For those of you who don't know, I ran the Art Show at the Minicon 46 science fiction convention this last weekend.  Part of my duties was to stick the guest of honor John Scalzi's head in a jar for the theme, Not Yet Dead From the Neck Up.  It was a great time, and from the comments on John's blog entry about it, it sounds like everybody loved my head-in-a-jar illustration. if you want to see it from Mr. Scalzi's waterlogged point of view, he'll tell you himself.

If you want to hear it from me, keep reading...

Since there was no artist guest of honor this year, Pat Scaramuzza (our head of pubs) came up with an awesome guitar graphic for the cover of the program book, and I put John's head in a jar for the website and t-shirts. I took it upon myself to organize a bunch of art programming, including a live model sketching workshop run by Pete Laughlin, a discussion called Making it in the Art World with me and artist Jeff Laughlin, and a presentation where I ran through the steps in Photoshop to put John's head in a jar. 

One of the highlights of the convention for me was getting my copy of Old Man's War signed by John, with inscribed thanks for jarring him.  He did mention that the photo I used was the one his publisher uses in promoting him, and as he was clean-shaven and wore glasses this weekend it didn't really look much like reality. But hey, it was him at some point.

Next year we'll be doing even more art programming, with workshops covering sketching, painting, digital illustration, design, and of course our talented artist guest of honor Frank Wu. If you're into art you may want to check it out next Easter weekend, April 4-6.

Jars optional. Heads too, for that matter. We'll just shovel the art right down your neck.