10 Years of Hourly Comics

All my hourly comics from the last ten years collected in one book!

February 1st is Hourly Comic Day – the day when artists draw a comic for every hour that they’re awake. These ten years of hourly comics provide glimpses on evolving art styles, changing relationships, dreams, fantasies, hurt and recovery, doggies, piggies and the mundanities of unglamorous Berlin life – mouldy walls, coal stoves, the m41 bus and all.

108 pages, black&white interior, A5 size.
You can get it at Stockholm International Comics Festival, May5th-6th, or order directly from me (6 € + postage).

How I do watercolours

I used to paint a lot with watercolours as a child and teenager, but then I started to draw comics seriously, and at least in the 90’s and 00’s I had no affordable way of printing full colour comics, so I worked exclusively in black and white for ages.

Only two years ago or so I started making forays into watercolour comics, with grey wash (The Slow and the Relentless), lots of little piggy sketches in colour, and my first colour comic (China White). Around that time, the Swedish comics publisher Ordbilder Media made a call for comic book pitches, including the option of an 80 page comic book in full colour. I pitched a watercolour piggy comic. The rest is history …

Here are my tools:

Cheap Hahnemühle watercolour board with a nice grain, Pelikan watercolours from 25 years ago, also 25 year old Raphael “Kazan squirrel hair” brush, size 1 or 2 (I’ve used it for watercolours and ink alike), tiny size “00” brush for the smallest details and cleaning up splotches. Staedtler pigment liners (sizes 0.2, 0.3, 0.5), mechanical pencil HB 0.7, lots of coffee … and finally, a Staedtler mars plastic eraser doing the devil’s work.

Half of the watercolour case and the browns and greens are from a Pelikan watercolour set (like this one) that my friend Nicole and I split in 6th grade, when our class cleaned out the crafts closet in our classroom. I supplemented it back then with blues, reds and yellows.

My process with this comic was as follows: I sketched with pencil on the board. Then I inked it with Staedtler pigment liners (they become waterproof after they’ve dried).
Then I committed the horrific act of erasing the pencil from underneath the ink. It does kind of ruin the surface to use eraser. But not enough for me to care, I guess.
Finally, I coloured with the watercolours.

I often did certain parts of the colouring in batches of 4-6 pages, to save time and to make the colour consistent in the parts that should be consistently of the same colour in one scene, like their skins and hair and some of their clothes. This should not be overdone, though, since each page is an entity that must harmonize within itself.

For the yellow morning light I started with a light yellow wash on the whole panel.

Before you’ve acquired truly mad skills, it’s usually best to use a somewhat limited colour palette for each scene, with two base colours and one or two accent colours. Above: brown/teal//light green/greyish blue.
Below (in the flashback): pink/grey//gold

Green is a pain in the arse and difficult to make look bearable. This comic is set in the summer, in the countryside, so it has a lot of greens … For greens in nature I used blue-greens and yellow-brown-greens.

For the man-made swine-made structures, by contrast, I used more “straight-up” greens, to accentuate their artificiality.

(Light green, turquoise and brown are popular colours for village houses in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan!)

My favourite advice on watercolours from Hayao Miyazaki: Use transparent, not sticky, paint; paint another layer after the first has dried.
My favourite advice from Joann Sfar (in one of the Klezmer afterwords): Use “unnatural” colours.

My own advice to myself: Don’t overwork the colouring with too much detail, and let the paper (or base wash) show here and there. With watercolours the most beautiful thing is the natural surface of simple strokes and washes. And keep some tissue/toilet paper handy. You will need it.

Finally, here is a video of me colouring one page in this book. It’s sped-up (obviously) – in reality it took me 35 minutes.

Akvarellfärgläggning: Tinet Elmgren / “Sockerärter” from Tinet Elmgren on Vimeo.

Sockerärter (“Sweet Peas”) will be released by Ordbilder Media at Stockholm International Comics festival, May 7th-8th 2016! I will be there to sign it and talk about it.

SIS/SPX14 SHORT REPORT

Yay, it’s already been a couple of weeks since I got back from Stockholm International Comics Festival. It went really quickly and smoothly and I sold crazy amounts of comics and of course piggy postcards, and I met crazy amounts of fun people, and managed to spend a little quality time with my awesome Swedish comics friends. Best SPX Stockholm ever (but I say that every year …).

I shared a table in the big hall with Ainur. It was a bit cramped so I displayed the back issues of my zine Tunguska in a really classy cardboard box, as you can see below … But I actually sold a few of them too. Maybe if this becomes a recurring theme I should bring a nice-looking cardboard box next time.

The biggest hit was of course The Slow and the Relentless. Yay! I’m glad I printed so many. (There’s even a little review already, here.)


Busy signing comics … photo by Thomas Karlsson!

Lucky for us we got a table here by the benches, where there was a little bit of draft. Others complained about how bad the air was in the big hall, but we were okay.

IMG_6949_SM

And this is how badass we looked, as usual … photo by Lars-Erik/caltex98!

I always try not to bankrupt myself buying comics there, although the temptation is heavy. But I have self-control of steel. This year’s loot:

Postcards from Mangapatriarkatet (podcast about comics by the awesomepants Lisa Medin and Stef Gaines), porcine poster (“Love Swine, Hate Cops”), Fridas resor by Frida Ulvegren, Dagarna i mars by Stef Gaines, Mitt ex som gjorde slut är sur på min flickvän by Tomas Antila, Aomanjuskogen part 2 by Hisae Iwaoka, Plutonium 11 (I have a piggy comic in it), Rysk afton på de övergivna männens poesiklubb by Andreas Rosengren, C’est Bon Anthology 24 – “Hair” (I have a hairy comic in it :3 ), Människomaskinen by Lisa Medin, weird flyer by Daniel Ahlgren, and a free PDF download of Åtta ben från underjorden #4 by Jenny Hannula!

I also got to meet some newborn chicks and their extended family:

One of Valentin's little newborn baby chicks. Nawww ... Hen and cock

And Lady Oscar:

Oscar de Jarjayes <3

It was atypically hot and sunny in Stockholm (except on Monday – clearly the whole city was crying because SIS was over ;_;).

But it was still very nice to walk the last bit home through the lush dirt roads of Brandenburg. :3

Walking the last bit home yesterday evening, returning from Stockholm.

The Slow and the Relentless zine

56 pages of Soviet truck racing action in the Siberian winter!

Alex is crazy about cars and racing. But this winter her stunt driver mom has dragged her along to the snowy depths of the Russian province, and tells Alex she’s too young to drive in Russia, so she is to stay the hell away from cars. Alex soon discovers that the big thing in Urgunovo is truck racing, and for her new classmates, not having a valid licence is not an issue. However, the races, as well as Karim, the total babe sharing a desk with Alex in school, are ruthlessly dominated by Irka, the mayor’s daughter … Does Alex have what it takes to beat her?!

I finished the comic just in time to print a zine for Stockholm International Comics Festival this weekend. (I don’t have time and also I’m evil, so I won’t post the rest of it online until after the festival. Mua hah haa …)

The theme of this year’s SIS is “representation”, and I guess The Slow and the Relentless fits the theme quite nicely. It’s (obviously) inspired by the Fast and Furious films. While Paul Walker as Brian O’Conner is probably the least annoying “obligatory white male lead in a mostly non-white cast” ever, the trope was more obvious and annoying in Tokyo Drift, with Lucas Black as the boring lead and Bow Wow’s much more interesting character inexplicably relegated to the role of “the funny sidekick”. So I wanted to subvert that trope and write a Fast and Furious type story with a black girl as the main character and a funny white girl as a sidekick/comic relief. Yay! V^(oo)^V

So come get it in Stockholm! My table (shared with my awesomepants sister Ainur) is here:

P.S. I’ve got something else that’s brand new and will be for sale at SIS – piggy postcards! Yay!

The piggy postcards *did* arrive in time! #sis14

Tunguska #11

Det tolfte numret på fjorton år är ute lagom till SPX i Stockholm nu i helgen! V`(oo)´V

@turukhtan 's awesome pants new zine for SPX #stockholm #Comics

(Där ligger de och torkar. Jag var en blind jävel och hade missat att maskera biten av flaggan under Willies arm, och märkte inte att den biten fortfarande var skinande vit förrän jag hade tryckt allt redan, så jag fick korrigera varje omslag för hand!)

68 sidor, A4.

Innehåller följande:

Sidan tre-killen – Albert Chisholm: Sjöman, skämttecknare och Spanienfrivillig.
Nästsista scenen i Drivgods kapitel 9, director’s cut! Tre extra sidor actionspäckad handling.
Hundön del 1. Fortsättningen till Drivgods: Willie har återvänt till Sha-Guo i hopp om att kunna hitta tillbaks till sina kamrater på skeppet Örnrockan. Under tiden får hon ett jobb på fiskfabriken, hoppas kunna hänga med någon fiskebåt för att komma vidare mot sitt mål, och har lite ångest rent allmänt.
Alla mina små grannar – serien om alla små insekter och andra rara djur som lever i min trädgård. :3
Anarki i Seriesverige: Det finns en hel del serietecknare i Seriesverige som kallar sig och/eller beter sig som anarkister, identifierar sig med olika anarkistiska strömningar och är till varierande grad posers och trüe. Jag presenterar kort ett par stycken.

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