Death or Glory (academic)

Being in the midst of finishing my studies, my master's thesis looms over me continuously and ominously like the final boss in a challenging adventure game. It's not hard to imagine that to complete the thesis, things will eventually lead into taking drastic measures on the last night prior to the deadline. To overcome this ominous, academic monstrosity one must muster a raging, relentless spirit and just finish the thing in one final swift strike, no matter the outcome. Either you conquer it, or it conquers you. Death or glory.

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Octoberian turnoff

Behold, the new comic strip which came out in yesterday's Lapin kansa- newspaper. It's in both Finnish and English. Enjoy! :)

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Fan art moment #2 with thoughts about drawing action in comics

Sheik, the "ninja" from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Continuing with fan art, this is a depiction of the ninja-like Sheik from the Legend of Zelda -game series that I drew for a friend. For online I added speedlines and the Zelda logo into the background to give it some spunk. The appearance of Sheik is somewhat a combination of the original Ocarina of Time and recent Super Smash Bros. versions, but with also some of my own slight alterations.

This image is by far my best character drawing to date. It has a strong sense of movement and action, the pose perfectly depicts the agility and determination of the character and both the perspective and body relations are pretty much correct. The image on the back is the only thing that I should have fixed into a proper angle, but I only noticed the fault after inking. So too late to change that. Also the backhand wielding the knife turned out to be exceptionally troublesome. Otherwise, I'm feeling quite proud. Next time I might even use some colors. Seriously, I might.

As I've mentioned before, the Japanese cartoonist Masamune Shirow is my greatest role-model with his highly detailed illustrations and dynamic depiction of action. With this image, I once again feel I'm getting much closer to that. And as a matter of fact, I have a great example of what I mean right here. :)

Breaking down "The knife fight" in Masamune Shirow's Appleseed

The article above is an in-depth deconstruction of one of his best action scenes, which shows wonderfully his mastery in composing complicated fight sequences into a perfect set of still images. Drawing a fight is one of the hardest things to do in comics. What is the correct size and shape of a frame, the direction of movement within and between frames, the window of time between each frame, the positions of character and items, etc.? When it comes to depict action, all these questions and many more are more important than ever. You don't want the fight to be too long nor too short, so that the story keeps going forward but the reader doesn't get lost. The imagery has to be dynamic, not stale. The eye of the viewer needs to be guided so that it moves fluently through the images. If you're interested in drawing comics with elaborate fight scenes, I truly recommend checking this article out.

Fan art moment!

I haven't done Dragon Ball Z fan art (or any type fan art really) since I was a teen, but I had a sudden urge to draw some last night. Here's a depiction of my favorite character from the series, Piccolo, giving "the eye" after getting badly beaten up. The result is quite nice for a quick sketch, even though he looks younger than what I attempted at.

Piccolo mad

Have a nice summer!

I was asked to draw a summer themed cover image for Vasa's facebook -page, and after 8 hours, something like this appeared on my drawing board. Even though, Finnish weather at the moment is all but the type depicted in the illustration, it's the spirit that counts. Also, after a very long time I'm using color pencils again and I must admit that I'm particularly proud of the result in coloring the girl. With this I wish you all a relaxed and awesome Summer and an enjoyable Midsummer's day aka Juhannus!

Remember Babylon Chapter 2: Human Necessities Part 1

Wow, that turned out to be a long title. Anyway, the University of Lapland's student comic publication LTT3 is finally out there. With the contribution of a total 15 artists (including me of course lol), it's another spectacular feat of our students. 

So cool!

Unfortunately, at the moment it can be obtained only from the university shop itself or the art gallery at Valsa. Eventually, it might go online, but as people wait for that to happen, I offer you as a special treat my story from the book. Well, the part that I got finished. The second half is planned for next fall.

There it is! On paper! So ...real.

You can find the previous chapter from the beginning of this blog, but storywise it's not a must to read before this one. ENJOY!

It's a wrap!

After a month's worth of waiting, the first part of chapter 2 for Remember Babylon is finally done. Pages 1-16 took a massive 100 + hours of work and was completed just a day short of two weeks behind the original deadline. Hurrah.... So as always, "a small and easy" project got bloated into Cyclopean proportions and with me also working on programs for the annual student radio Säteily, staying on schedule turned out to be impossible. In fact my "nicely calculated" spring plan got screwed because I ended up giving this comic more than a week more than I had calculated. But what is done is done, and hopefully I can use this as a "demo", even though the story gets cut short. I've actually played with the idea of trying to sell the story to a publisher. They might even get interested. But here're more production images and as a bonus, the first page of the comic! LTT 3 will hopefully come out in two weeks so stay tuned to see the entire thing and all the great comics by our University's students.

1. Okay, so this is my new profile picture for the introduction page of LTT3. I'm a monkey, tehehehee.

2. Here's the whole thingy, 16 pages, done with a 0,7 and 0,5 mm technical pencils onto basic copy paper. Why the holes you ask? Because this paper was on sale. I counted it took me 3-4 working hours per page. Then begins the inking.

  

3. The inking phase took about the same time as the preliminary penciling even though "I only needed to re-draw the same lines", which of course isn't true. During the penciling phase I leave a lot of details out, because "I'll take care of them during inking". As you can see from the image below, the pencil drawn rocky area is much plainer than the inked one.

4. After inking, there's digitalization and applying the finishing touch in Photoshop. This includes removing mistakes, adding frame borders, dialogue and sound effects and, as in this image, adding shadows to large areas. I'm not sure how pleased I'm with the end results though. We'll see how well the digi-black fits together with the rest of the image when the final print arrives.   

5. Here we have page 1. You can compare my draft from the very beginning

 to the final results. Each page was drafted in the similar fashion so that I could see how the layout works. For this opening page, I first thought to repeat the same sequence as with Chapter 1 (the three growing frames), but it just wouldn't work. Also to give more space for the "evasion frame", I decided to remove one image from "the lizard and the bug"-scene. I'm pretty sure the build up for the evasion is okay even with one image less.

PS. The next time I'll put this much time and effort into a comic, I'll expect something in return. Like a statue. That would be awesome. Or a Lego-set.