Detroit Fanfare and Tashmoo Biergarten!

Since school started, I have been super busy everyday working on classwork and student government and NYC trip stuff. I also got a job working as a waitress down the street from my apartment building at Byblos on Wayne State's campus. It's a lebanese restaurant so I tend to smell like chicken shawarma and falafel. Sometimes tabouli too.

That means I have to hold off on major updates and a layout change for this blog until I find some time to do this properly. As in, before October so I don't look unprofessional in front of artists and publishers I swapped cards with at the cons I attend.

This weekend I had the luck to get a free pass to Detroit Fanfare Comic Convention as CCS (College for Creative Studies/my school) had a table at the con for portfolio reviews and recruiting. As I haven't officially gone through Student Ambassador training yet for school info sessions/campus tours, I instead got a chance to see how to run a table at a con.

Thanks to Dave Chow, Zach Ares and Hannah Stockdale!

I got to hang out with Joe Foo, a professor at CCS and the creator of Desmond while he was sitting with another CCS alum, Mike Roll. Joe and Mike's tables were right next to Ethan Nicolle, one of the creators of Axecop (he's the illustrator, his 5 year old brother Malachai writes the stories). I sat in as an advertising asian while bothering them at their tables.

I also got cards from Top Shelf and spent major dough on some swag.... but it was worth it. A rare, out of print, complete 2-disc 20th anniversary Blade Runner soundtrack, digitally remastered and resubtitled 3-disc set of A Better Tomorrow Trilogy in a special boxed package, and an artbook of Yoshitaka Amano's concept art for Final Fantasy. I also got some more art supplies and talked major shop with some comic artists. I will make a separate post about some things I learned and some stuff I drew later this week.

Sunday, I woke up 3 times in the morning before getting up from my couch around noon with Futurama dvds on repeat. Then I went to the opening of this Sunday daytime biergarten in Detroit's West Village called Tashmoo.

The biergarten is open on Sundays for the next few weeks with a rotating menu of local brews and eats. I was really impressed with the crowd the neighborhood event created, and the design branding done by my good friend Jacob Hagen (pictured above) at lovio george communication+design was really sharp.

The end of the night concluded with a short film about the Detroit People Mover (which is finally starting construction to expand down to 8 Mile) and was art directed by Michael Burdick, a CCS Illustration Grad who currently works with Team Detroit. Music in the beginning of the film was from Of Oceans, the solo work of Peter Bosch, a CCS Photography student.