Stuff byStfn

Illustrator, designer with a sophisticated taste for concept.

[stuffbystfn]

Enjoy my wobbly head. I’m now offically an animation teacher again and I have to start doing stuff :)

[stuffbystfn]

Project: Akira Jacket (2014)

I have always been hooked to the Akira Manga and especially Kaneda and his red outfit and bike. I'm always looking for a red leather jacket because of this and suddenly my good friend Pontus just had one hanging in his hallway. He found it and was going to give it away to charity when I went obsessive about the color and the 80's look. So I went ahead and made the pill in Photoshop and printed it onto a piece of OH plastic sheet.

After that I cut out the complete pill and put it onto the back of the jacket. Out with some acrylic colors. First a couple of white layers. I tried to be fast to get some nice structure and in fact just painting on leather was very satisfying.

After the white was dry I took the plastic from the hole and separated it to use the border to get a smooth edge of blue paint.

It's not perfect, but it has a nice feeling to it. I use matte poster paint which becomes water proof after it's 100% dry.

Finally I put the white dot on and it was done. Took an evening when I had so much else to do. That's of course when these things happen.

And this is the final result. Off to town on non-existing motorbike!

[stuffbystfn]

Pandie (2012)

I have a friend that calls herself Pandie and this was created on her birthday during a long trainride on a scrap piece of paper that I had. It turned out pretty cute and made Pandie happy. Loosly based on my old character Nalle who will surely turn up here in a few places.

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Making Of: Comic Page of Gengångare (2012)

This is a small deconstruction of a comic page from this comic made in 2012. It looks so multilayered but was made extremely quick due to a nasty deadline.

First the ink. Traditionally with cheap brushes to easily create the gritty look. Note how the sloppy bookshelves consists of only a few random thin and thick lines. End with some dry brush and spattering to make it even more gritty.

Next up: the overlay. I usually do this inkwash directly on top of the original, but I felt so rusty that I decided to do it on a cheap piece of copying paper.

When scanned the inkwash got less contrast than the original and the paper was actually another shade of gray. I put i all together and it was missing something. Then by shear luck I accidently erased some part of the inkwash in Photoshop and white appeared. This looked great! So I carried on (with a computer mouse, not a tablet) until I felt some harmony.

Like this it of course looks stupid, but put together you get a nice result due to mishaps and coincidents! Now that's how I like it!

[stuffbystfn]

Eric Eswin and the Fism Winner (2012)

Made in june 2012 to enlighten the magic community about the fuzz that was going on that Yann Frisch would win the world championships of magic, FISM that same year. Interestingly enough he won and was way above the rest in quality, so this was not really needed.

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The Everyday Wonders (2010-2013)

These pages was created for the Swedish Magic Circles member magazine, Trollkarlen, which I also was editor for during two years. The basic idea was to do a one page comic for magicians with specific jokes that would only work for magicians based around everyday life of such wonder makers. All in a style of old 20th century magicians posters.

The plan is still to do some more pages of this project, but that will probably take a while, so for now this is it.

This last one was made as a gift for the oldest of the nordic circles, now 86 year old Norwegian Magic Circle.

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Stormustaschen och Lillmustaschen (2011)

The Big and the Little Moustache. This comic came to be during the 24 Hour Comic Day but was never meant to be 24 pages since I also arranged the event for the Comic Art School I was currently running. The story and art is both by me, but the characters are loosly based on what me and my friend Kinna came up with during a tea-session a few months earlier. It's also meant to be for kids and actually came forth place in a swedish competition for kids comics.

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Human Waste - Excerpt (2012)

Human Waste was supposed to be an ongoing webcomic when I published the first five pages in april 2010. Now, almost five years later it’s at page 25 out of the planned 180. Read it all and stay tuned for the rest over at www.humanwaste.se.

Here follows an excerpt of my particular liking :)

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Gengångare (2012)

This comic was made for a small independently published magazine called "Svensk Zombie" (Swedish Zombie). The magazine features zombie tales that take place in swedish enviroments or circuit around swedish things. It was printed in a small edition for the Small Press Expo of Swedens International Comic Convention and sold out in two days.

Due to a mishap at the printer there was ten copies with a black and white cover that I transformed into a Limited Edition featured elsewhere on this site.

Gengångare is by the way old swedish for "zombie".

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Making of "Twelve Baskets" Poster (2014)

So, this second hand store from the town I'm originally from asked me to do walkaround magic during their re-opening in august. Of course I wanted to make a poster (as I always try to do - just because I can). Basic idea: The store is called "12 korgar" which literally means twelve baskets. I just wanted to do a kind of comedic poster with me and twelve baskets.

I did no sketches at all before I went online and looked up baskets. There's alot of them. So I just grabbed a Pilot Fineliner and a sheet of copy paper and started doing the ones I found interesting.

Here (as you can see) I tried out an idea that I would be hiding in one of the baskets. That didn't really make it for me. During maybe half of these baskets I suddenly saw the poster in front of me.

I drew this really quick with my light blue Pilot Color ENO 0.7 and then went over with the fineliner. After that I continued doing more baskets until there where twelve.

There's actually more to this idea than just the twelve baskets thingy. There's an very old stage illusion in magic called the Sword Basket Illusion where the assistant or the performer is inside a big basket which then is pierced by sometimes even flaming swords. Just for the record: I'm not that kind of a magician.

So, back to the poster. I quickly scanned the drawings and started to do the layout. I quickly found that twelve baskets with a guy in one of them don't layout as I saw it in my head. So instead of going for a A3 format I just dragged everything around until it looked ok and this was what I got:

I left some room up on the left for some sort of headline. I had no idea what to write other than "here I am", but I'm just doing this because I really wanna make some pretty pictures. I also left some space underneath it all for further info. Now into Photoshop.

Here's some ugly flat colours with some darker shades almost randomly painted onto them. Flat is good, but sometimes the tiniest of variation can make it so much more interesting to watch. I of course extracted this layer just for the sake of this demonstration - when I paint I just paint in a layer below the inked lines.

Put it together and write some text and it looks pretty ok to me :)

But as always a white background is not the best option, especially not for a second hand store, so I dug out some textures and finally the poster was completed.

This was completed in approx. 3-4 hours. It's pretty fast but I don't think the quality is lacking that much because of it. Some of the baskets are seen from a slightly higher perspective that the others, but I think nobody will notice it.. Or care actually :)

[stuffbystfn]

"Suddenly you realise that your life has a best-before date… and that it was yesterday" ~ Stfn 2005

[stuffbystfn]

Prints available at Stockholm International Comics Festival on May 17-18th 2014.