Kumoricon is a holy haven for nerds of the North West, United States. It is an anime convention, which is the gathering of nerds typically hosted at a convention center, hotel, or even a college campus. Depending on the scale of the convention there will be a variety of activities and panels.

There’s a lot of different activities and panels to choose from! You can cosplay as your favorite character from your favorite fandom and choose to partake in a group photo shoot or you can simply walk around the convention in your cosplay, tons of fun! What you can do in cosplay could easily be its own tangent, there’s so much to Kumoricon I want to nerd out on. There are a wide variety of panels to choose from including, fan ran panels from which you can improvise in character depending on the panel, you can watch shows or movies together, also you are able to prescreen never before seen footage of TV shows, movies, or videogames that haven’t been released. There are panels for let’s plays, which is to watch someone play your favorite video game and make commentary live for the audience instead of through Youtube, panels to learn skills from sewing to fan making. There are a lot of different opportunities with all of the different type of panels. Kumoricon is large enough to of hosted on of my favorite animation studios, Trigger.

Besides all of the wonderful panels you can attend there are other functions of a convention that are important as well. Typically, there is a section dedicated to gaming, and not just video games. As there is a huge variety of TVs that are set up with different consoles there are also a wide variety of board games to choose from.  Nerds are very introverted, so this space is great for the socially awkward.

For me the most important activity at an anime convention is the Artist Alley, an outlet for illustrators and exhibitors to sell their goods. It’s funny how easily 5 hours can pass by so quickly there, I spent a majority of most of my time there. I’ve participated in selling at an Artist Alley before at New Con and now am addicted to it. I decided not to participate in the venue, yet it didn’t stop me from wanting to learn from the artists that were there. I spent a majority of my time at Kumoricon shadowing the artists. As expected the quality of the products were very inspiring at each booth. There’s a lot more to art than just to be an illustration and I felt that a lot of the artists at Kumoricon understood that. They can self market their drawings with templates such as bookmarks, stickers, keychains and many other options. All of the artists there were so kind, they were able to answer all any questions I had. Luckily a lot of the artists went to NewCon as well so it was really nice for me to see how they’re grown.

It was especially nice to see my fiend Ashley Kincannon, her artist booth was very inspirational. It’s refreshing to see her knowledge of character design. As someone with a mindset who doesn’t create I could remember when I liked a show because of simply a funny joke. Now with an artistic mindset, aspects like a character’s shape or the type of lines applied are more important to me. These are qualities that I see in Ashley’s character design, she has characters of all different sizes, body types, and even textures that show so much personality! It’s very inspirational to be able to present yourself as an artist, and I truly admire how Ashley is very professional yet her art is so much fun. You can see her art at http://www.kincannonconcept.com/