What I packed for my first art-fair booth (and what I'd cut)

The con was in Mossfield, a town just big enough to host a one-day "Arts & Tabletop" fair in a converted grange hall. I had a six-foot table near the back wall, between a woman selling resin dice and a guy who made leather dragon masks. I had been painting commissions out of my spare bedroom for almost two years at that point, and this was the first time I was going to sit behind my own work in public. I got there an hour early and immediately drank too much coffee.

I want to write this down before I forget, because next year I will absolutely tell myself I remember, and I will absolutely be wrong.

What earned its space

The single best thing I brought was a stack of eleven framed originals, propped on small wooden easels at staggered heights. People stopped for the originals. They walked past the prints. I had assumed it would be the other way around, that prints at fifteen dollars would be the easy yes and the originals would just be decoration. Wrong. The originals made the booth feel like a booth and not a yard sale.

After that, in rough order of usefulness:

• A binder of past commissions, sleeved, with the character name and a one-line backstory on each page. Three separate people sat down at my table and read the whole thing.
• Palette samples on small primed boards. Just little 3x3 squares showing skin tones, leather textures, metallics. People love touching things. I underestimated how much.
• A square reader that worked. Mine did, on the venue wifi, which I genuinely had not planned for.
• Business cards with a QR code on the back, no front-of-card glamour, just my name and the URL. I gave away about ninety of these and got two commissions in the following month from them.
• A folding stool for me. I almost did not bring one. I would have died standing for nine hours.

The other thing that worked, which I did not expect, was a hand-lettered sign that just said "Yes, painted by hand. No, no AI." I put it up around hour two after the fourth person asked. After that the question mostly stopped, and the people who did ask were already interested, not suspicious.

What I'd cut

Now the part where I am honest with myself.

The print bin was too big. I brought roughly sixty prints across fifteen designs and sold eleven. The bin took up about a third of my table real estate and most of it came home with me. Next time: four designs, twelve prints each, max.

I also brought a small portable speaker, thinking I'd play quiet ambient music. The hall was so loud you could not have heard a marching band at my table. The speaker sat in its case the entire day.

The "tip jar" I'd lettered the night before. Embarrassing in retrospect. It is not a coffee shop. Nobody is tipping the painter. Threw it in the trunk at lunch.

A clipboard with a mailing list signup. Two signatures. Both were friends I'd told to come by. The QR code on the back of the cards did the same job better.

And finally, the second tablecloth. I brought a backup in case I spilled something on the first one. Reader, the only thing I spilled was my own coffee, onto my own jeans, in the parking lot, before I'd even unloaded the car.

The one thing I should have left at home

A space heater.

I had read on some forum that grange halls run cold in the morning and to bring a small heater for under the table. So I brought one. The hall was packed by ten and stayed at roughly the temperature of a sauna for the entire afternoon. The heater sat by my feet, off, and I tripped over the cord twice. Once in front of a customer who was three sentences into describing her tiefling warlock. She was very gracious about it. I still think about it.

An art fair is not a gallery show. Nobody is hushed. Nobody is reverent. A kid will ask if you painted that or if your mom did, and a guy in a kilt will tell you about his bard for ten minutes, and that is the actual job.

What I'd add next time

A second chair on the customer side of the table. The commission conversations that turned into actual sales all happened when someone sat down. Standing across from me they would look for thirty seconds and drift. Sitting, they would talk for ten minutes and book something.

A printed price sheet for character art and VTT tokens, laminated, one copy. Not a brochure. Just a single sheet I could slide across the table when someone asked "so how does this work." I improvised it four or five times that day and the answer got worse each time I gave it.

Also: a real lunch. I packed a granola bar and an apple. By 3pm I was running on caffeine and pure social adrenaline, and I could feel my pitch getting weirder. Next time, a proper sandwich in a cooler under the table.

The conversation I keep thinking about

A woman in her sixties stopped at the booth around four. She had no D&D context at all. She picked up the binder, flipped to a portrait of a half-orc paladin I'd done in October, and asked, very quietly, "is this someone's daughter?" I said no, it was a character from a tabletop game, that the client had played her for two years. She nodded for a long time and said, "well, it looks like a real person." Then she bought a small print of a different painting and left.

I do not have a tidy lesson from that. I just liked it. It reminded me that the work travels further than the genre, which I think is the thing I most wanted out of doing the fair in the first place.

Closing up

I broke down the booth at seven, drove home with most of my prints still in the bin, and slept for ten hours. The honest math: I sold enough to cover the table fee, the gas, and a decent dinner. The two commissions that came in over the following weeks are what made it actually worth it, and those came from cards, not from anything I sold at the table.

If you want to see the originals I had at Mossfield (and the ones I have made since), the portfolio is the same binder, more or less, just digital. If you have a character you have been carrying around for a while, the order page explains how the process works without me tripping over a heater cord.

I'll be doing another fair in the fall. Smaller print bin. No speaker. Definitely no heater.