But then sometimes what you need most is a 20-second-long animated short about a very small, outrageously cute little spider named Lucas. Lucas the fuzzy wee spooder is the work of animator Joshua Slice. Slice had his young nephew, also named Lucas, provide the voice for his adorable arachnid creation:
(I touched on this in a previous post, but decided it merits elaboration.)
So my #1 piece of advice, for people who are selling fan products (be that fanart, merch, or cosplay), is to diversify your fandoms. The more the better.
This doesn’t mean forcing yourself to do work from every popular movie/show/game, even if you hate it, in some cynical money grab – trust me, it’ll show, if only on your face when you’re trying to interact with people who are legitimately fans of it – but if you liked something, even in passing, and wouldn’t mind doing work from it, then by all means, make a sketch (or do some other small piece, depending on your medium) and toss it in your shop/portfolio. This has multiple benefits:
1) More exposure – A no-brainer. More people will find you, because you’re fishing in multiple ponds. For every new fandom you branch into, you get exponentially more hits, because you’re showing up on the radar every time someone googles “____ fanart” (or in my case, “____ cosplay”). More people seeing your work = more people buying your work.
2) A jumping off point for more work – Having a diverse portfolio dramatically increases the number of inquiries you’ll get for custom work/commissions. People will *absolutely* feel emboldened to request other work in the same fandom (for instance, if you do Overwatch fanart but they want a different character/pairing/etc than what you’re showing), but it’s vanishingly rare for people to approach an artist who does exclusively, say, Marvel comics fanart and ask if they’ll do something from, say, Game of Thrones.
In my case, as a cosplay leatherworker, my entire DC line sprang from one Wonder Woman tiara that I made and released pictures of into the wild, like bait to lure in larger commissions. People saw the tiara and asked for other pieces from the costume (“Can you do her armband? Can you do her boots?”) or from other costumes in the DC movies (“Can you do Aquaman’s armor? Can you do Hippolyta’s crown?”). Likewise, all my Lord of the Rings pieces sprang from one pair of Kili bracers that got people’s attention and encouraged them to inquire about commissioning… everything else. Meanwhile I have never, not once, gotten an inquiry about Game of Thrones commissions, even though a glance over my work with LotR, Dragon Age, and my original Nordic pieces shows that it’s fully in my wheelhouse. The GoT cosplayers just don’t find me, or they assume that I wouldn’t be interested in/capable of GoT work, or it doesn’t occur to them to ask.
(This is why I’ll often cut people a first-time discount if the piece they want to commission is one I’ve been interested in making before, or is in a fandom that I’d like to branch into. It means I can make it (on someone else’s dime), accurately calculate the time/materials cost for future reference, add it to my portfolio, and then get it out of the house. Costume leatherworking can run hundreds of dollars in materials and labor, and the last thing I want is to make an expensive sample piece that winds up never, ever selling and just takes up space in my closet for the rest of time.)
3) Surviving fandom boom and bust cycles – if you’re trying to make your living on fandom merchandise, you are *painfully* at the mercy of whatever’s trending. Fandoms spring up and die down, some faster than others, and having a diverse portfolio lessens the blow when one of your sources of income abruptly dries up.
I lived off LotR and Loki armor for a few years, took a couple years off to get a useless graduate degree, and when I came back my income was practically ZERO, because everyone who wanted to cosplay LotR/Loki already had it, yet that was all I had in my shop. It took several precariously low-income months to regain my momentum, for the lines I’d thrown out into other fandoms to start drawing in new business, and to get myself financially stable again. Since then, I’ve made an active effort to keep an eye out for interesting projects in new fandoms, and it’s served me well.
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Anyway, I hope this was helpful. Good luck to all my fellow con artists out there! :)
Teach your children to appreciate nature and love their bodies and most importantly, to keep an open mind towards things and people they don’t understand.
On Surreal Sunday the deer go shopping. This gift shop at the Horsetooth Inn and RV Park in Fort Collins, CO was recently visited by a small group of deer, including a young doe who strolled right in and began browsing.
“It was hilarious,” Lori told The Dodo. “She was looking at the sunglasses and the chips. I was laughing so hard.”
Eventually Lori was able to lure the doe out of the store, but she returned for a second visit a short while later.
“About 30 minutes later, here comes the deer again with her whole family. They were just looking in the doorway like, ‘Can we come in too?’ I said, No! It was so funny.”
Lori did eventually manage to lure the inquisitive family of deer away from her shop, but not until she took these delightful photos with her phone.
