have changed, do your research. You don’t need uberfancy double sided business cards for a convention– single sided will do, save your money. The catch is you need to send your design off to Vistaprint around two weeks in advance of when you need them, because their shipping DOES take some time. If you have less than seven business days until the con, your only option is to go through a traditional print house, and they’ll run you about $100 for 250 business cards. TOO RICH FOR MY BLOOD.

12. This step is optional, but I like to purchase little cellophane sleeves to put a print in when someone buys it, to protect it from harm during the convention! And I slip a little business card in the back, so people who bought a print can look me up online later. People tend to lose business cards when they just put them in their pocket, or forget which artist they took it from and why they cared.

13. Make sure EVERYTHING you need printed is in CMYK mode, not RGB. Prints AND business cards. Printers do not like RGB. If you’re drawing digitally, make sure everything is at least 300 dpi. Anything lower than that will look shitty. Most printers will also require a 3mm bleed margin when you send them your work, so don’t forget to factor this in to your design. If you aren’t familiar with these terms, go do a quick google and teach yourself, because they’re pretty necessary to learn if you want to get stuff printed regularly without giving your printer a massive headache.

14. Put your name on your prints before you send them to the printer. I always forget this one. Always. Don’t be me!!! Sign ‘em!!! People will lose those business cards and forget who you are 12 hours after the con is over. Leave them a way to google search you again later.15. Buy one of those table bag hooks ($2 at the dollar store), and a few large plastic bags. Use as your bin. You would not BELIEVE how much rubbish you will generate behind your table.

16. You don’t have to stick to doing the fandom of the month, I promise. I’ve done prints for decades old fandoms that have sold just fine. Prints with bold colours and strong designs stick out really nicely, and if you can think of any good jokes, prints with humour on them sell really well too. (Shorelle’s Star Wars meme prints sell out EVERY time.)

17. Most importantly, have fun! It’s a convention, enjoy yourself :D!

Try Newcastle Council Printing Services! They’re who I used when I was first starting out. Their quality is pretty decent-- not OH MY GOD THE BEST!! but decent enough for the considerable discount you get, which is why I recommend them for people just starting out. Their pricing is the most affordable for good quality that I’ve ever found, personally, though if anyone has found cheaper please, let me know. (We’re not counting OfficeWorks Garbage here. They’re disqualified.) Postage of the prints from Newcastle is usually $7, but even with the postage price they’re still cheaper than most printers by about 40-50% since they’re a government owned office. HOWEVER. If you go this route, know that the prints can take at least five days in the mail, so don’t plan on doing them two nights before.Next: DO NOT go to OfficeWorks. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES. DO. NOT. Don’t even consider them as an option. OfficeWorks is the cheapest place you’ll find, and that’s for a reason. Their quality is SHIT. Their paper is SHIT, their colours are SHIT, their cutting is SHIT-- you get the picture. I have often gotten samples from OfficeWorks that were so bad I’ve thought I wouldn’t pay people to take them.Third up: If you have a bit more money to burn, and/or you’re on a very tight schedule and a five to seven day turnaround isn’t an option for you, you’re better off emailing regular print shops (AGAIN, NOT OFFICEWORKS) in your local area for a quote instead-- once you know how much you’re going to print. There’s no point in asking for a quote before you know how much you want to print, because most shops will charge different prices per page depending on how much you get printed on them. That is, the more you print in bulk, the cheaper it gets per page. Keep in mind that anything less than 100 pages is a small order for them, and will cost the most. (That’s why I don’t print on demand– I do about three large runs per year and that’s it, to keep costs down.) This is the most expensive option, but will probably produce the best results. Also, if you can pick the prints up in person, you won’t need to pay postage, and you can check them for any defects on the spot before accepting them. (I definitely recommend doing this.)As an aside, if you don’t know about printshop standards like CMYK and print&bleed margins and PDF standards, I recommend you go take thirty minutes out of your day to google and read up on it, and also check with your chosen printshop what THEIR requirements are (some of them differ), because it WILL cost you more money if you don’t. Because see, if you don’t do it, the person in the print shop will have to spend time converting it all for you, and then you’ll get charged for that too. So make sure you have your files all print-ready exactly the way the shop wants them! If you’re not sure and their website doesn’t say, ask them.Lastly, if you have the time when searching for a good print shop near you, the best thing you can do is to ask if they can print a sample for you, so you can see the quality of their work. (Some will do it for free, some will charge a dollar or so, some will refuse to do it because it interrupts their workflow of bigger clients. If the latter, don’t go there anyway, they don’t want your business and tbh you don’t want theirs.) Compare the samples! Write on the back of each one who did which, what paper it was, and if you got any quotes from them, write down the quotes too. Also compare the quality of their customer service (some are lovely, some are snooty if you’re not a big business) and also their turnaround times as well. (Keeping in mind though that turnaround times vary GREATLY depending on the time of year and how busy the shop is that day/week.) Email and compare as many as it takes until you find one that’s right for you!Apologies for how long it took to answer this! I don’t often check my ask box, but I hope this helps.

I wasn’t actually at Armageddon in person, but I had a friend there selling my prints for me! I couldn’t afford to go myself :(. I hope you had a great time at the con, though!

Awwwww thank you!! You’re very sweet. Rest assured there’ll always be other cons :D. I love doing them, so you ain’t seen the last of me yet!!

Ahhhhh, thank you!!! It’s so sweet of you to say that.If you like those, you should follow me on instagram! I often post a couple of life drawings there once a week or so, or random sketches or WIPs that I don’t post on this blog \:D/. Of course I also post the occasional selfie and picture of my cats on there too, so ymmv. In any case, thank you for saying hi >w