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:

(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).

5. Tagtool Session at Café Wendel

Andreas Dzialocha talked me into doing some live drawing with the tagtool at Café Wendel, where they have a regular event (once a month) that brings together tagtool artists and musicians for improvised sessions.

Both me and Karotoons, who did the animation, had only used the tagtool maybe once before, and none of us had ever worked together or even met before, so it was really totally extreme improvisation. And lots of fun!

Getting started with the setup with Andreas Dzialocha and Roman Hagenbrock.

(All photos here were taken by Eija Elmgrén.)

There had been some problems with the tagtool box and tablet recognition, and my tablet didn’t work either, but one of the two backup tablets Andreas brought did. Phew! However, it lost the pressure sensitivity just before the performance begun. I figured I could just adjust my style to that …
(Continue reading …)

Turret and Snout photoreport

Last night we did the magical Tagtool session at the Freie Internationale Tankstelle, right next door from us. We had been passing by the place every day for years, curiously checking out what was going on there and trying to think of something nice we could do there. Then Ilan got the idea of doing a Tagtool collaboration, where I would draw images and Ilan would move them around. We had only collaborated on something once before, and since a bit of drama and conflict and schlepping around huge projectors is always good for maintaining a healthy relationship, I said why not.
So after living here for four and two years respectively, we finally said hello to Dida who uses the old little gas station as a studio and art space, and he thought our idea sounded fun.

We actually don’t have any documentation of the main show, where we told the story about the wee wild piggy who finds a tank in the forest, set to the tone of all the songs I could find about pigs and/or tanks that I liked.

We do have some photos from the second show we did, though, which was entirely improvised, and even more fun, anyway.

The following photos were graciously made by the very sweet Hermano Silva:

Ilan suggested I draw “Pig Island”, as described in the song by Sandra Boynton, performed by Scott Bakula(!) – my new favourite song ever …

(Continue reading … it only gets better …)