Odd and the Frost Giants

Ahem...

So, ladies and gentlemen, this will be my new mystery project.

When I heard Neil Gaiman was writing another story obout Norse gods I got immediately interested... I've liked very much the way Neil has handled old gods like Odin and Thor and Loki in his past stories... and when I read the beginning of chapter three of Odd from Neil's journal, I knew I wanted to illustrate the story.

After reading the whole thing I started doing sketches and realized I was actually planning a COMIC and not just individual illustrations. The last time I had done anything in comics format was around 2002 (Neil's Babycakes), so I thought it was about time to try and sharpen my very rusty comics skills. I emailed few of the sketches to Neil and asked his permission to try this... and he said yes.

This Odd and the Frost Giants is my ADAPTATION of Neil's story. I try to change the text as little as possible, but since we're talking about two different mediums here, some things have to be changed. This is also MY adaptation of Neil's story and even though I'm trying to be true to the original story, it will be also my view of the story... and I'm sure there will be people who think that I'm getting something wrong or doing something wrong, but I also hope that there will be people who like what I'm doing'...

So. This is where it starts. I will post spreads/pages here as soon as I finish them. Unfortunately I'm doing this on my (very limited) "free time" and therefore I cannot guarrantee when I'll post the next page, but I try to post something new at least once a week (if not finished pages, then sketches or inks or thumbnails or something) furthermore I cannot even guarrantee that I'm able to do the whole story. I've estimated that Odd would take roughly 100 pages as a comic and thats quite a few pictures and quite a few hours. But one thing I can guarrantee: whether it's 10 or 50 or 150 pages I manage to do, I'll do them as well as I possibly can... and I'm going to enjoy every second of doing them.

Oh, by the way, I'll post pages 2 and 3 tomorrow. Hope to see you again then... and feel free to comment.

Cheerio.

Odd things coming...

This is something from my new "mystery project "...

Let's see how this turns out.

;-)

Cheerio.

More quick doodles...

Just amusing myself. This one's called "Floating Around"




Cheerio.

Just staff...

Continued doing pencil-sketch thingies.

Couple days back I got my copy of Neil Gaiman's "Odd and the Frost Giants" and there's this staff mentioned in the story (and no, this is not a spoiler or anything) and I wanted to draw it. So...


Cheerio.

Bet ya thought I wasn't coming back, eh?

Life seems to be too busy for blogging right at the moment, but hopefully things will ease up in the (near) future.

Meanwhile, here's a pencil-drawing-thingie I did couple days back. It's my younger son Julius.




Cheerio.

Capoeira X-mas

So, it's been awhile, eh?

Been busy and all that...

But, Christmas is coming fast and a card has to be made.

The story behing this particular card is that my 6-year old son got REALLY interested about capoeira during last summer (Hämeenlinna is a small town, but we're lucky to have a real capoeira academia, thanks to Gharronne Silva and his friends) and at some point we (me and my wife) gave up and asked the capoeira people what they thought about it... and they said sure, of course he can come and train with the other kids (who are mostly from 8-10 years old). Now Joonas has been training for about four months, twice a week and he can do stuff (cartwheels, cartwheels with one hand, handstand, HEADstand, high kicks, rotating kicks etc.) I HAVE NEVER been able to do, and he just generally loves the whole thing. So, Joonas wanted to give his capoeira instructors a christmas card and I promised to design him one... and that's the picture you can see below.

Merry X-mas.



Cheerio.

Elfgirl

I really like DeviantArt for three reasons:
1) It's a good (and free) place to store your pictures and show them to people
2)There's huge amount of amazingly talented artists and art to watch
3)There's loads of reference material (photos and illustrations) to go through


Take the drawing above for example. I wanted to try and do some traditional pencil drawing stuff and went browsing through the photos in DA. I stumbled across this photo and though to myself 'she's an elf' (not the high and noble Tolkien kind, but wild and pointy-eared Charles Vess -styled creature)

So I drew her...

Cheerio.