Iridescence

 Greetings

Teddy and I spent the long Easter weekend at Iridescence, the 2026 Eastercon. ( Eastercons are the annual Science Fiction national convention for the UK)

This was at the Hilton Metropole in Birmingham and, when we got there, we found we were sharing the hotel with an anime convention. An excellent detente had been worked out between the committees. They had access to our dealers room and artshow and we had access to their traders hall.

This worked extreemly well and we also gor to enjoy the large number of them walking about in costume.

I even started to regret deciding not to bring any of my costume.

It turned out that they had had no idea our sort of conventions existed. Some of them bought memberships to our con and many said they'd be joining next year's con.

Their traders hall turned out to be a slightly dangerous place. I discovered a stall selling discounted anime figures and ended up buying three.

I put both originals and prints in the artshow.

All the pictures here except the centre top one( armoured girl with sword) are being shown for the first time. They are all originals except the hussar( top right) and the young man with a sword(base middle) which are framed prints. The originals of those two are much larger.

Here are the displayed prints ( I had more in a box on one of the tables)

 I didn't sell any originals, but did sell two prints.  So, better than nowt.

Catspaw ( second down on the left)

and a cartoon from the box- Nosfer-R2 (again).

This , to date , is my most successful cartoon.

I think I also gained some fans of my work from the anime convention.

The convention went very well and , unusually, we both found several programme items we wanted to go to.

The journey to and from, however ,was very long. We were giving our friend , Melusine, a lift and she came to our the night before, but we were also taking Teddy's cousin, Gail ( who is in a wheelchair).

Thus, I had to drive the wrong way round the M25( vis the Dartford crossing) to go in to pick her up from Walthamstow, then drive on round to the M40 to get to Birmingham. Then I had to do that in reverse on the way back. So I drove nearly all the way round the M25 - twice.

Until next time

Adieu