Now that I have finally published the tenth chapter of Millenials Kill, I can also publish this blog post! I found the art a few months ago and finished the new artwork today!
So, I found some really old art. At this point I have no idea what it was meant to be, but I assume it was an idea for a comic that includes a band. I had completely forgotten about this so you can probably understand how surprised I was when I found this and read the band name I had chosen.
It was Dead Line!
I had designed Dead Line way before I had even thought of Millenials Kill! This drawing was from around year 2008! Well, I knew what I had to do. I had to redraw the illustration with the current members of Dead Line in my comic Millenials Kill. Here’s the new version.
I kind of found the glitch tool on Procreate and this was the first time I tried it out. It was cool! Though I did erase some of the glithes, because I didn’t want them to cover the characters’ faces.
And here’s also a screen recording of me drawing the illustration. There’s no sound in it, so feel free to listen to your own music while watching it.
Oh by the way, if you liked seeing the WIP video, I post those on my Patreon all the time! I’m always mentioning the Patreon but really, I like being able to survive!
I was watching a video by Danny Gonzalez about Conspiracy Theories while I was going through papers I have stacked everywhere. He talked a lot about time travel. Among my other papers, mostly art, I found evidence that I am a time traveler myself! (Or an oracle, but I think time travel is cooler.)
So here’s what I found out. I either predicted COVID19 in 2008, or I had already seen it happen in 2020, then gotten back to year 2008, made art about it, gotten amnesia and lost all my memories of my time traveling. Let me show you the proof!
Content warning: A disturbing drawing of a murderer clown and a victim with blood ahead
Proof of time travel
In this artwork we see lady liberty covering herself with a cloth (=mask) and she’s trapped inside a bubble with the weird shape that doesn’t resemble anything else than this…
Photo from: https://www.cdc.gov/media/ – PHIL ID #23312
How do we know it’s lady liberty? Well see the colors? It’s white, red and blue! The colors of American flag! It could also be Croatia, United Kingdom, Iceland, Norway, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Paraguay, Dallas, Labuan, Rocha, Sorbs, Federal Rebublic of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro, Republic of Crimea, Espiríto Santo, Fort Smith, Gaugauzia, Kayin State, Khahassia, Mannheim, Mindanao, Liberia, Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Sabah, Schleswig-Holstein, Valledupar, Turov, Serbia, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Transnistria, Maracaibo, Bydgoszcz, Manatí Puerto Rico, France, Iowa, Cabo Verde, Costa Rica, North Korea, Thailand, Cuba or Hawaii (and there’s even more options here) because they share the same colours, but let’s just go with the most obvious answer, USA.
So what about this artwork? Is this COVID19 too? (Art from 2008 again.)
Clearly this creature is shaped like the COVID19 virus and it’s breathing! COVID is a respiratory illness, so breathing is a clear symbol for… breathing! But wait, there’s more!
This one predicts the stock market crash after the COVID19 lockdown in 2020. And the artwork is from 2008!
As you can see, the woman’s dress is made from the stock page in a newspaper. There’s blood dripping from the top of the artwork, but the blood turns into spores, that look like COVID19 viruses (yet again!). The red color on the bottom of the page looks like a fire that’s going on somewhere in the distance. The fire symbolises the destruction COVID19 did to the stock market. The woman also seems to hold a glass of alcohol. That probably symbolises the alcohol people drank during lockdown while getting pantsdrunk. Or maybe it’s not alcohol, but blood!
Other predictions
Being able to predict COVID19 alone isn’t that impressive. A real time traveler would know so much more! So here’s some more examples of things I have predicted with my art!
Here’s a weird one. Seems like a completely normal drawing of a mermaid, right?
WRONG!
See the text hidden in the waves? “Pahuuden makkara” meaning the evil sausage. This is a prediction of the poisoned sausages of York in 2019! And the artwork is done in 2005!
How would you feel if I told you I also predicted the controversy behind the 2020 Froot Loops Toucan Mascot’s design change? Well I probably didn’t, but look, I made a lino print of a toucan in 2002! Close enough!
This artwork from year 2003 predicts a hit movie from 2014! Over 10 years after this piece was made, the movie Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda hit the box officed with a storm!
Now I assume you’re eager to hear my actual thoughts behind my own artworks. If you’re an intelligent human being, you probably guessed this was all just satire, so let’s go through the real ideas behind the artworks.
Lady Liberty and COVID19
I had just gotten new aquarelle pencils and learned that you can do all kinds of tricks with them. Tricks like scrape pieces off of them on wet paper! The “virus” on the first art piece is just me testing out how the pencil works on wet paper. I then decided to draw a sketch of a woman next to it. They are separate drawings at this point. But they look like they belong together, so I draw the bubble around them and add similar scraped aquarelle pencil on the woman’s cloth to make them match. That’s all there is. Two separate pieces on same paper to save paper.
COVID 19 virus breathing
That’s not COVID19, that’s pallosiira. It’s a character of mine based on an isopod species living in Finland. Also it’s not breathing, it’s sucking! For some reason Pallosiira sucks.
Market crash lady
The reason I used stock market page for the dress was that I didn’t want the dress to have words. It was the only page that had enough stuff other than words to cut out the dress shape. The background is yet again just me testing out the aquarelle pencils.
Killer Clown
This is fanart for a horror movie I saw.
Saimaa Ringed Seal
My teacher told us all to draw an animal. I chose the easiest one.
D&D podcasts
I was a tabletop rpg nerd as a teen. This is just fanart for a game I played.
Evil sausage mermaid
I was going to send this to a teen magazine under the pseudonym Pahuuden Makkara, but accidentally also put my real name on it! So I never sent it in.
Toucan
Yet another piece where someone else told me what to make (an animal) and I chose the simplest one.
Ford Mustang
It’s just a horse.
Sharktopus movie
I was obsessed with sea monsters at one point. It’s not even a sharktopus, but my point was to show that if you just squint your eyes enough and dig deep enough, anything can be a prediction of almost anything.
Did you like this post? Meybe you’ll like my other posts where I talk about my own art process in a more serious tone! The tag Art-Analysis is where I store my ramblings of my own art and the process of making it.
As many of you know, I’m the author of Life Outside the Circle webtoon, a comic about two men finding love in the Finnish countryside. Let’s talk about how I made the comic!
I could go on and on about the plot and characters and everything else, but on this post I want to concentrate on the art. So I’ll tell you the main points about the other parts of the process in short.
History of Life Outside the Circle
I got the idea for Life Outside the Circle webtoon in 2014. At that point I hadn’t even started my first Webtoon comic Immortal Nerd yet! In 2015 I started making my first Webtoon original series Immortal Nerd and after that one was over, I asked if webtoon would be interested in Life Outside the Circle. They were!
The plot I had was initially only written in Finnish. I paid a translator to translate it to English for me. Then I worked together with my editor Bekah Caden to make the comic the best it can be.
The Art of my Webtoon
I personally love the art of Life Outside the Circle. I’m so proud of the things I did with it! I think it’s the best looking comic I’ve done in my life, which is why I want to talk about the choices I made with the art in more detail.
Life Outside the Circle webtoon is in grayscale, there’s only one spot in the comic that uses colour. That part is the Helsinki Pride! And in there too there’s no other coloring than the rainbows that are in pastel rainbow colours. Like this:
I have gotten wonderful comments on the colors. People have told me the impact of suddenly having the colorful rainbow flags surprising and memorable. The podcast Talking Comics told in their Thirsty on Toon series that they didn’t even remember the comic being black and white, because it felt colourful.
The drawing process
First of all, I sketched the comic panels separately on red pencil.
Then I inked them with a NIKKO school nib and indian ink. The kind of a nib that you dip in an ink bottle.
Then I colored the smaller details with copic markers in different tones of gray.
And in the end I used ink diluted with water to do the larger grey areas and the shadows.
Then I scanned the illustrations and edited the red out of them on Photoshop, making them greyscale.
Here’s an example of what the scans looked right out of the scanner. Bad… The diluted ink wetted the paper and made it warp even if I used thicker paper.
But with a bit of editing I turned this into a neat comic panel!
So this was the process for the normal comic panels. But this alone isn’t the thing that made me love the art I did for Life Outside the Circle… This is:
The emotions! I love drawing them! Let’s analyse these a bit further.
The Analysis
In this picture I have changed the tools I used for inking the picture. Instead of using a thin nib, I used a brush with the ink. Normally I would also make sure the perspective was believable, but in this one I intentionally bent the perspective. It’s warped. I did this so that the panel would look like what Juha is supposed to feel. Juha feels dizzy and he feels heavy. The darker heavier lines make the panel feel claustrophobic. Exactly what I’m trying to portray!
I use a lot of silhouettes in my comics. There’s three reasons for them. 1. They are simple. The readers eye doesn’t focus on anything else than the main point I want to portray. 2. They create contrast. For a very important part in the comic it’s good to create more impact with contrast. 3. They are fast to draw. I save a lot of time with them.
Here’s something I don’t save time with. Panels like this take ages to draw! But I often loved to start a chapter with a beautiful tall illustration of either nature or actual buildings in Helsinki. I love drawing environments and I think drawings like this create sense of time. A beautiful moment the characters have stopped to enjoy.
So what about this one? Quite often I had to draw the same places over and over again. That was pretty boring. Not for me really, I could just reuse the same drawings but I didn’t want to do that too often. So sometimes I showed this aeriel image from the place! I used this in one panel in Helsinki too, but that one you have to go see yourself from here.
On this panel Juha is angry, but he’s trying to keep it in. I drew him with a black crayon, pressing hard and making jagged lines. The illustration was very big, but I scaled it on Photoshop to fit the panel. I think the artwork looks angrier, because I drew it with “angry motions”. While holding the crayon tight I tensed all my muscles. I made myself feel the anger Juha feels and I think it shows on the illustration.
So what about sadness and helplessness? I’ve drawn this with a very thin marker with no sketch. I held the marker very lightly to make it shake a bit more. I would let my hand make mistakes, like the lines that are too long on Juha’s hair. That’s not how I draw his hair normally. This all makes him look very anxious. I drew like I was scared of the paper! The coloring is also threwn in there in blobs, not spread smoothly like normally.
This is what makes me believe Life Outside the Circle is one of my most artistic comics. I set out to portray emotions and even the art, not just the story, emphasises the emotions.
I hope reading me patting myself on the back doesn’t make you think I’m a horribly self centered person. It’s quite sad that artists are often expected to dislike their own works and only find faults in them. Don’t get me wrong, I find faults in all my comics, Life Outside the Circle webtoon included! But the comic is done and published. Only focusing on the faults wouldn’t change anything. Letting myself enjoy my work and celebrate the best parts of it makes me want to draw more and come up with new ways to make my art even better.
And if you want to, you can subscribe to my mailing list and hear all the latest news about my comics career about once a month. No spam, no affiliate marketing.
My emotional abuse comic, I Survived Him, is definitely one of my favorite works of my own. I’m especially proud of the art in this one. The comic is now available on my itch.io again! But before you go get it for yourself, I want to tell you more about it and show some of my favorite pages.
I Survived Him was made in 2020. Even if it is a comic about emotional abuse, it doesn’t describe the abuse in detail. The comic begins from the moment the abusive relationship was over and the story describes the process of letting go and healing. I want to show you the first scene of the comic.
I don’t often make autobiographical comics about such tough subjects. Portraying myself as the victim in my art isn’t really something I want to do. I very much believe in the theory that one can change the way they see themselves by controlling how they talk about themselves. Of course one has to be realistic, but I don’t want to unnecessarily dwell on the negative parts of my life. Making a comic takes a long time and if I were to make a comic about something very traumatic, I’d almost have to relive the trauma for months on end! I’m totally not up for that! No way! What I can relive is the healing process.
This comic was drawn in 2020, now that I reread it in 2022 I felt powerful, I felt at peace and I felt strong! I have survived this and I am proud of that. When I finished the comic I still felt scared, and some days I still do, but it becomes rarer every day. I love seeing this comic and remembering how far I’ve come.
The Art
I told in the beginning that I was especially happy with the art on this one, so here are two pages from my absolute favorite scene artwise.
On the first page’s first panel you see me laying on my face in a bottom of a rocky pit. The pit is drawn on normal paper with ink markers and pencils, but that me! I drew myself on a piece of used napkin! The two illustrations were then combined on Photoshop. I love how I used the drawing material to really show the desperation.
And the rocky pit… man, that’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever drawn. I love it. I also love the combination of pencil and ink. All the illustrations that illustrate my memories are drawn on pencil only and I love it.
As said, I’m very proud of this one. I think this comes only second to Life Outside the Circle. It might be a good idea to later write a blog entry about the medias I used for that one too… I love the art on Life Outside the Circle!
So where can you get this comic?
I have a store on itch.io. The emotional abuse comic is $5, but you can choose if you want to leave me a tip. It’s up to you! I always try to keep my comics accessible to most people, so the tipping helps a lot in keeping the comic price fairly low.
Please note, despite this blog post having alt texts for more accessible reading, the ebook doesn’t have that.
