Last Wednesday morning, bright and early, I set off on a 2-day road trip to Kansas City for Spectrum Fantastic Art Live! I wasn't alone but caravaned with a few buddies and fantastic artists. We packed a van full of art and headed out, sure to make mutual enemies of each other by the end! And I'm posting this from the road, somewhere just outside of Kansas City on the way home, packed even tighter.
The crew consisted of Scott Murphy, The Greg Manchess, and Steven Belledin. Yes, Greg deserves a capital-T The before his name. And then there was myself.
Fast food was eaten, music listened to, art discussed, and when it was over the party began in MO. This was my first time with a full 10x10' booth. It ended up being an order of magnitude more complicated than half that, which is about what I usually put up at shows like IluXCon or GenCon, and certainly much more than an artist alley situation like San Diego or New York. It turns out that as you double in size, the prep and total costs double, as well. I hadn't anticipated this, when I signed on, but now I know.
Before
After. Simple!
A tip for next year, presuming this happens again: without any gaming happening (this was an art related show, after all), we estimated that Spectrum Live featured the largest number of Magic: the Gathering artists ever assembled under one roof. Someone said the number was over 50. Had that been well-advertised to the Magic community, it would have been signing central for the entire center of the country. There were even a number of artists present unofficially.
It was a great weekend, and I enjoyed meeting those of you who could make it!
It's roughly 20 hours back to New York. On the way out we stopped in Columbus OH and had dinner with Steve Prescott who had to back out very last-minute. Our ride home featured Arkady Roytman in lieu of The Greg. It's all a lot of time away from the studio, but is also good fun and amazingly, a chance for me to relax a bit. Weird how it takes a road trip to relax. Well, apart from blogging from the road. So, I'll wrap this up and get to relaxing now.
