Illustrations from a current book project
I’m illustrating a book that is based on a blog written by a teenage girl from Mosul, Iraq.
There are already lots of photos, and also some drawings made by the author herself. My illustrations are partly replacing copyrighted images that she had used in her blog, and partly they are just jazzing up the book and adding emphasis or clarification to the text.
The suwar of the Quran are arranged by length, the longest first, but I’m doing it the other way around with my illustrations — I have started with the smaller illustrations and will do the bigger ones last. :o)
From top to bottom: French journalist Florence Aubenas, who was taken hostage in Iraq 2005, an illustration to a footnote about Muslim prayer, music legends Umm Kulthum, Fayruz and Abdul Alim, Iraqi politician Iyad Allawi, and the author observing how she is not frightened by bombs and explosions anymore.
Miriam Katin font
I will soon start lettering the Swedish edition of We Are On Our Own by Miriam Katin for the publisher Epix. It is the story of a little Jewish girl and her incredibly brave and smart mother, who go underground in Hungary during the Second World War, based on the author’s own childhood experiences.
I’ve made a custom digital font for the book. The original is lettered by hand with a graphite pencil. In order to make a digital font look like graphite, I made gigantic 2400 dpi scans of the text from the original pages, so I could create bitmap images of the individual letters with lots of fine detail. Then, when I lettered, I set the opacity at 50%.
The end result looks surprisingly much like graphite pencil lettering. :o/ Click the image below to see a sample (in English, because the Swedish translation wasn’t ready yet at that point).
© Miriam Katin
Blutch font
I lettered Blotch by Blutch for avant-verlag a while ago. The book, about a bunch of insanely petty and arrogant cartoonists at a fictional Parisian humour magazine in the 1930’s, is really funny and wonderfully drawn, and the German translation is very good, so it was a joy to work with this project.
I learned some new French phrases from this book. My favourite is “Tu vas voir mon cochon!”, “You will see my pig!”, which means something like “I’ll show you!”
Blutch has a very lively handwriting, so it took some effort to not entirely lose that in the digital font. Click the image below to see a sample of it:
© Blutch/Audie — Fluide Glacial and avant-verlag
EPIX BLOG
I’ve designed a layout for the new blog of my publisher and client Epix (again taking a simple Wordpress theme and perverting it to my own liking – nothing fancy). I kept the layout elements somewhat subdued in their colours, because they will have to fit together with lots of different colours in the comics and images published on the site.
The blog is part of an ongoing collective effort to bring Epix back into the consciousness of Swedish comic readers. The late 1990’s and early 2000’s were pretty tough for the publishing company, so there are a lot of people who think it’s not publishing any new books anymore. But now we’re bringing it back!
Oh, and my book will be officially released tomorrow (or rather: later today, since it’s past midnight already). So it will be possible to order it from the Epix webshop any time now …
MUSÉE TÉLÉGUIDÉE
It’s been out for a little while already, but the site is only now finally presentable, so I can link to it.
I made the graphic design of this book in collaboration with the author/publisher Quentin Duclos and associates. It’s a hilarious and insane work, hard to describe with words. If you can read French, check it out.
I also designed the website of the publishing company (by perverting the Dark Smoke WP theme).
