Mini Comic Fair at Edinburgh Book Festival

Edinburgh Book Festival (probably my favorite of all festival activities here in the burgh) was hosting lots of graphic novel related events. There was even a Mini Comic Fair which I went to last Saturday with Aimee. I LOVE comic books, I read probably the same amount of books as I read cartoons as a kid (both is a lot). Recently I have been going through this "blast from the past" fascination with all things sequential. As much as I love illustration and product design this is a nice change. And also reading it and not drawing is quite relaxing ;)

We went first to have a browse and then decide whether we wanted to go back and buy things. And yes, we did! I was armed with a £30 budget (and ended up overspending) and one of my favourite purchases was this:

(Presented to us by lovely young Daisy in the background).
The guy behind them was a great chat and offered to sign the books for us.

And he even drew pictures! How exciting. My name always gets misspelled, and so does Aimee's, so we both were being morons making a big deal of it. And despite all this fuss, he did mess it up on the second book...

To make up for it he made a mistake on Aimee's too. It was pretty funny ;)

The books themselves are essays on film related things (one of them is food in films). They are pretty good, but I will perhaps say more about them next time, when I read them all :)

And here's another shot of Daisy, the dog who'd like to eat all the other dogs.

Cat Wedding!

Last June and July were two months when I have had some very special queries. They were all to do with... weddings! I was very happy to partake in preparation for someone's Very Important Day. Every of those queries was a bit different. This is the first one I will post up. I was to create an illustration of Mr and Mrs Cat on their wedding day, later to be used on the wedding favors. It was VERY exciting to draw :)

I now can't wait to see the picture of what the finished favors looked like! And do I have to mention that if you ever wanted to order anything customized you just need to drop me an e-mail?

Character design and problems that follow

 Few days ago I was reading Rod Hart's post about naming characters. It was an interesting read (as most things that he writes are, so I do recommend going over and having a read) and it got me wondering about how I normally go about naming the characters.

I have never had the problem with accidentally naming two people the same name. I have done something else though, equally silly. After conceiving Malin and all of her back story, future story, current affairs and a dozen of supporting characters I have moved on to halfheartedly working on another story. The main character was also a girlie, similar age, going by the name Rose. It was an entirely different setting (Malin's world was urban fantasy, Rose was a more of an epic fantasy - I had to look these up, honest). The backstories were different. Everything about them was different, apart from one - the way they looked. If you removed all of the surrounds you ended up with two black haired chicks with a bob. I spent a lot of time trying to make them look different. Rose as the newer one was bound to be the one that got redesigned. And I played around with this a lot, but in the end in my head she had BLACK HAIR. And there was nothing I could do about this apart from set this aside and come back later (unfortunately, similar fate has later met Malin. Perhaps the time to dig them back up is approaching?)

And here is just the faces in black and white. I suppose, the removal of all surrounds takes place here.

At the moment I am just lost. Are they really that similar? I can't tell anymore.

Help! ;)

(For real. What do YOU think?)

Semestern 2

A prize goes to someone who guesses where *exactly* this is. Kinda hint in the title ;)