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 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 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.

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.

"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 6 (chapter 1)

Right. I promised to Dan that I would say few words (and show some pictures) about the technique and the different steps from a sketch to a finished page... but when I managed to finish this page, I just wanted to post this as soon as possible. I'll show the steps in my next post. Promise.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 5 (chapter 1)

...and I'm currently finishing the pencils for page 6.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants page 4 (chapter 1)

...and I'm inking page 5 as we speak.

Cheerio.

Odd and the Frost Giants pages 2-3 (chapter 1)

There. First two pages.

Cheerio.

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.

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.

Just couple more pictures...

Just something I found from my hard drive. Tha'ss all.

"Troll"


And "Jack"



Cheerio.

Past Victories II: Shoggoth's Old Peculiar

So, since I'm not going to tell you (at this point) more about... that thing... I mentioned earlier (well, other than it's coming along just fine, thank you)...

I thought it might be a good time to do a second part of my 'Past Victories' series.

Right. Before 'A Study In Emerald' poster thing we did a chapbook (we meaning me, Neil, Greg Ketter and Bob Garcia) of Neil's fabulous short story 'Shoggoth's Old Peculiar'. It was launched in the Fiddlers Green convention in Minneapolis in november 2004. It was loads of fun. I even did a signing with Neil and that was very much fun and VERY odd.

Anyways... here's some illustrations from the book.







... and here's a photo of the signing... umm right. (photo by Michelle Larson)


And I checked Dreamhaven website and found out they are still selling the book in here so go buy it... shoo!! And while you're at it, buy some other books too. Greg is a great chap and has a really cool comic/bookshop

Cheerio.

But, I DO real things too

It's not all just messing around with ArtPad or DeviantArt, or doing fun stuff with Neil.

This for example is a theater poster I did to a local group. The musical is about this gypsy tribe in Russia during 19ht century or so. And there's love and death and all that...


I mean I work TOO... you know.

Cheerio.

Past Victories I: A Study in Emerald

Since some of you may be unaware about my past doings I thought it might be wise to take a brief look to (few of) my past works, don't you think. (And for those who ARE aware about my past doings... please bear with me. This won't take that long... promise.)

Sometime around 2004 I illustrated Neil's magnificent 'A Sudy in Emerald'. It was published as a broadsheet poster by Dreamhaven Books and it seems to be still on sale in here


Later I made a kinda small-newspaper-type-of-PDF-thing of it for Neil's web page. And the PDF (about 5.1Mb) can be downloaded in...
here

I really loved doing the little ads.






Cheerio.