Hooray hooray ~

Today's my birthday (yaay, 27!), and since it's 2 months since I last wrote here I better make an update!

Some new things have come up, but otherwise I'm just eagerly trying to meet the deadline for Sword Princess Amaltea Book 1 (pushed a little to the middle of August).

So far, I have drawn and inked 120 pages out of 160, and I think about 100 of them are screentoned. There's a huge load left to do, so my awesome sister Catarina and my amazing boyfriend Emil is helping me out (as I wished for that instead of birthday presents!). With their help, and the help I've recieved from my dear friends Joakim Waller and Yossra El Said, I'm pretty sure I'll meet the deadline.
I think...

I want to tell a little about the assistant work they are doing. As I'm highly inspired by Japanese manga, I often like many others in my situation try to meet their standards in each page, since that's what the manga readers here in the West are expecting in some way. This is very hard, as many of the Japanese artists has sometimes up to 7 assistants helping them out. To be able to get close to their quality of work, I'll have to work full time for a long time (maybe even a year per book) to do the same amount of work, which neither me nor my readers have patience with. That's partly why I wanted to have as much help as I could with this, without losing the creative control. Inking frame lines, scanning, tracing background photos and laying basic screentones are things my controll-freakish mind could give away to someone else, haha.

I also think the system they have in Japan, with a master and her assistants, is a very learning and good structure of an comic making industry, without losing the "auteur feeling" of the work (as the master still does all the storytelling, sketching and inking of the characters). The books gets done a little bit faster, and also the assistants is introduced to the market and the industry this way, as interns in any other company would. It's also a great way for inexperienced artists to collect works on their C.V., as they could claim they have worked under more experienced artists and thus get that reference for future publications.
I think this would help the Swedish comic industry a lot. We have comic art schools/courses but no real structure in the industry to pick the students up after graduation... So I really hope more publishing artists takes in assistants in the future, it's truly not that shameful.

Anyway, here's a sneak peek from the fourth chapter!

Oh no! Amaltea is in real danger! O_O

Since my last update here on the blog, I've been to two conventions with Nosebleed Studio:

KodachiCon - The weather was terrible but the people was nice and we sold some books, yay! As this con is in my hometown, I have been visiting since the days I actually was a part of the team working on the con, and today we have a group of followers that we just have to attend to meet!

Copenhagen Comics - Expensive tables, but we had heard it was huge and thought it was worth it. Sadly, all our potential customers was missing, there was mostly older guys or young kids. Also, we artists had to pay the same table fee as the companies who earns a lot more (since they sell all the popular titles) which I feel is wrong. I would not return unless they actually had an artist alley, as most comic conventions does. With more affordable tables... (we just barely earned back our expenses)

Now to the coming future, and my plans for the rest of the summer!
Something crazy happened this Spring. Yes, truly "once in a lifetime" crazy! Via Fredrik Strömberg I was invited to attend famous Japanese manga artist and teacher Baron Yoshimoto's artist event Robopic in the end of July. Flight and hotell payed~
I could not say no, even though this trip is in the peak of my deadline stress, hahaha... *sweatdrop*
Catarina is coming too, yaaay!!

So, just like last time I went to Japan three years ago, I could not resist try to get a meeting with an editor or two in Japan, so after some help from my friend and colleague Elise Rosberg, this pile of packages was sent off:

 

...and I have already recieved some replies! OwO
More about that soon...

Ok, that will have to be it for this time, I'll get back to you soon with more information... Thanks for reading!!