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| Goldilocks and the 3 Bears by Sandy Pressley and Bonnie Fisher took first place in the large sculpture competition at Balloon Camp. |
Once more, Summer Balloon Camp has come and gone. Roughly 500 participants from around the world gathered at the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas for classes, jamming, and general sharing. BHQ has attended and covered the event all five years of its existence, even offering online voting for four of the five contests. (BHQ members that were unable to attend were able to cast votes from home while looking at photos of the large sculpture, small round balloon sculpture, small non-round balloon sculpture, and centerpiece entries. There's no good way to represent entries in the portfolio competition online.) Don't forget to check out all the winners the rest of the activities at camp.
As usual, things were busy enough for us at camp that I hardly had time to poke my head into classes. I did find time to show up at the jams every night by surrendering sleep. I was quite impressed by the crowds that attended the jams. They seemed to grow in numbers each night with an enormous amount of activity. Entertainers, decorators and others that just happen to work at some balloon company or another showed up and stayed to twist balloons for a while. This included people I never would have expected to twist at all. What a blast.
If you missed camp this year, you'll have another opportunity next summer. Details of next year's event haven't been announced yet, but that information will be available on BHQ as soon as we have it.
One recurring topic we see on the forums, both decorator and entertainer, is the lack of a certain color that's just right for weddings this year, or matches a certain animated character in the hot new summer movie. Sometimes it's a slightly longer or wider balloon. Every so often it's an interesting shape, or a balloon that curls automatically when it inflates. It isn't surprising this comes up so often. As artists, we want a larger palette to work with.
The manufacturers certainly try to give us what we ask for. They each add colors, one or two at a time. Adding new shapes is somewhat harder, but even adding colors isn't exactly a simple task. So what would it take to get all of the balloons we want? I heard this question asked so many times at Balloon Camp, I can't even count them. The answer is always that the manufacturers need to sell more balloons to justify the cost of adding items to their catalogs. That sounds fair to me. I think we can help.
No, I'm not saying we should buy balloons and shove them in storage. In the end, that doesn't actually increase sales. That just changes when, not how much, we spend. I propose all of us go out and teach more people to do our jobs. I know, a lot of people will read that and wonder who's going to hire us if they all know how to create using our medium. Since the creation of BHQ, I've always believed that educating the world about what we do will help our businesses. It will give everyone a greater appreciation for what we do. Those of us that care about balloon art can just keep developing new things and focus on doing a better job. The educated consumer of our services will appreciate how well and how efficiently we do things. The key word in "balloon art" is "art". Others may learn the skills needed to work with balloons, but every artist has a different view of the world. The do-it-yourself type looking to decorate a party may not hire one of us, but those folks haven't hurt the textile industry or the plumbing industry, and free software hasn't shut down the software industry. Let's teach balloon art to more people. That's how more balloons can get sold and how the manufacturers and distributors will be able to give us that larger palette we're asking for.
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| Country scene |
Eduardo Seiti Yoshikawa of Puma Baloes in Brazil says he specialized in centerpieces, but his portfolio shows some pretty spectacular large scale pieces as well.
Visit the portfolio of Eduardo Seiti Yoshikawa.
