RAW: Raleigh presents Envision - and Sparky’s day of panic, pandemonium, and pretty amazing people.
Photos by me, my friend Kat, and my friend Anthony. I didn’t get the chance to take many, but professional photos will be out on March 5th and I’ll be sharing those. I also got lots of videos of the fashion show, which I’ll post to my Facebook page.
So this was my first time being a RAW Artist, and also my first time EVER doing an art booth of any kind. You’d think as much as I love Animazement that I would have done one by now, but no. I just didn’t really make any efforts towards it until this pushed me into the pool. Now I know the process!
I started the day out with a celebratory cup of matcha from my own handmade bowl to treat myself before the event. It was tasty. :P
Overall, the night went amazingly well, but I spent most of the day in a state of panic, running further and further behind schedule (although from what I heard, that was most people).
We were supposed to be there to start setting up at 2, and then the photoshoot was from 4:30 to 6:30 (they extended it by quite a bit by the end of the night).
The thing is, more than half of my pieces were still on a FedEx truck at 5 PM.
I should have ordered them two days earlier, but I got sick and didn’t finish the kiteboarding piece in time. Such is life.
I set up everything else on time and pinned up cardboard placeholders for the missing pieces. Luckily, they arrived in time for the show, with just enough time to set them up and still get my photo taken (bless, by that time I was a freaking dumpster fire and all my styling work had melted, so who knows if any of them are decent, lol)
Once the show started, I was chilled out and things ran smoothly. I met so many awesome people with so much talent. Hair and makeup artists, plant artists, crystal jewelers, painters, photographers, musicians, models, fashion designers, you name the craft, they were probably there.
My booth ended up being right up front, next to the runway, so there was a ton of foot traffic and lots of people visited me (lucky!).
Apparently, mine was the only booth with a TV playing a demo reel, so that ended up being an unexpected eye-catcher as well. I was told by several different people that there was nothing else quite like mine in the show. There were so many people fascinated with my work and asking me questions about how digital art works and how the process from 2D to 3D works, and I was thrilled to explain it to them. I love it when people are curious!
I ended up selling quite a few small prints and had a few people interested in purchasing canvas prints. I also got an idea of which pieces resonated with people the most, which was insightful.
The most popular by far was my large digital painting of one of my characters gazing up at a neighboring planet from his space atrium, “Fate of Billions” and one of my Inktober pieces, “Alice”. There were almost no prints of those left by the end of the night, and several of all the others were sold too. I was really surprised by how much interest there was in my work, to be honest. It was a huge confidence boost (and man, I really needed one of those, lol).
I was SO happy to see so many of my friends and family there, too! I couldn’t have done any of this without you guys. And a special thanks to Darius and Caroline for helping me pack up at the end of the night. I didn’t plan for that at all and it was a lifesaver. T_T
