Live Piggy Drawing at Zielona Góra

Last night I did a live drawing session at the bar Zielona Góra in Friedrichshain. I hadn’t done anything like it in a long time and I was a bit nervous. V^(oo)^;V It was hard to draw on a tablet and in such low resolution …

Here are some of the highlights:

Not everybody got that this was the Ernst Thälmann park (maybe not so strange, since I temporarily forgot which way he’s supposed to be looking, argh V`(oo)´;V) …

This could have been even better animated.

Piggies from the rough side of town.

This was the best part of the session. I first drew this image. It was meant as a little story in itself: maybe the piggy man has been out drinking all night and is now trying to cure his hangover and his conscience with a coffee, while his wife has come to pick him up, knowing that he would be here, same as every time, and they are frozen in this moment where she is pausing for a second in the doorway, looking at him, looking at their life and how it has turned out to be.

But luckily some members of the audience intervened and demanded to change this devastatingly sad story. They came up to me and requested that it should be a happy love story: they should be strangers meeting for the first time, the piggy woman should come sit down next to the piggy man at the bar, she should have a glass of champagne, and they should talk and then kiss!

So I drew it as a “live comic”, erasing parts and drawing in new parts. It was especially fun to show their conversation with simple expressions like eyebrow wiggles and blushing. (Unfortunately I didn’t make screenshots of it!)

And then they walked home together. Awww.

(Although I guess even with the addition of the love story, the story could still end up in my vision of “the morning after/this is how our life has turned out” some time down the line, and it will be even more devastating because that diner is where the piggy woman and the piggy man first met. It will be a closed circle of eternal doom. Yeaahh.)

Dinner and a Story, December 29th at FIGO


(Click to see it bigger!)

This will be an evening that stimulates all senses equally. The three course dinner is an integral part of an audio-gustatory-olfactory-sensory-visual performance … And it will all be pleasant, so don’t worry.

We will also present some exciting hand crafts made by my mum, textile artist and book binder, as well as some comic books by myself and my sister. Perfect for those christmas gifts that you forgot to buy, or whatever. V^(oo)^V

We’ll charge 10 € for the full experience, including non-alcoholic drinks. (Alcoholic drinks are extra.)

Seating during the performance is limited, so please email me or click “attending” at the facebook event page! (But you can of course drop by later on to just hang out.)

Tinet’s event schedule – winter 2011

12th-13th of November: 24h Comics Marathon Berlin
In a haze of coffee and club mate, we’ll draw our asses off at lashopp in Friedrichshain, from noon to noon!

24th-26th of November: Gothenburg Comics Festival
I will partake in this festival in my favourite part of my favourite Swedish city with a small exhibition, featuring part of the final chapter of Driftwood. That comic is quite significantly influenced by the period when I lived in Hjällbo and went to high school in the same building complex where the festival is held. I’ll also sell some books and zines to the unsuspecting audience.

Late December: Still nameless “dinner performance” at Figo, Berlin
The Elmgren family will unite, with technical and emotional support by Ilan Katin, in a performance that speaks to all the five human senses. (And maybe also the 6th sense!?) We will serve a three course dinner of traditional food from three ethnic minorities of Finland, accompanied by an audiovisual performance in three chapters. Our arts, textile and book binding crafts and comics will be exhibited and for sale. More details to follow!

Live drawing at the release party for Serier mot rasism

Last Friday was the release party for Comics Against Racism, a comics anthology that I have the great honour of being part of. Ilan and I offered to do live drawing at the release party. Malmö is so close that we took the morning bus there, drew, and then took the next morning bus back home. Whee!

When we arrived, I got lost, as I always do in Malmö (even during all the years when I lived in southern Sweden and visited Malmö many times). Malmö has new science fiction railway stations, and nowadays you can get off the Denmark trains already at Triangeln. Since I have also gotten used to Berlin’s enormous distances, I was convinced that NOOO, Möllevången CAN’T be that close!!!

So I dragged along Ilan on a long walk in a circle around the entire neighbourhood Möllevången, where we were supposed to go. Maybe I was intuitively drawn to this building:

Vattentornet, Malmö, Sweden
(Photo by Ilana2010 on Flickr)

The water tower that the locals call “kuken” (the dick), as Sofia Lindh later informed us. There were lots of hot hairy guys playing with balls around the base of the dick when we walked past there. :3

In the end we went to an internet cafe full of hairy uncles and checked the map, and realised how close we had been to our destination the whole time, as Malmö is in fact a quite small city. Duuuh.

We checked out the final exhibition of the Malmö comics school, and there we also came across Henri Gylander, who recommended for us to go to the lovely Anarchist book store Amalthea bokkafe, where they had delicious vegan food, wifi, and also a little release party for the latest issue of Mattias Elftorp’s comic Piracy is Liberation. There was even a nice doggie.

Eventually we went back to the venue, Restaurang Bodoni, and set up the Tagtool. Bizarrely enough, we had no technical problems whatsoever. So we started to draw a bit, and at some point people turned on the lights and cleaned up, and we were, like, “What, is it already over?”

I totally lose my mind when I’m drawing, and since we for some reason didn’t take any breaks at all, I pretty much didn’t notice that there actually were other people in the room.

Så, öh, jag vill be om ursäkt till alla underbara människor som jag totalt ignorerade … FÖRLÅT! (T_T)

Here are some photos and screenshots of what we drew:

The wild piggy who loves to ride his scooter. But traditionally it’s a sport for domesticated piggies, and the domesticated piggies who ride scooter ridicule and despise the wild piggy and tell him he can’t ride at all …

The hypno toad

The piggy in the tree house

The piggy in the hammock

The cosmonaut piggy

Okay, you get the pigture …

Ilan drew, too, but I’m so egocentric that I totally forgot to make any screencaps of his stuff as I animated it. :o(

The by far most fun part of the bus trip, which went partly across the sea on a ferry, was that the Russian school ship Sedov was docked in Rostock!!! ♥

Note the sailors working in the rig …

This is what I looked like for hours after seeing Sedov, both on the way out and on the way home.

* * *

Big (pig) thanks to Sofia Lindh, Henri Gylander, Emelie Stigwan and Robert Pettersson for putting together this anthology, especially to Henri for being excited about our live drawing and Sofia for wonderful tea and conversations as we hung out a bit, before we took the train back to catch our bus in Copenhagen. Piggy thanks also to Frida Ulvegren and her stand-up comedy with an “Argh! Nooo!” kind of humour, as well as the bands Slag Från Hjärtat and Mango Bi Family and DJ Joakim Derlow, who provided challenging topics for which to draw (piggies).

Back from SPX

I just finished a deadly deadline, so it took some time before I could return to the finer things in life, such as actually posting something on this blog. (Other finer things I shall soon return to: drawing comics and also my home and garden.)

But anyway — Stockholm SPX11!

I’ve written a long report in Swedish with lots of photos on the Epix blog. Here is a short report in English with less photos:

Elmgren table with a bit of Katin on the side

Tunguska #9 sold quite nicely. It actually brought in more money than the Eva book — maybe because the Eva book was just so 2009/2010.

I’d had nightmares not only about forgetting to bring my zines to SPX, but also of people accusing me of being a paedophile :3, but actually none of those scenarios came true! There was just one guy who came by and said he’d seen my pedoporn drawings and was surprised that I’m a girl and not a guy. Oookay …

I had also been worried that no one would want the free retired Eva zines that I gave out, but they all disappeared long before Saturday / Free Comic Book Day was over. Whee!

Horst, Tinet and Ainur

I shared my tables with Epix/Horst Schröder and Ainur with Goldenbird, and Ilan brought along a Hungarian publication of his mum’s work, and also a zine of his own!

The Tagtool live drawing event that I organized with Ilan went quite well. There are lots of photos on the live drawing blog. I had to jump in when somebody got ill, so I also got to tagtool a bit at SPX. Here is a screenshot of what I drew …

Tinet Elmgren

I hope to soon be just like the piggy, riding my bike home through the nightly countryside. V^(oo)^V

Next Page »