Hello everybody!
As most of you already know, we hosted an event here in Italy with Mitsuhiro Arita special guest 
I thought it would be nice to make a “professional” looking thread about this great experience we all have had!
Before the pictures to show some of the great works he did, I want to underline some points…
First of all, I want to thanks the sensei Mitsuhiro Arita to be such an awesome, professional, and kind artist. He worked so hard in these days because the event brought several hundreds of guys and girls from all over Italy and Europe, especially from France, Belgium and Germany (from what I remember). Average queue was around 2hours, with 3hours waiting peaks(!).
All of us organizers TOTALLY didnt expect this epic success… The 20th anniversary, and the Pokemon Go’s hype eased our initiative for sure.
Cartoomics 2017 has been the largest event for a Pokemon TCG illustrator ever, and the Sensei and us are so proud about this.
Arita made signatures in Kanji and in his translated western name, in a lot of ways: regular horizontal signature, vertical signature, double language signature, signature + mini sketch, signature + dedication.
Most people preferred the Kanji signature to the western one, becuse it reflected most the artist’s origin.
The main reasons of the long queue was not about signatures, but about sketches. Sooo many people asked for different sized sketches [price range was from 20 to 200€, and we offered around 5 different types of sketches (i.e. BW/colored - half art/only pokemon face/full pokemon… etc)], but as you can see from this video, he was pretty fast 
:
Credits to Pokelottery for the videos and for some pics incoming
Last point that I want to underline is about the resale.
I am pretty sure market will overflow in the next days/weeks.
As said before, we didnt expect this crowd, but we tried to stem putting the ‘‘dedication obligation’’ for the sketches after the 1st day.
The signature price was surely cheap, but we couldnt change it during the event, because it would have created a lot of disappointment - I hope you can understand about that.
The other 2 organizers are great MTG collectors, 2 of the most well known italian MTG collectors, and they know how to manage an event with this kind of guest (in MTG signatures and events like this one are waaay more popular than in PKMN), so please dont complain about that. We tried our best, and from the Facebook Pokemon group I admin, I see just a lot of happiness and this was the main aim.
I am mainly a collector. I asked around 15 cards to be signed from Arita and no one will ever be for sale. But a lot of other guys will do that, so be careful about market prices. BGS and PSA are not so famous here, so, many of these cards will not be authenticated… so dont be rude pretending a CoA, but just try to do your best to know if the seller was at the event (i.e. asking pic). If you wont buy raw signed cards I personally understand, but please consider the ignorance in here about CoAs.
I will post the artowrks in the comments just to avoid this thread to become a complete mess, and to ease you to comment just on what you prefer.
I really hope you can appreciate this gallery. Pics are from some friends of mine, from some facebook users, Instagram and from private collectors! Enjoy it!
