Sourcing cheap printing / Planning for Smash! is hard. It's pretty amazing how much prices fluctuate though... I don't know what kinds of people pay $30 to get a single poster printed. :| Businesses, I guess. Woo, tax writeoffs! Maybe we should start a business just for tax reasons, lol. @_@ I would call it Trainsquare and it would be a collective of comics artists or something. :B

bargainprint Brisbane sounds promising... It looks like it's just one guy and his trusty printer or something though. No website, just a hotmail address and a mobile phone number. Hm... His target market is indie bands, I think. A3 posters for $1 each is hard to pass up though! Might send him an email after I give it some thought. He does postcards too.

Anyway, I was thinking about sticker designs all through DnD yesterday (boring combat intensive session) and punched out a couple of possible stickers! Inked and everything, wow. I know I'll have to offer fanart and obviously our ultimate goal is to draw attention to the pirate comic (whose title keeps changing) but I'd also like to offer other original things. Like a series of Japanese demon/monster stickers or something? I think that would be cute and has selling potential to a large audience.




A tanuki! I'll probably redraw this one if I intend to use the idea when the time comes. Joey likes this better than the next one. He is a sucker for mischevious little kids. Tanukiboy looks too much like Randomly Generated Furry Character #0950-6439 at the moment though. :/ Gotta read up on Japanese mythology to make this work, I think!


I like this one. Sort of circular composition going on there. I would buy it purely for that rockin' umbrella demon though. Ugh, now that I think about it, the umbrella should end in a foot. Another redraw, lolwell. Demonchick there is just some demonchick because people like demonchicks, yes they do. In retrospect, she's probably a nekomata (split-tailed cat demon).

Other ideas include: Kitsune (obviously), fudog (yey!), that demon that is a chick with a mouth in the back of her head (how cool is that, but it wouldn't sell :( ), kappa, tengu (hell yeah), kirin(?), yuki-onna (snow woman), kodama (but not the Ghibli version)... list goes on. Obviously I'm going to have to narrow down the list and pick out the ones that'll have the most mass appeal. I can always build on the series later as the years go by...

Of course, printing oversized stickers (I'm thinking about 10x10cm... :\) is hella expensive. T_T



I'm also planning fanart postcards and buttons for Smash! I'm going to have to check Supanova's fanart guidelines too thought as I'm not sure if I'd be able to reuse the stock there next year...? I guess it'd be okay...

Possible fanarts:
Final Fantasy (VII, VIII, IX, X, XII)
Naruto
Bleach
Fullmetal Alchemist
Death Note
Ouran High School Host Club
Cowboy Bebop
Kingdom Hearts
Zelda

All of those would do well, I suspect. Ugh, so much anime. I'd like to do some Sandman or Batman stuff too but they probably wouldn't sell as well and I think DC is somewhat more touchy about its intellectual property. >_> I'd LOVE to throw in the Violinist of Hameln but I'd sell about five cards and four of those would be to myself, lol. :B I guess I could do the more obscure/copyright protected ones as just original pieces. $20 upwards for an original piece of art, OPAC sized. Sounds reasonable to me!

Buttons are a pain in the arse to source too. Does anyone know a button/1" badge making machine rental place? The UQ union doesn't seem to have one, the losers. Honestly, what group of self-respecting left wing nuts DOESN'T own a machine with which to produce millions of hippy campaign badges with??? I know my old primary school must have got one from somewhere that one time... :/ Maybe I should ask the dudes who sell buttons at the UQ markets every Wednesday about it...

Otherwise I can buy one for $300 dollars, including the shipping and 500 sets of parts. I suppose it would pay for itself after a fashion and I could rent it to other artists in Brisbane but, guh, my poor $300. T_T