Well, as you might guess from my previous post, I've been a little busy for the last month or so...
The LARP event I did makeup for & vended at was last weekend, and it was a lot of fun, although I didn't get to go out and enjoy it as much as I'd hoped, since my minion/fiancee got press ganged into helping with food & beverage service... He had a fantastic time, and has volunteered to keep working the tavern at future events, so I guess I need a new minion (I suppose I'll keep him for the fiancee job, though ;) ).
Makeup went on quite well, especially when you take into account that larpers are even more difficult to herd than actors... Sadly, though, our Medusa backed out, and the only people we could get to volunteer as a replacement were men with beards... plus, we were running low on time (see above re: difficulty of herding larpers), so we scrapped that design, covered the faces of the beardy menfolk, and let the snake hat do the talking. Which sucks, because the design I had come up with would have been awesome - I was going to do basically two "layers," the first of which was white marble, and then over the marble look I had patches of green-on-green (OD over grass) scales... if my phone's SD card survived its swimming lesson on Wednesday (yeah, that happened - it spent a couple days in a bag of rice, and the phone will start up, but it's... not right anymore), I'll post pictures of the test-application I did on myself.
Anyways, that simplified my job down to an assembly line of Drow and one well-preserved undead guy. Plus, I had minions to help, the chief of whom had an airbrush. So all my dark elves looked very pretty, and I was able to make my one undead dude look rather subtly gruesome... although I really should have put the spot where his skin was sloughing off on his cheekbone rather than his forehead, 'cause it got covered up by his hood....
As for the vendor booth, I managed to build enough stuff over the month and a half to keep my booth from looking too empty, although it was still pretty sparse. I had a selection of belt pouches, a few hoods, shirts sized small through XL (one of each size, plus a couple "factory seconds" as it were), a couple pairs of leg wraps, and a couple of dice bags up for sale, and I also made a display of some of my personal garb as examples of custom work. Pictures of the booth are up on my Facebook page.
Sales weren't exactly great... I sold one belt pouch, and am following up on one custom job I may have picked up at the event (a replica of the very first pattern I ever designed seven years ago, which I suppose is a good omen). I'm trying hard not to be too discouraged... objectively, not only was it was my first show, but it wasn't the most sale-friendly environment - the light was really dim (because Underdark), and the "market" was positioned so that it didn't have any non-shopper through-traffic, which since this was a LARP event and not a trade show or other shopping-related event means I don't think any of the impulse-buy-only crowd actually even SAW the stuff I was selling. Realistically, giving out a half-dozen business cards and doing any business at all under those conditions is a pretty great start, but I can't pretend I'm not bummed. (And please don't interpret this as a comment on the event organizers - they ran a damn fine event, the very first at this venue, no less - it's just that "friendly retail environment" and "Drow city" are nearly mutually exclusive, and generating sales isn't a major priority for making a good LARP.)
Oh, well. Onward and upward, and all that... at least I have a bunch of stuff to list on my Etsy store now! Watch this space for a link once it's up and running. :) And I learned a lot, so when I do this again I'll have a much better idea of how to create a good vending experience. Like, it was really cold down there, so I bet I could have made some bank if I had a bunch of wooly cloaks for sale. :P
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