HOW I MADE MERCH THE NIGHT BEFORE A COMIC CONVENTION (COMIC FIESTA 2017 BLOG PART 1)

If there are any weaboo Malaysians here, you’d know about the recent anime convention over at KLCC Convention Centre. Comic Fiesta (CF) is the biggest anime event of the year (not to mention there was a Hatsune Miku Concert on the same night!!), and its the kind of place where anime and comic geeks gather to meet their online friends and buy merch of their favourite series! My friends and I have been going for about 5 years, and it would be an extreme waste to miss out on it because of all the cool and beautiful things they have to sell on that day.

However, me being the reliable person I am, completely forgot about the necessary time you need to create merch. And I was collaborating with a group of friends to open a booth for CF. So, the day before CF, I had to come up with really- really quick ideas for what to sell there. (Actually, I already had ideas months before, they just couldn’t be done in a day.)
Simplest things to sell during CF is usually :

• Art prints
• Stickers

If I wanted to sell badges, it’d be too late because you had to order them in bulk and wait for them to deliver it to you.
So comes the stickers I made for CF and the ideas behind it. I swear, I rushed through this like a bullet train, I didn’t eat and I didn’t go to the toilet unless I really had to. I WAS PANICKING SO HARD.

STICKER IDEA GOOD OR BAD?

My first idea was an ice cream cat! Its super cute and delicious. And it actually became a series of Malaysian Food Stickers! I think I’ll save the process of all the foods in another post ;)

But yeah I really liked the idea of cats + food. Because at CF there are always vendors selling these really nice looking foods, so I thought, we need some Malaysian foods as well! It’s always western desserts, breakfasty stuff and Japanese food.

Do you like it?

The foods I used here (starting from left to right and descending down), are Nasi lemak, ketupat, McMeow Ice Cream, Curry puffs, and fishball soup! These are all familiars to the locals here, especially nasi lemak, a popular breakfast food.

Malaysiana Animal Crossing

After that, I thought I should make Animal Crossing stickers considering their launch on the app store recently.

But, I was never really good at drawing fanart, so I Malaysianised it again! I used some well-known and some not well-known animals such as the tiger, binturong, pangolin, orang utan, tapir and sun bear!

If you don’t know some of these animals I implore you to look it up because they’re precious animals! And sadly, most of them are either threatened or endangered.

Back to the topic on hand, I also had a friend who helped me design some pokemon stickers! They are really cute doggo/burdo stickers of legendary pokemon! Check out him out @kaimu (although he's relatively new and I don't think he's posted anything yet but... once he does you'll love his art style!)

I finished the drawings at around 7-8pm, which makes it really late, considering that the printing shops closes at around 9pm here. I rushed out and quickly printed a few sets of stickers at around 8:30pm, it was such a close call.

Went back and started cutting up all... 40 sets of stickers and prints. I slept really late that night. Thank goodness some of my friends helped me! They became my slaves for the night haha.

It was like an endless supply of stickers...

Finally... at 3am in the morning...

Through sore fingers and tired eyes... we finally finished cutting up all 160 stickers... I'm really grateful to my friends who helped me through the wee hours of the night.
However, the next morning, I remembered I had art prints to cut up as well!!! DX

Post to be continued in part 2...