Saturday at the con was all about Barry Kitson. Now, I must admit I’ve seen hardly any of his work. I ended up in his line because that was where I was taken. Barry’s deal is that he will do water-colour pieces for free but you have to stay in line and wait your turn. This meant a six hour wait for me. Six hours is a long time in one spot, especially when we had this utter arsehole to deal with. It didn’t start well with him. I’m 100% certain he cut in front of me in the line and he had this attitude that he was entitled to everything. But being an arsehole, he thought the “you must stay in line and wait” rule didn’t apply to him so he wandered off. I was already annoyed with him to begin with so I had absolutely zero qualms about sticking the knife in at the first opportunity. <\/p>\n
Barry isn’t the quickest artist, the pieces he does take on average an hour but he is working with water-colours and they do look amazing. However, he’s a good guy and doesn’t expect you to stay in the line the whole time. Food, toilet and walk around breaks are encouraged to stop you from going stir-crazy so I did manage to walk around a little. It’s all about coming back to the line.<\/p>\n
It’s fascinating to watch Barry at work and he’s quite chatty while he’s working. We covered loads of topics in our chats and he seemed impressed by the fact that I’d traveled so far. He was also totally in love with Haley which was cute and completely understandable as she’s gorgeous. As my turn edged closer and closer, the arsehole returned to claim his spot and was not at all happy when he was told he’d lost it. He tried the whole “I drove down from New York and I’m only here for today” line which I, of course, could totally trump. Chad, Barry’s assistant, was far too nice to the moron and eventually Barry got really annoyed and essentially told him to go away. We all cheered.<\/p>\n
It was a really long wait but I’m glad I did it. The Daredevil piece I got from Barry is extraordinary and I was so shocked when he said he’d never done one of that character before. It looks like it’s a cover, it’s that<\/B> good. Every time I showed it to anyone, their reaction was widening eyes and an exclamation of “Wow!” (Turns out that Barry thought it was his best piece of the con which pleases me to no end.)<\/p>\n
I managed to have a wander around and bought a few things. I totally went to town on Matt Wagner’s pieces. He had a superb colour Green Arrow which I snapped up as soon as I saw it and I surprised myself by buying the pencil prelim for a Spectre cover which I loved as soon as I laid eyes on it. I wandered around trying to find Amanda Connor so she could sign some comics for me and ended up sitting behind Darwyn Cooke’s area because Marsha saw me and offered me a seat. Have I said how much I adore that woman? She’s all kinds of awesome. Nick and Steve were flicking through Darwyn’s folio and I saw a piece I liked as soon as I saw it so Marsha snagged it for me. Tee hee. Turns out it was one of three that Steve was trying to chose from. It was cheeky I know but the one Steve bought is beautiful. Total impulse buy and I really should’ve looked through the rest of Darwyn’s folio but the one I’m happy with what I bought. (Later I saw a fabulous Black Canary piece he’d done but I decided it was too much at $600 as I didn’t want it as soon as I saw it.) I umm’ed and ahh’ed about buying a Batman and the Mad Monk<\/I> page from Matt Wagner for a few hours but in the end I decided I had to have it. Turns out it’s one of Matt’s favourite pages and he’s really pleased I bought it.<\/p>\n
We were supposed to go the baseball that night but it had been raining heavily all day and it looked like it was going to rain again – which it did – so we ended up going out of dinner instead. By this point, I was feeling quite a bit better so I think I had a much better time at dinner than I did at the room party the night before. I got to talk with Kelly plenty which was wonderful because he was one of the people I really wanted to meet. Tim finished my Batman\/Catwoman piece and I love it. My next claim to fame is that Matt Wagner gave me a big, sloppy kiss when he was leaving. That man is totally crazy. <\/p>\n
It amazes me how great everyone is and how well we click as a group. I know what I did is crazy but I’ve never felt an immediate bond with a bunch of people like I did with them. They were all so concerned about how I was, if I was feeling okay, if I managed to get all the things I wanted. I was so well taken care of. I’ve ended up feeling a bit guilty because I had so many meals bought for me. I think the whole time I was in Baltimore I bought exactly one meal. I know I’m very social awkward and I don’t enjoy being in unfamiliar situations but I’d do it all again in heartbeat. In fact I can’t wait for the next one I can make it to (although I hope it’s on the west coast the next time). Going on this trip has been one of the best things I’ve ever done and I’m so glad I decided to do it and stuck to my decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Saturday at the con was all about Barry Kitson. Now, I must admit I’ve seen hardly any of his work. I ended up in his line because that was where I was taken. Barry’s deal is that he will do water-colour pieces for free but you have to stay in line and wait your turn. This meant a six hour wait for me. Six hours …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[8,2],"tags":[15,48,47,49,50,32],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hatfullofsky.net\/littlewords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hatfullofsky.net\/littlewords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hatfullofsky.net\/littlewords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hatfullofsky.net\/littlewords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hatfullofsky.net\/littlewords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/hatfullofsky.net\/littlewords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148,"href":"https:\/\/hatfullofsky.net\/littlewords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions\/148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hatfullofsky.net\/littlewords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hatfullofsky.net\/littlewords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hatfullofsky.net\/littlewords\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}