New toons for Shep

Shep Hyken is a business writer and speaker who uses me to turn his articles and concepts into cartoons. Here's some new stuff done for him.

Back from Awaken

Wow. The Awaken show is a memory and was another true success. We don't have an exact count, but I'm fairly sure we drew over 400 people in attendance. A very cool crowd, extremely supportive. People are inspired by what we're doing. A lot of people thanked us for what we're trying to do with the Dallas art scene, and for local artists.

The artists and performers kicked ass. This time I actually got to see a lot more of that. The previous show was a bit more hectic for us and I spent most of the night running around like crazy. This time our leadership team resolved to go "deeper not wider". We didn't try to expan d or pull off new tricks, we just focused on doing what we do even better. It worked too. Everything on this show from the promotion, to the pre-meeting, to the night itself went down pretty smooth. We're getting better at this.

Justin put up a great report of the show that you can read at artlovemagic.com The photos with it are excellent. Sherry Smith proved that there's extra value in inviting a good photographer. She took a lot of great photos and shared them with us for the site. I love it when we invite someone I haven't met yet (she's a friend of Justin's), and they contribute immensely.

Anyway, another event down. I think it was our best effort. We've gotten some good feedback and we're continuing to tweak as we go. As far as our efforts to help the local art scene, I couldn't be happier. We've now had something like 50+ artists, poets, photographers, crafters, and musicians create live at our events. Several artists have shown for the first time anywhere with artlovemagic, and several people have sold their first ever work at our shows. One poet I know of (me) spit for the first time at our events.

I'm really proud of what we're doing here.

Ha! Feels good.

-Mike