THE LAST MATCH HAS OPENED
You can see photos of the exhibition and all the individual artworks in the exhibition’s Flickr photostream.
As it turns out, Ilan and I are, after all, not the only ones who have made “real comics” – Reinis Pētersons and João Chambel did too! Yay!
Some random favourites: Kerascoët, Roberta Gregory, Amanda Vähämäki, Sergio Ponchione, Rokudai Tanaka, Peggy Adam, Olegti, Kai Pfeiffer … Actually, almost all of them are really great.
Making piggy pictures
I searched out a couple of new photos of myself from Ilan’s vast photo archive, in which I actually look okay, to use for promotional purposes.
I don’t think anyone would want to use the photo below in an article about my book, but I borrowed it anyway. >:(:))
Making piggy pictures at Wildpark Schorfheide …
TUNGUSTKAN’
I like sewing – clothes, household items and plush piggies, for example. Often I tend to break out in sewing madness when I’m stuck with one of my comic projects. However, one problem is that there are few patterned fabrics that are even remotely badass. It’s all just flowers and (in the best cases) cutesy little animals in pastel colours.
There are some borderline cases of “slightly badass” patterns, like a some of the fabrics designed by Tula Pink or the ‘Mendocino’ line by Heather Ross. Especially Tula Pink is really inspiring. As a designer she has a background in the music industry, so she knows her way around skulls and monsters, and her fabric designs are, in her own words, “soft and sweet but still cool and interesting”. And she lives in a farmhouse way out in the countryside. (In other words, part of me would secretly like to be her :3 …)
This summer I spent one month in the countryside outside Bonn looking after my doggie friend Henry while his parents went on vacation. With the change of scenery (and being stuck in a book project) I got a rush of inspiration to design my first fabric pattern …
The wild boar, death’s-head hawkmoth, dung beetle, black slug and withered brambles can all be found in the forests of Germany. I didn’t personally see any wild boars and death’s head hawkmoths during my month in Bonn, but the other three elements I saw daily in great masses.
An even more badass steel blue colour scheme:
The lovely Spoonflower allows anyone to upload their own patterns and order prints in small quantities without ruining yourself. They ship worldwide, too. Here is my profile on the site.
After some testing I got the two above colour schemes to look like I wanted them to in print. And yesterday I made a slightly less natural scheme — here you can also se how the pattern repeats:
And here is a variation that I made recently, with diagonally distributed boars.
I still have to get a test swatch of the “cherry” colour scheme to see how it really looks in print. :3
I’m sure there will be more fabric patterns from TungusTkan’ (TungusCloth). And maybe TungusTkan’ will even sell the fabrics some day …
ARTICLE ABOUT RAPE/REVENGE FILMS
Many people assume that I’ve been inspired by rape-revenge movies in my comics about Eva. As a matter of fact I had hardly seen any such films when I drew these comics.
But some of them seem like good fun, so I looked a bit closer at the genre in an article for the new blog of my publisher Epix. Read it here (in Swedish) …
Screencap from the film Thriller – A Cruel Picture, at which I take a closer look in the article.
Miriam Katin font
I will soon start lettering the Swedish edition of We Are On Our Own by Miriam Katin for the publisher Epix. It is the story of a little Jewish girl and her incredibly brave and smart mother, who go underground in Hungary during the Second World War, based on the author’s own childhood experiences.
I’ve made a custom digital font for the book. The original is lettered by hand with a graphite pencil. In order to make a digital font look like graphite, I made gigantic 2400 dpi scans of the text from the original pages, so I could create bitmap images of the individual letters with lots of fine detail. Then, when I lettered, I set the opacity at 50%.
The end result looks surprisingly much like graphite pencil lettering. :o/ Click the image below to see a sample (in English, because the Swedish translation wasn’t ready yet at that point).
© Miriam Katin
