No Zinefest for me …
This weekend it’s Zinefest, but I’m too §$%&ing ill … Today I had to go out a bit, and on the bus home I got one of those conditions when slime drips down your throat, and it makes your eyes water like crazy, but if you cough or breathe too hard you’re going to puke! Yay!
In fact I was able to breathe very flatly and with great focus and keep swallowing desperately for about 10 minutes until the danger was over. But I’m in no state for selling zines …
Sketchdump!
Recently I finished this sketchbook, with its slightly questionable cover:
Here are some previously unpublished sketches from that book! V^(oo)^V
Belated Helsinki Comics Festival photodump
The Islamic congregation of Helsinki and some old villa behind the trees
Doggie paparazzi photos
Essential artist’s supplies: loads of sketchbooks, Russian and Chinese watercolours, and also Aspirin. :3
Piggy window painting
At Sarjakuvakeskus (the comics centre) in Helsinki they had a table on which you could try out the pens they sell at their cafe. So I drew some proletarian piggies …
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Stef Gaines was our super special guest and made lots of photos:
* Me sewing zines in the last second (Ainur and Stef were awesomepants and helped me fold them, for which they were rewarded with copies of Electric Tsunamis)
* Ainur and I being cool at our table, as always (with Nicola in the background, doing something indeterminable)
* Coffee and the Mochi dummy (Mochi is a character in Ainur’s extraordinary comic Goldenbird!)
* Finnish pirogue and the Mochi dummy
* Me at Sarjakuvakeskus, wearing extremely Finnish, Mymlan-style clothes that Ainur gave me after having grown out of them (the pattern persists even in adulthood!), yet drinking German lemonade
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… Anyway, back in Berlin I saw this fluffy white doggie at Frankfurter Tor:
Helsinki Comics Festival piggy drawings
The highlight of the festival was probably when a slightly inebriated Russian showed up, distraught that he had lost his tour bus and had to figure out how to get home to Vyborg somehow, in this hostile city where nobody spoke Russian and police officers gave him the finger when he tried to ask them for help. Luckily I actually did speak Russian, so I showed him the way to the central train station, from where he was hopefully able to catch a taxi to the port. :-/
On Saturday I sold 34 piggy postcards and some books and zines, and I painted some watercolour piggies (and some kind of disproportional/non-euclidic shiba):
On Sunday my comics business was totally dead, so I painted “desolate piggies in melancholy landscapes”, as Ainur dubbed them:
Little baby Sergei ♥
Winter 1998/1999. For years we thought Ainur had lost this photo, but this summer one of the paper copies turned up!
There are very few photos from when Sergei was little, because at the time I thought I had film in my camera, but actually didn’t, and somehow mum barely made any photos of him with her camera. But luckily Ainur made a few when she came to visit. This is one of them, and it’s the one photo where you can clearly see Sergei’s eyes! As he got bigger, his face got fatter so you couldn’t really see his eyes anymore. :3
