I happen to be a former member of a group  known as BAAU, Bay Area Artists Unite.  it all started on ocad.syste.ms a long time ago on a message board on that website. pretty soon a meet was set up and people went. BAAU was born. we did our best to make our first anthology  and then we sorta became famous. now a lot of us have separated from it and moved on. some left because of college because most of the baau peoples were high schoolers. I left because of many reasons. but i can't stop thinking about them. i still look at their posts or chats and wonder what they're up to. any other former BAAU members here? please share your BAAU stories. i'd like to hear them.

Hi Qwerty.

I was in BAAU for a short time. It was in 1999-2001 ish when I was in high school. A friend of mine at the time (his name is Carlos, but his alias was "Z") introduced me to BAAU. I had gone to a couple meetings but it was hard for me to go on a regular basis. I didn't drive at the time and most of the meetings weren't close to me. I live in San Jose and didn't exactly love riding public transit and bart all the way to SF where many of the meetings were.

I remember there being so many great artists there! I don't remember too many specifics about the people. But I remember how good everyone was at drawing and how neat it was to be amongst other anime fans (there were many into anime in BAAU and I think anime wasn't too mainstream yet). I actually felt pretty intimidated because the artists were all so good.

I don't keep in touch with anyone from BAAU, mostly because I didn't really get to know any of them that well. But I bet if facebook was around back then, it would have been easier to keep in touch with all of them.

Sounds interesting. I never heard of the group, but i'd be interested in joining if it started again. Right now on facebook i'm part of TJ frias fan group. Its a bunch of bay area artist that basically grew up in same neighborhood, Its mosty comic book style art.

BAAU is still very much alive. Their web site is https://sites.google.com/site/baaubayarea/ and they also have a Facebook page.

Thanks for the link dragonimp. I went on there and noticed they are starting their own convention. That sounds really neat. I reached out to them about possible advertising opportunities.