Marty’s dad called me from Youngstown this morning, while Marty was away from his phone:
“I was driving down the freeway today,” he said to me, “and I saw a Youngstown Crab Company billboard. And right up there is one of the crabs Marty drew, bigger than life.”
He’s going to try to send us pictures, and we’ll take a few if it’s still up when we’re in Youngstown at the end of April. If you see it, will you take a picture? Marty is just gonna bust.
Holy hell, what a weekend! Megan and I went to Aggiecon in College Station this weekend, and we had an amazing time. I entered pieces into the art show (several of which were sold!). I won the Iron Artist competition (through sheer force of cheesecake and pandering). I met a lot of cool people from all walks of sci-fi/fantasy/gaming/anime/cosplay geekery. Thanks to everyone who stopped to talk to me, take a look through my sketchbook, and especially to all of you Aggieconners who have stopped here at my site to take a look around! (I seeeee you!) If this is your first time here, please leave me a comment and tell me what you think of everything. I love feedback. (^_^)
The second dose of awesomeness hit me when I got home and finally caught up on e-mails. Lo and behold, my Fundable Project finally reached its goal! You know what that means, don’t you? Now I get to start on the drawing! I’m still waiting on a few people to get me their words to include in the picture. I can’t start without them, so I’ll have to start tracking those down! I can’t wait to begin work on this thing! So, thank you to everyone who pledged donations and made this project possible. I’m gonna work hard to make it all worth it! (O_~) I’ll keep you updated, and I’ll let you know when the next opportunity arises to make me your art bitch.
Reporting again for blog-posting duty! Marty and Angel are still completely crashed but for some not completely surprising reason I’m awake. So I am your liaison into Martydom for the moment. ;}
Marty filled an empty slot in the Iron Artist competition yesterday. I believe its a guest artist thing usually, but there was a space open and he was interested, so he went. This is exciting because at our last Aggiecon (two years ago) we had a freakin’ blast at Iron Artist. There was this awesome dude who painted Chuck Norris fighting ninjas with snakes on a plane with puff paints. And it was so much fun, we were way looking forward to it this year — we just didn’t know we’d have a contender with us!
The medium (which, if you’re not familiar with Iron Artist, is announced with the subject matter at the very last possible moment) was colored sidewalk chalk on black foam-core. I don’t know the names of all the artists who were there, but I recognized Carl Lundgren and one fellow identified himself as Cat. All of them were really amiable and fun to watch. Carl Lundgren’s piece was actually beautiful, considering that they had an hour and a heckling audience. (Carl was the Guest Artist at Aggiecon this year, and his work is just plain gorgeous across the board.) The very blurry picture I took is here, but it will give you an idea. It was sort of painted like fine art and it was awesome.
In any case, the theme material was a pimped out penguin, and the audience was encouraged to be bastards. I admit that it wasn’t quite as entertaining as last year (it did seem less well-organized) but it was pretty damn funny. Marty’s final piece is here on Flickr — and wouldn’t you know it, he won. Super awesome, huh??
The final pieces all went into the auction for Charity (which, if my information is correct, is Scotty’s House) so we’ll get to find out today if it went and what it went for. As you can imagine from the content, the audience was pretty brilliantly amused by Marty’s T&A sketching savvy. Let’s do this again next year, dude. This was awesome.
If you want to watch the whole process of drawings being done over the course of the competition, start here and look through. I took a picture every few minutes (though mostly of Marty’s).
Now we’ll check out of our hotel and head over to con for a few more hours before starting the drive home (and getting Todd back to the airport). Pretty awesome weekend, if you ask me. Dude.
We’ll explain later. Promise.
Megan M., reporting for blog posting duty!
Marty and Angel and Todd and I arrived safe in College Station yesterday afternoon and checked into our respective hotels. We carted Marty off to the art show and set up, but not without accidently parking way too far away. (Ha!) The highlight of our evening was finding out (a bit too late) that artwork needed to be effectively G-rated (just sex, not violence, it’s okay, you can laugh too). This wasn’t on the Aggiecon website due to a string of administrative issues — I felt so bad for those art show folks, scrambling around. But we, uh, censored all the boobies.
No, don’t freak out! It was really weird. It’s nothing permanent — we basically taped carefully over items that were covered in plastic, and taped strips of paper across items that weren’t. So no boobies (or artwork) were actually harmed in the course of our impromptu Aggiecon censorship. Hopefully congoers will still get the gist of the pictures (we made the censors as small as possible) and feel comfortable buying a few pieces anyway. ;}
Then we were exhausted and went to dinner and ate like ravaging carnivores (even me… well, sort of) and went back to our hotels and crashed. And Marty made evil faces, and I took pictures. (Because what better use is there for a camera? For reals.)
If you’re at Aggiecon and you see us, say hi. ^_^