Last week a 12th Festival of Young Artists from Balkan was held in Leskovac, Serbia. There was a lot of great comic drawings and authors there (over 150 artists submitted their work and over 50 of them ware present) and it was, as always a great joy to be one of them. Three years ago Amnesia won the award for best screenplay there so I'm more than happy to visit Leskovac year after year.
This year I went there with Senad Mavric, fellow comic artist from Sarajevo, expecting a good time drawing comics and nothing more. You can imagine my surprise when they announced that I've won the award for best drawing!
Having won three years ago was such an inspiration and motivation for me to continue drawing comics. And I thought, if they are to award a person from Bosnia and Herzegovina, which they did for three years in a row, they are going to award one of my younger colleagues, somebody who is still in doubt if he or she should continue drawing comics. Yet, they awarded me. And not only me - Emir Pasanovic, who has ghost-written the comic "Traitan" (among other work I drawn) and translated Amnesia into English, has won the 1st prize for best comic books theory (texts written about comics).
A lot of comic artists at the Festival liked the sneak-peek of episodes from 2nd book of Amnesia. Which motivates me enormously to continue work on the book.
But today, while browsing trough scanned files I've found sketches I made for that job. Some of them are shitty (done with pen on my work) and some are in color. This has absolutely no artistic value apart of seeing how I make my drawings/illustrations.
I've put sketches next to finished art for comparison (if the subject of the setch made into the book).
Judging by the lack of "post-Marvel" posts, one would think that not making it for Marvel made me so depressing that I decided to stop drawing all together. Well, it didn't. It's just that I'm drawing new episodes of Amnesia and I can not show them to you before the next spring when the book comes out of print. I'm drawing one per day (or per two days) so there is not enough time to draw anything else (and there is the World cup in South Africa, in case you didn't notice).
Recently a friend of mine, Senad Mavric, who used to draw really good comics but quit and is now re-discovering the joy of drawing, asked me to draw something because he would like to try and ink it.
At the same time, Goran Sudzuka gave me some amazing blue pens so I decided to try them off with a work for Senad.
I never worked with blue pens (you know, you draw with blue pens, ink over it and when you scan it the blue doesn't show) so this was a perfect opportunity to try it.
Last night I made this image. It's nothing special, some anatomy could be wrong and there is no background, but as it was made just for the fun of trying the drawing material - it will do.
An interesting piece of fan-art - there's a local web page for logic puzzles geeks. And last week the subject for their weekly anagram game was Amnesia. It's all in Bosnian/Serbian/croatian language but if you understand it, you can check the work by visiting Logika blog
And I'm back. Sort of. I'm not uploading new Amnesia comics but I am drawing. And here's what.
Remember that Marvel Editor that came to Makarska? Well, he liked my work and his assistant gave me the sample script I should illustrate. As that was the possibility to get a job in Marvel I said goodbye to all of my friends and obligations (including updating this web page) for seven days and I made this (see below) comic.
Sadly, it didn't impress the assistant. But, what the hell, life goes on and I have other comics to draw. I must say it was awesome drawing an action comic for a week thinking how, one day, I will be employed by such major publisher.
