Hello Coen! For those who attended the weekly meeting yesterday, thank you for turningup, I hope you had fun! Now that we have met, seen what we can do, its time to set our direction for the future and work towards it!

Our biz mag, Joan is currently sourcing for merchandise manufacturers, the list of products include:

- Bookmarks
- Badges
- ez-Link card stickers
- iPod/iPhone stickers
- etc.

The organizers of the EoY event has approached the Anime Chair Denise for a possible collaboration on a comics/illustration aspect. Combined with our AFA Extravaganza event and artbook project, my plan is for us to produce print-quality works that can be used for all these events at one go. As a business student this is my suggestion:

For those of us who are more experienced/skilled in illustration, we can try to produce works along the

- Realism line.
Pictures that look like photos. They seem to be very popular, generating the most interest and impress from the people who viewed our art displays during recruitment booth.

- Traditional Media line.
Pictures inked in the old school style is very uncommon nowadays, apart from being able to impress our viewers easilt, this also ensures that our products will be very different from the other people who are also setting up booth/selling merchandise during EoY.

For those of us who prefer a more casual route, we can produce works along the

- Fanart line.
In particular, we should concentrate on series that are very popular lately, such as K-On!, or once-famous series that are scheduled to make come-backs in the near future, such as Inuyasha. I invite the AnimeWorks people to provide their views and suggestions on this matter.

Preferably, our works should be in series, so that we can bundle and package the merchandise instead of selling them singly.

You can also opt to work on other stuff.

Yiming is working on 4koma strips
Weiyang and me will be trying our hands on a Touhou doujin
Overmage (eric ?) has voiced his interest in working on story plots.


So, for our next session, those who can start work on their pieces can commence, you may want to come up with new pieces from scratch or just touch up some of your previous works.

As some of us need some pointers on digital coloring (myself included), those who might want to pick up some lessons on digital coloring can go through a crash course by Thai/Wei Yang.

* if you already know how and where to apply colour and have used photoshop for around one month, it's better to go to Thai instead. also where are the adm people!!! we need them!!!!!

If you intend to go down the fanart route, I'd suggest going for Evangelion. Stuff like K-On already dominates the local doujin scene, but surprisingly I hardly see much Eva stuff, despite the series' continued popularity. Eva has very long lasting potential to remain popular, and having the rebuild movies around will only help boost it even further, so I forsee that Eva merchandise can last our club quite a few years even if we have leftovers for this year.

The only problem I forsee for going Eva is that there is no short supply of official Eva goods to say the least. Nevertheless, if our doujin/fanmade merchandise can have some degree of uniqueness to set it apart from those official goods, I think we can sell reasoanbly well.

Thats a very good idea. Evangelion. I wonder why i did not think of that lol. There was a recent craze over Danbooru on the new test plugsuits haha!

Are there anymore A&W peeps out there who have suggestions ? Shoot pls! XD

regarding the badges (for merch)... they are all limited to the round shape right?

personally i think that we cant have too complex stuff on badges (they're meant to stand out only at a glance imo), if people want to pin them on bags or something. i was thinking of simple but 'symbolic' stuff like yuyuko's danmaku fan, etc etc etc

omg, did i agree to do de 4koma?

hmmmm, i not sure abt either can spam here (since this post is so serious) or i can make it or not. in conclusion, i am a bit blur abt wat to do. i feel sorry tat i didnt attend de weekly meeting, but can i meet weiliang some time to clarify wat i should do? thx

For badges we'll probably do something like the pic im using as userpic.

Yiming, sure ask me about it when we are having our kiting outing or something lol. If u see me on msn can ask me too

Hi all,

I've just stumbled upon a website of a Vietnamese comic group.

They looks like a group of comic enthusiasm or comic hobbyist. They have a monthly comic magazine, which is at issue no.2 atm.

Anyway, the thing that interests me is that they are currently holding a comic contest, with the first prize is 300 USD. Looking good I think.

The contest is rather simple. Just draw a comic (more than 30 pages) about anything, and then submit to them via email. Of course don't submit a story with sexual, anti-religion, politic, or extremely violent content. The deadline is 27-7-2010.

Their English website is here:

http://english.breakfreemagazine.com/

But mainly everything is in Vietnamese

To be honest, the 1-year deadline bugs me a bit. In my experience, hobbyist's magazine usually doesn't last that long.

But the thing is, I realize that we can make some money by working online. For example, I hear about commission drawing in Deviant Art. There are guys willing to pay for fanart or for drawing their webcomic. Payment varies from 20 USD to 60 USD per picture.

Pros are drawing for them actually cost us nothing. We don't have to print or make any physical object, and can work anytime and anywhere. Cons are we need someone working as "businessman", for example to create a common DeviantArt account for Comic Ensemble and go around doing PR stuff, which are not my strong points.

Just some ideas

haha Thai i wonder if we write a comic, will you help us translate it?

(on another note, you got the email i sent, right)

Oh, I have some more rambles

There is another online Vietnamese comic magazine. This one is sponsored by a comic company in Vietnam so they are a bit more ... reliable.

You can read their newest issue online here:

http://truyentranhviet.vn/

(click on the "read online" button)

The older issues can be download here:

http://vncomicfarm.com/index.php?showforum=136

(click on the magazines' cover)

The magazine is in Vietnamese, but we can have a judge at their standard looking at it. They pay 20 SGD for any accepted comic, and will pay 30, 50 and 100 SGD more if that comic win the monthly, trimonthly and yearly awards, respectively.

The payment is not good, I think, but we don't have restriction on comic length and the payment comes after 1 month.

So if we have a short comic, and don't know what to do with it, maybe send to them by email and make some pocket money.

Thai, i bet you're an underground businessman! XD you're having so many ideas! >...<

oh btw weiliang. what are the dimensions for the bookmarks you mentioned?

1)We could maybe also make VAS collectible postcards? Like have one set featuring each main character of a particular anime or manga like Vampire Knight? Even if in the packaging we give one maybe we can sell it on other events then they may be tempted to complete the collection?

2)And speaking of fanart we can also do some based on movies like Twilight (somebody did it and is selling it i think!)
This is one on Edward, Jacob and Bella... really nice style!



3)We could also try to make manga drawing into a high-end art (something i learnt in my illustration elective )

My favs so far are works by Chiho Aoshima and KMR, you can check out these links:
http://2st.jp/kmrimg/l/10.html
http://english.kaikaikiki.co.jp/artists/list/C4/

These are some examples by Chiho:

i can see why you like KMR, the atmosphere is just so.... awesome.