Above is the completed booth. It wasn't all on the floor like I expected so that was good. I had a great first day and got to meet a lot of familiar bloggers like:
Carol EldridgeTara ReedCindy Ann GanadenLiz Goulet DuboisLaura FryMary Beth CryanPlus several others that I can't think of right now (sorry guys - my brains pretty much mush right now), but hopefully I will later.
I made a few good contacts and one really great one about 15 minutes before the show closed. I've heard that tomorrow (Monday) will have the most people and Tuesday's crowd will start to dwindle as the day goes, but it could only take one good contact to make the show successful and so far I have several!
I'll try and blog again tomorrow night!
I'm here! After months and months of working on things for Surtex, it's finally here and I'm ready for it! Today was the set-up day and it was pretty rough. There was no air conditioning on, my booth was by the huge open dock doors and with all the humidity and heat, my tape wasn't sticking to the walls and my things kept peel and pop off. So, we went and bought scotch tape and that was working but only a little, so I'm heading back bright and early in the morning to see all my work on the floor and tacking everything up with command poster strips (I boughts all they had at the CVS by our hotel). Hopefully with the air on tomorrow everything will stay stuck. I'll try and post an image of the complete booth set up tomorrow.
I finally got to "meet" my fellow
Illustration For Kids member
Jannie Ho. We didn't get to talk long but am sure we'll make up for it in the next few days. My booth is next to
Monica Lee,
Barbara Johansen Newman,
Caleb Gray (the only exhibiting artist, I think, who is from my neck of the woods), and
Nancy Woolf (who's work is super cute!).
After set-up we walked back to the hotel (our hotel is in a perfect location!) and then headed out to eat at the Bread Factory and then to Time Square. Since I've never been to New York, the crowds and sights were pretty insane. I'm already tired of all the honking :)
Here's my tree display from yesterday's
ornaments. All my painting & gluing is done so tonight I get a manicure and I'll be set!
Quick iphone picture of what I'm working on right now. A couple of ornament mock-ups from my designs.
I leave for Surtex next Thursday and I'm getting everything together and hope to be done with it all at the end of this week. Above is my little promo giveaway. It has my bio card, samples cards, business cards and some will contain access to my private gallery. Today I'll be gluing everything on study boards and tomorrow will consist of cutting and mounting. I still have a lot to do, but the stress of it ll is gone. It feels great!
Surtex is officially one month away and I still have a ways to go, but I;m feeling really good about my progress so far. I figured out my booth layout and what all I will show (the biggest stressor for me). I used my skills from my environmental design class in college to work up a to scale elevation of the booth:
The green areas are what I already have printed out, the pink areas are what I still need to print out, the blue areas are signage and the orange areas are things I need to mock-up (I'm still working on my last panel though). I spent Tuesday and Thursday this week printing. I am using someone's large format printer by paying them per square foot. I like this better than sending it out somewhere and hoping it looks good when it's all done. This way I can check progress as I go. Luckily I haven't had any issues. I've cut everything out and will later mount it all on boards:
This week I also worked on some postcards for Surtex. I decided not to use the USPS postcards like i normally do because I'll be writing small notes on some of the mailers and I couldn't do that with the others. One is a mailer I plan to get out next week (we went through names yesterday and have about 220 people to send to), a bio postcard to hand out as giveaways and I had extras printed to include in any samples we mail, and
thank you postcards (for Surtex and later). For the design I went with a design I originally went with
last year:
I still have to print my other giveaway goodies, so hopefully I'll get to all that next week. Other things on the to-do list:
- Get everything printed and assembled for my press kit (everything is written, just need to print it all out)
- Mock up several physical products to show
- Mock up products to put in design book - I think I'll get my designer to work on those next week
- Start packing my suitcase of of things I'll need for the booth (scissors, stapler, tape, etc.) - just filling it up as I go so I won't have to get it all together at once
- Chart out our road trip via Garmin
- Download audiobooks for the trip
- Shop for clothes and comfortable shoes
Now I'm off to spend the day preparing for the
Woog's 5th birthday party tomorrow!!
From my last
Surtex update I really only got #1 done: My
business cards. I did get a lot of other "thinking" things done though. I really had to decide on why I felt like I was feeling so nervous and overwhelmed. After having a planning meeting with my licensing manager and lunch with my husband, I decided that I needed to focus more on the art itself rather than planning for the show and getting bogged down with how it will all look, my own self consciousness of selling myself face-to-face, so in order for me to stay on track and to accomplish what I want to accomplish art-wise, I've decided to hire a part time designer to pass some work off to. She starts tomorrow and I really hope we fit together well. I'm excited to see how much more work I'll have ready to show come May.
I also got some relief when the Surtex guys finally posted their set-up manual. Exhibiting at Surtex became more real and manageable after reading everything from how to get all my materials into my booth, to working on press kits. It's not so overwhelming now and I'm really getting excited about it. I'm sure everyone else in the world knew this but me, but I found out that I had to go through an underwater tunnel to get to Manhattan. I could have done without knowing that until I actually went through it and it was too late to turn back (yes, I am a bit of a weenie). I know it's no big deal and I'll close my eyes when we go through it, but I will literally freak out if I see water pouring out inside the tunnel. My husband told me not to go back and watch
Daylight before I go. If anyone if familiar with these tunnels, please do not tell me anymore about them!! I don't want to dwell on it until May :)
Last Monday I did do a little booth research by going to a trade show here in Nashville. The subject matter wasn't very interesting to me but I wanted to see how people had their booths set-up, their graphics, and how they were able to get the most out of their spaces. There were only a few booths that really stood out. This one was actually stretched fabric squares on a grid (done by one of those
exhibit making places). I liked the dimension it had but it didn't take up a lot of footprint space:
And I saw another that I really liked. Simple but a way to show off several images and it worked great for istockphoto.com:
I also signed up for
twitter this week since one of the things I wanted to do was give updates from my Surtex booth. You can follow me
here. If you're not on it, it's addictive.
Kathy just wrote a great post on it.
To get me back on track with working on all the ideas in my sketchbook, I'm going to get back on track with my
daily creative warmups. Hopefully each day I'll come up with a new line to license.
So...on my immediate to-do list this week:
1) Use my Creative Warmup time everyday to flush out sketchbook ideas
2) picked up from last week -- Start printing out my pages for my portfolio (which I will have set up for buyers to flip through at my booth) print out 5-10 pages a week. I kind of have everything in layers on one photoshop file so I need to get them all separated first - UGH!
4) picked up from last week -- Start designing a mailer to send out, inviting people to my booth. We have about 325 companies on our list and we are in the process of getting contact info from their buyers.
5) this will be on the list weekly - Keep researching artists that have been at past shows to see what did well for them or how they designed their booth
One thing I really love about licensing is you can draw one thing way back when, and use it for something, use it for something else, and then take it use it for something else. The first image is a tag I put on the back of the baby gifts I make, I then later took it and put it in my doodle+daddies™ collection and then reworked it for a shower invite.
I've been doing more
Surtex planning and feel a little more confident and in control of it now. I'm deciding if I want to spend any extra money on on-site marketing now. I'll be blogging and update on the planning process in a few days. Oh, and I'm on
twitter now. One of the things I'm going to do during Surtex it twitter during it to give everyone first hand accounts on the show. If you're on twitter,
follow me!
