Tier 1+ 🌱 Dokomi Report!

Hey Sweethearts! 

Rose writing here, welcome to our little Dokomi report, for those who are interested in what we've been preparing and doing for the last months. This is going to be a good read including a lot of crying, so beware! But it'll have a happy end.

When you click on the pictures you'll see some additional descriptions 💜

As stated in some posts before, since our closest friend has been so badly sick (she's good now, by the way!) and we had to be there for her and because of mental health issues we couldn't work as much an early as we wanted, so we ultimately had to rush and work around 14h a day right before the convention. It was vile, but it was worth it in the end. 

Schpog went over many of her illustrations which I then edited, same with our Through The Lands comics. Since they were a couple of years old Schpog wasn't that happy with it anymore, and I hade to change the pages into a fitting format for the available magazines at our printshop.

There was a lot of research, too. How to actually make physical comics? What's a "color profile"? Which is the right CMYK color profile for the printshop? How thick are usual comic pages, and should they be glossy or not? How can we make QR-Codes that last forever (without being ripped off and having to pay 300€ a month to keep the code)? What are people willing to pay, and what's the stuff worth?

Even though a looot of consideration went into our first analogue comics there's stuff we can improve on in future prints, but overall we're super happy how they turned out.

Then there were the Pocket!!Artprints trading cards - this was mainly my project, with all the artworks available from Schpog (and some by me). It was A LOT of fun and very rewarding at the end, but hooo boy did I underestimate the work. At first I had to go through literally thousands of artworks by Schpog and chose the ones that would fit the cards well. Then I had to settle for a design. I decided on rainbow watercolor on the back (9 slightly different designs, so the backs don't look too copy-paste) with some blotches, and a simple, but handdrawn white border for every normal illustration card on the front. Then there also were special sketch cards, printed on a different paper (watercolor paper that feels more natural), which don't have white borders and a darker paper texture. Then we also had to decide for a thickness, consider the price differences in the different papers, decide how rounded the corners should be, and so on. I worked dozens of hours on creating and designing the 218 cards we ended up printing.

A packaging design also had to be made! One that reflects Schpogs traditional and easy-going style.

And then of course everything had to be cut, corner-rounded, be-glittered (there's one special shiny glitter card in every package!), folded, glued and packed. This was nice (see the process here) but holy frick was this a lot of work. And I mean: A LOT. It was thousands of cards at the end that had to be process one by one, and because of our time schedule issues we were so far behind...

Thankfully our friends generously helped us out. Berricherry, Kitty, Mimi, Chaba (no social media) and Ira helped so much. The last 4 even helped 5h the day before we had to go. With their help we managed to pack 250 booster packs and cut hundreds (maybe even around one thousand) of artprints. We never would've been able to do it without them.

Ira then took our dogs for the time being (which is so nice because she loves them and they love her) and then we were off with Kitty to Düsseldorf on Friday.

But wait! There's more problems!

At first Kitty got stuck in city train for an hour or something. So we got out of Munich way later than we anticipated. Then I had the worst migraine and almost couldn't drive (thankfully Kitty took over, Schpog can't drive). Then we were stuck in traffic for 2h. At the end we arrived at 9:45PM - and the build time for booths ended at 10PM. Kitty wasn't allowed to help (she wasn't registered as an official helper for our booth) so Schpog and I had to build the booth, that usually takes around 4h to be built properly, in 15 minutes then.

Even though we secretly stayed longer we of course weren't able to finish the booth at that time, so we had to get up early the next morning to continue. 

We arrived at our apartment at 12AM - but our problems didn't end there. We rented a carport, but we had no idea were it was. Nobody was picking up the phone at the apartment/hotel place, and there was absolutely no indication of where the spot was, neither in the mails nor the homepage nor google maps or reviews or anything. We looked for half an hour and drove around looking for a free spot, but there was nothing close by. Besides that we had to pay good money for this fricking spot and we didn't want to just give it to them for their bad service. I've sent them a mail and thankfully they answered relatively quickly, telling us "roughly" the spot where the carport was. It took us another 30 minutes to find that spot, and when we found it, another 30 minutes to get in. See, the spot they rented to us was in a TINY tiny subterranean garage, and I have a really big car. 7 seats, 3500lbs, my chonky girl. But the garage was made for small and normal passenger cars. It was unbelievably hard to get in in the first place, we almost didn't make it, and then we saw that it was a duplex parking spot, too. They didn't say anything of that sort beforehand. So we had to research if our car would even fit in a duplex. I had never used one before and it was so so so scary to drive on. So tight, too. I ultimately managed to get in but the spot was so tight that neither of us couldn't properly open our doors. We ended up leaving both at my door which was opening sliiiightly more. We still had to squish a lot though.

Finally at the apartment (which was, in spite of everything cute and cozy) I noticed that the bed was way way waaay too hard for me, so I had to sleep on the couch. At first I thought I would through up from all the stress and migraine but in the end I was able to fall asleep. Schpog slept alone in the bed.

We had to get up some hours later, around 5AM. I really wasn't able to handle it, so Schpog got up alone while I tried to catch some more sleep. I joined her later then, right before the opening times, but she had managed to built up most of the booth by herself, and she said that she was happy about having the time for herself, too.

Sadly, my migraine hasn't gone away (and wouldn't do so until we were back home in Munich again), so after a while when my meds stopped working I had to sleep under the table. I was able to do so just fine and things were a little better after that.

But besides all of that, besides the pain and stress and panic and dread, it was a positive experience.

Because everyone we met was just so, so incredible sweet. We had the cutest customers, and the most considerate neighbours. They were so kind and so helpful, the offered us space on their tables and food and even helped out our customers when we weren't there. There were 750 amazing artists in the hall and the few we could meet were inspiring and amazing and so very skilled!

We saw so many cool and sweet cosplayers, many of which who were happy to find art prints of their representing characters at our booth. Like a female presenting Crowley and Aziraphael screaming over our Good Omen artworks, or Edas being so happy about our Owl House content that they gave us candy. 

There was almost no sapphic representation at the convention, so many lesbians (and friends) were freaking out when they saw our booth, the hype was so, so sweet. They pointed out their favorites, they shared what the art did with them, what spoke to them, some were long-established fans, some just found out about us at the booth. 

All of it was so overwhelming sweet that it easily made up for everything we had to go through. We were both so overjoyed. We noticed how much we missed the human contact, to see other cosplayers and artist and marvel at their work, to feel what our work does with people and also share what their work does with us. We squeaked at Edas and 13th Doctors and Links and had the biggest dokis when people recognized Data in our artworks, or Wander over Yonder, or said that our Bowsette version is fantastic, or teared up when they saw our trans representing Links & Bakugos, or got all excited about their Pocket!!Artprints booster packs.

Just... overall fangirling. Yes, that was what we missed. It made us feel so close to others again. I'm tearing up when thinking about it again, haha.

It was so nice, in fact, that we decided that we really do have to do it more often in the future. We don't know if we can manage it, and we definitely have to work on our work/life balance and find a third helper if we want to, but it would do us good.

The dismounting, check-out and drive home went without complications and smooth, it was a nice finish. There were some more small things I could talk about, but the post is already very long and I want to go cuddle with Schpog now, so I leave it there!

You guys and your support mean so much to us, so I thought a more detailed post about our life might be something nice to give back to you once in a while, so let me know how you guys like post of this personal nature. I hope you enjoyed it!

I hope you have a fantastic start into the new week,

🌹 Rose (Management & Partner) (& 🌿Schpog (Main Artist))

Add-On: Oh, I almost forgot! Sadly all of our Pocket!!Artprints are sold out. But we do our best to reprint them asap (though it will take a while, it really is a lot of work). When we restock we will let you know and you'll get a special discount! 

In the meantime you can buy our comics though if you want, we do still have a couple in stock!

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