Another excerpt from that side-project I’m working on - Red Season.
It’s been on the backburner temporarily, while I got Stockholm’s International Comics Festival sorted out, and then I got all super-focused on Fathoms of the Sky - but I felt like I needed to get back to this, so here is a little bit of page six.
Halfway through!
I am a Pretty Good Artist. I have worked professionally since 2006. I have worked on properties like G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, Transformers, and a host of others. You can see my work everywhere, from toy packages to comic books to DVD covers. I currently work for MinoMonsters, where I have…
I don’t often reblog things on this here blog - I prefer to keep it for my own stuff - but oh my blessed socks, this post. It is so true, it’s ridiculous.
No one sees the flaws in my art better than I do, believe you me, and there are days when I just want to give it all up and go live in a hole in the ground. But I don’t, because even at its most difficult, even at its subjective worst, art is still fun. It’s something my hands and my brain itch to do.
And every now and then, you draw something that’s so right that you realise that this is why you keep doing it.
… Also, someone wiser than I once said that writing is harder for writers than it is for those who aren’t - and I think that’s true for artists as well. As long as you are invested in your work, you are always going to find more fault in it than others do - because it matters to you how it all turns out.
AWESOME!! Kvarnen är ett MÅSTE! Bor Song of Storms snubben där i ditt zeldauniversum också? XD
Another Legend of Zelda: Redesign-update!
This time, it’s Kakariko Village!
This is inspired by a lot of things, both in the Zelda franchise itself and other things.
I wanted the Kakariko villagers to be craftsmen - hardworking people, far from the bustle of Hyrule Castle Town but providing Hyrule with a good bit of its goods and necessities. So the first picture features, from left to right - the village blacksmith: wearing leather gloves and apron to protect herself from the fiery forge, but sleeveless and wearing shorts to cope with the sweltering temperatures. Next is the blacksmith’s little brother, who is in charge of herding the village sheep - and cuccoos. Next to him is the village baker, and on the far right one of the old men of the village - who might be the old miller, now that I think about it.
Again, I’ve gone with a cohesive colour scheme, to tie them all together visually, as well as a shared symbology: blues and greens and whites for grass and sky and clouds, and symbols reminiscent of sheperd’s staffs and pinwheels.
Second picture - Map and architectural details. I wanted Kakariko village to be reminiscent of the OoT version, with its tiled roofs and pale walls, but took inspiration from elsewhere as well - the village of Dali from Final Fantasy IX, for example, as well as Kusanagi Village from Okami, and Ni no Kuni’s Ding Dong Dell.
The central theme is, obviously, wind. I have a soft spot for windmills and pinwheels, so I went with that. The village is centered on its big windmill, which grinds wheat to flour for the big village bakery, and helps keep the blacksmith’s forge running, and providing wind-power for the local inventors’ experiments. This is very much a working village: layabouts are discouraged, and they take pride in their work.
Third picture - a mood-setting piece, rather sketchy and unfinished, but I wanted to get a feel for the village’s location and mood. It’s high up on the slopes of a mountain, where the high winds never cease blowing. Think late summer, when the sun is still warm but cooler air begins tempering the breeze.
Fourth picture is, of course, the obligatory cuccoos. Used exclusively as egg-layers, of course - chicken is, for self-preservation reasons, not on the Kakariko menu.
So let’s talk about pens.
Because as a comic artist, I adore pens, and finding the right pen to ink with is the sweet and glorious holy grail at the end of quite a troublesome quest. What works for you might not be what works for others - we look for different things in our pens, and thus end up liking different pens.
Me, I tend to get a bit nervous while inking - you know, in case I screw something up and have to start over - with the result that my inking can get a bit… robot-like. Very stiff and mechanical. It looks horrible. So I’ve spent quite a lot of years searching for a pen to help combat that tendency. Ergo, a brush pen! But the world of brush-pens is quite a jungle to cut your way through.
Eventually, though, I found the Legendary One True Pen
It’s this one - the Pilot Pocket Brush Pen (Soft), disposable.
It is absolutely glorious. Unlike many other brush-pens, the Pilot Pocket Soft does not have a bristle-tip - but a felt one. A bit like Faber-Castell’s brush pens, except less fibrous and more.. rubbery, I guess. It glides over the paper smoothly, without ever splaying out the way bristle tips do - while at the same time giving you a huge range of line-width variation. It can go from needle-thin to a line as thick as the tip is broad with a twist of your hand. 
Lines all done with the same pen-tip.
I tried it once and then fell absolutely in love with it. I do almost all of my non-digital inking with it these days - certainly all of Fathoms of the Sky is inked with it - and I don’t know where I’d be without it. It’s lovely to handle, the brush tip stays smooth and non-bristly from start to finish, the ink in the pen is a good, solid black….
The only thing wrong with it is that it’s disposable - i.e: non-refill, which means you run out of ink and have to get a new one eventually. I’ve tried to jury-rig my own refill at some point, but due to how the pen is constructed, this necessitates pulling the tip out, which almost certainly ruins it.
In my experience, though, it’s pretty long-lasting. Even when it seems empty, it just keeps going - and even if it does run out of steam, put it aside and leave it alone for a while, and it might just be back to normal when you pick it back up. I try to conserve ink by filling in the black fields with liquid ink and brush instead, but yes, sadly, it does eventually die.
I wouldn’t trade it for the world, though. It makes inking comics a dream:
Panel from Fathoms of the Sky IV: Wavebreaker, all inked with the same Pilot Pocket Soft.
It gives me all the line-width variation of an actual brush, with all of the control of a normal pen, it just feels good in my hands. The only very minor downside - besides its lack of refill-ability - is that it does make a rubbery squeaky noise when you’re drawing broader lines, but that’s such a minor quibble that it’s hardly worth mentioning.
There’s a hard-tipped version as well, but I’ve only just recently invested in one, so I haven’t used it enough to merit a review. Thus far it’s spooking me a bit, though: at first touch on paper, the tip feels almost like a regular Staedtler pigment liner, but when you push down a bit, it starts to give like a brush-tip, which makes it feel like you’ve accidentally broken the tip. Will experiment further with it (might try to use it for crosshatching Fathoms issue 7) before I give my final verdict.
Lunch-break sketch/painting - speedy, and therefore rather unfinished. I needed a break from pencilling the last issue of Fathoms of the Sky.
Didn’t really know what to draw, so I defaulted to one of my mainstays: grumpy samurai dudes and wavy diagonals. … Poor Masahiro looks grumpy every time I draw him. One of these days, I’ll have to draw him smiling.
… I also need to seriously consider his costume design. But that’s for another day, when I actually have time to work on it.
Three pages for the glorious round-robin comic that is Stafettserien - yes, the corpse lives!
Stafettserien is a Swedish-language (well, mostly) ridiculous round-robin comic that a couple of friends and I started drawing in college, which then just sort of kept going and going - a bit like a pileup on the highway. Or a trainwreck. It started something completely different, but has now become this… crazy blend of videogame jokes, in-jokes and competition to see who can do the silliest plot-twist. We’ve all got some incarnation of ourselves in the comics - these pages obviously feature myself (with hair only slightly exaggerated), though in a parodic play on my fascination for Russian history/culture.
I decided to use my latest set of pages as an opportunity to practise both motion-dynamics/action sequences and Manga Studio skills. Still not up to scratch on either one, but getting better.
My personal rule is to never spend too much time on any page for Stafettserien - because it’s a silly project and I probably shouldn’t - which is why there’s wonky anatomy and bad screentone-decisions all over these pages.
…. And yes, I have been playing old-school JRPGs lately.
“Old Ghost” has been picked up by 215 Ink!
It’s a supernatural spy thriller written by Mark Bertolini, co-created by Rolf Lejdegård, illustrated by me. And with a logo designed by Vic Boone creator Shawn Aldridge.
The comic will be released in four parts digitally as they come out, leading up to the release of the print version of the graphic novel. Some sneaky previews:
http://redmalm.blogspot.se/2013/05/old-ghost-and-215-ink.html
This is a comic drawn by a friend of mine. It looks great and I’m SO buying the print version of this when it’s released. Also check out his excellent sci-fi webcomic called Wayfar.
Yes! Olov is awesome, and does awesome things - and is possibly one of the nicest people I know. Congrats to him on getting picked up by 215 Ink!
Now go on - read Wayfar while you wait for Old Ghost to be released.
Legend of Zelda: Redesigned - Minor Character Edition!
I felt it was time to get started on designing some of the minor characters - so I did.
Up top is Nabooru. I always liked her OoT-role as a sage, even if I was (as previously mentioned) never fond of the fetishised harem-girl look - so I decided I wanted to do my own version. In LoZ: Redesigned Nabooru is part of the same diplomatic mission that gets Ganondorf into Hyrule Castle - unlike him, though, she is genuinely there with diplomatic intentions. A bit flippant and sarcastic, but a good person at heart.
She claims the sword is “ceremonial”, but that’s only to get it past the pesky castle guards: it has an edge so sharp you could shave with it.
Middle picture is Kaepora Gaebora - yes! That annoying owl from OoT/Majora’s Mask who babbled on endlessly about stuff you didn’t pay attention to and then tricked you into hearing it again! No project of mine is truly complete without a bird-person, so I made one. In my version, Kaepora’s role is to show up every now and then and provide Zelda with information, hints, tips and tricks, etc., and to explain game-mechanics. When s/he shows up, s/he has a tendency to babble a bit, get lost in hir sentences and be a general klutz. And yes, that is a tiny portable Gossip Stone s/he’s got.
Down at the bottom, from left to right: Tingle, the Happy Mask Salesman and Beedle!
Tingle has creeped me out since he first turned up in Majora’s Mask, so I decided to run with the creepiness and make him a fence of stolen goods in Hyrule Castle Town’s less… salubrious quarters. Link runs errands for him sometimes. He’s obsessed with rupees, and has an incredibly creepy way of talking. “Koolooh Limpah” is the password to get into his hideout.
The Happy Mask Salesman… Whoah. Was there ever a more sinister character? All happy smiles on the outside, sinister mask-deals on the inside. In LoZ: Redesigned, he runs a skeevy mask-trading business in the bad end of the Castle Town, providing a game-long sidequest, and speaks as though he knows more than he rightly should about the current state of the kingdom/world.
Beedle, unlike the other two, is a genuinely good guy who just happens to live in a less than stellar place: his shop is on the edge of the bad part of town, and he knows Link as that kid who occasionally nicks something from the shop. He’s too kind to do much about it, though.As always Anna continues being a monster of productivity and spew out solid concept pieces
these are awful.
Nabooru looks like a guy
and that’s supposed to be KAepora Gaebora? That looks more like Prince Komali, or another Rito from Wind Waker, as opposed to an alternative form of the Sage of Light. it looks too young.
I have no idea what you were going with with Tingle but you got his character entirely wrong.
Same thing goes for the Happy Mask Salesman, but the biggest tragedy here is that you didn’t make him look like Miyamoto.
beedle, ehh, no where near as cool as his regular, goofy, funny design.
Why thank you. :P
Nabooru has a big nose, yes - but what else makes her “look like a guy”? It’s not a traditionally “feminine” nose, I think it fits. ‘Sides, it’s better than her hideously racist caricature nose from OoT :)
And as for your other criticisms - this is supposed to be a reimagining: a whole new game with a different approach to things. The fact that the characters look and act different is kind of the point. This takes place in an entirely imaginary place in the Zelda-timeline, where these characters have been born and reborn a dozen times, and thus are different from what’s already in the games.
While we can disagree on Tingle all day long (I find him incredibly creepy in MM, so I intentionally made this reimagined version of him creepy), what is it about the Happy Mask Salesman I’ve gotten wrong (other than the fact that I didn’t bother making him look like Miyamoto)? He’s definitely sinister in MM, both in-game and in the manga, so I went with that.
You are very welcome to dislike it if you think I’ve done something that’s ugly or inappropriate, of course, but I think using words like “biggest tragedy” to describe a rather harmless for-fun fanart project might be taking things a bit too seriously, don’t you think?
Legend of Zelda: Redesigned - Minor Character Edition!
I felt it was time to get started on designing some of the minor characters - so I did.
Up top is Nabooru. I always liked her OoT-role as a sage, even if I was (as previously mentioned) never fond of the fetishised harem-girl look - so I decided I wanted to do my own version. In LoZ: Redesigned Nabooru is part of the same diplomatic mission that gets Ganondorf into Hyrule Castle - unlike him, though, she is genuinely there with diplomatic intentions. A bit flippant and sarcastic, but a good person at heart.
She claims the sword is “ceremonial”, but that’s only to get it past the pesky castle guards: it has an edge so sharp you could shave with it.
Middle picture is Kaepora Gaebora - yes! That annoying owl from OoT/Majora’s Mask who babbled on endlessly about stuff you didn’t pay attention to and then tricked you into hearing it again! No project of mine is truly complete without a bird-person, so I made one. In my version, Kaepora’s role is to show up every now and then and provide Zelda with information, hints, tips and tricks, etc., and to explain game-mechanics. When s/he shows up, s/he has a tendency to babble a bit, get lost in hir sentences and be a general klutz. And yes, that is a tiny portable Gossip Stone s/he’s got.
Down at the bottom, from left to right: Tingle, the Happy Mask Salesman and Beedle!
Tingle has creeped me out since he first turned up in Majora’s Mask, so I decided to run with the creepiness and make him a fence of stolen goods in Hyrule Castle Town’s less… salubrious quarters. Link runs errands for him sometimes. He’s obsessed with rupees, and has an incredibly creepy way of talking. “Koolooh Limpah” is the password to get into his hideout.
The Happy Mask Salesman… Whoah. Was there ever a more sinister character? All happy smiles on the outside, sinister mask-deals on the inside. In LoZ: Redesigned, he runs a skeevy mask-trading business in the bad end of the Castle Town, providing a game-long sidequest, and speaks as though he knows more than he rightly should about the current state of the kingdom/world.
Beedle, unlike the other two, is a genuinely good guy who just happens to live in a less than stellar place: his shop is on the edge of the bad part of town, and he knows Link as that kid who occasionally nicks something from the shop. He’s too kind to do much about it, though.
