Happy birthday Monkey King...

Odd and the Frost Giants page 22 (chapter 2)

Made it in time! Whee!


Have nothing especially clever to say and feel a bit worn-out, so I leave you to watch the picture and bugger off myself.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 21 (chapter 2)

I'm a man of my word. Page 21 and another animal.


Oh, and since I'm curious. Is there anyone reading this Odd-comics thingie, who hasn't read the actual book? If there is, please drop me a comment, or email, or Tweet or FaceBook comment or something... Just want to know if there's people who don't know what's going to happen next.

Had loads of fun doing this. I'm pretty surprised how much I enjoy drawing animals.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 20 (chapter 2)

Right. Continuing my romp through Neil Gaiman's "Odd and the Frost Giants". I'm quite pleased of the recent progress of this thingie.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 19 (chapter 2)

As promised. Also re-colored page 18 a little bit. I think they're ok now.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 18 (chapter 2)

...the saga continues. And if everything else in life goes as nicely as "Odd" at the moment I may be able to do another page too during this week. That would be cool.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 17 (chapter 2)

I have to admit that I really like this page. The new style is quicker, better and so much more fun to do.

Me happy.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 16 (chapter 2)

So, this is the new beginning... in many ways. First, the REAL story of Odd starts here. Second, from now on I have to change the text (and even some minor things in the story) more, to make it fit better the comics format. And third, as you can see below (and perhaps have read earlier) I have to change the illustration style... meaning I got quite frustrated of using couple of hours doing the pencils and inks and then spending a week (or even weeks) trying to find time to color the page and even then having too little time to do it well... so, for now on I'm putting heavy emphasis on inks and the greys will only be used to spice the inks a bit.


Right. It will look more or less like this from now on.

I kinda like it... and feel more... comfortable with it. Hope you do too.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants pages 14 and 15 (chapter 1)

Right. This wraps up chapter one.

The previous pages can be found here: page 1, pages 2-3, page 4, page 5, page 6, page 7, page 8, page 9, page 10, page 11, page 12, page 13.

See you in chapter 2... hope it doesn't take as long to finish (10 frigging monts! For 15 pages... Christ. That is so pathetic...)


Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 13 (chapter 1)

Making my way towards the end of chapter 1...

Cheerio.

New year... same job

... but I'm certainly not complaining. I'm havin' fun with "Odd" even though I haven't been able to do finished stuff as much as I wanted lately (read: "during last six to eight monts")

So, during the holidays we (my family) were on the road "up north" visiting relatives. No internet. No email. No Photoshop... it was nice for a change.

BUT... I DID have paper and pencils and ink... And Odd things in my mind. A frost giant, for example (and no, I don't think this is a spoiler... the story IS titled "Odd and the Frost Giants" after all).


...and here's another sketch.


...and now that I got back to office, I wanted to do some vector magic to this one...

Cheerio.

Merry X-mas 2008!

So here's my on-line X-mas card for the year 2008 as promised. I've had this idea in my head for some time... and since it's 20th anniversary of The Sandman, I thought "Aw, what the hell! Let's do it." Hope you like it.

It's called: "His Master's Laundry"




Cheerio.

PS. I think I should also mention just for the record that The Sandman was created by Neil "Scary Trousers" Gaiman and Sam Kieth. And all the characters are trademarks of DC Comics and Warner Bros. Right.

Stroll down memory lane... Babycakes from 2002

When Neil mentioned in his blog that I have every now and again illustrated his stuff, I started thinking about the first time I did that. It was in early 2002. My wife had given birth to our first child the previous summer and I was learning how to be a father. Then I happened to read Neil's short story called "Babycakes"... and it hit me HARD. I had read it before and thought if was great story (in a really disturbing way)... but reading it as a father of a tiny baby, the creepiness took a whole different level... and I IMMEDIATELY decided that I wanted to do a comic of it... and I did.

That was also the first time I ended up in Neil's blog (April 10th and April 12th). Ah, those were the days. I also checked if the comic is still up... and guess what... it IS... thanks to Tara.

But in order to save you from some unnessessary clicking, I decided to show the comic HERE.







Hmm... Actually it's not that bad.

Cheerio.

"The Mystery Project" revealed...

Finally.

I mentioned WAY BACK I was doing this "thing", and now it's finally out.

The story was that I fell in love with Neil Gaiman's poem "The Day the Saucers Came" and I got the idea of having this one picture in the beginning, and then just "zooming out" of it so that there's more and more stuff visible. I did couple of pictures and sent them to Neil and he really liked them. Then I did the rest of the pictures and was really happy with myself... and then Neil asked me what are we going to DO with the illustrations... and I had no idea.

We went back and forth with various ideas (basically anything and everything between... let's say from set of postcards to T-shirt printing to illustrated picturebook)... and then Neil was busy with stuff... and then I was busy with some other stuff... and then we forgot the whole damn thing for a little while... and then we remembered it again.

Now, at some point we added Cat Mihos from NeverWear to the "brainstorm" and we came up with an idea of a poster. So, I did a backround image and put the illustrations on it... and that was it. Everybody was happy.

Here's a picture of the poster.


Go buy it from here. It's a nice poster... and a great poem.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 12 (chapter 1)

See? It didn't take as long as the previous one... I told you.



The end of the year is coming pretty fast. About six months ago I thought that this point I would be doing chapter 3... but life has that tendency to take a perfectly good plan and screw it up totally and completely. Ah, well... that's good ol' life alright!

Right now the bottle-neck in this project is the coloring-thingie. I actually have two inked pages (and one pencilled) just waiting for the coloring, but the problem is that I currently have considerably less "computer-time" to do these fun projects. I'll try to figure out something... but in the mean while... if there's a colorist aching for a project with ABSOLUTELY NO money and VERY LITTLE publicity involved, email me, OK?

Cheerio.

Neil

Here's a picture I sent to Neil as a birthday card. Cute, eh?


Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 11 (chapter 1)

Yup. It sure took it's time... but I promise the next page won't take so long.

Cheerio.

The Graveyard Book

So, I've read (and listened at mousecircus.com) Neil's new book... and I loved it.

Once again Neil tells us stories filled with ghosts and ghouls and monsters. And once again those creatures are described with such accuracy and clarity that they seem more real, more HUMAN, than most of the empty-faced strangers that you'll see walking down the streets in the REAL world.

And once again the most powerfull parts of the stories are not the scary bits (and there are those too), but the more silent and gentle parts where you can almost taste the joy, or sadness, or longing, of the characters... and you can most certainly feel it.

Cheerio.

Odd page 11 inks

YES, I'm still doing things you know...

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 10 (chapter 1)

Here's page 10. I can feel the end of Chapter 1 (slowly) approaching... and it's a good feeling.

Cheerio.