Q: How is Kitty?
A. (00:06:28): I think she’s sleeping, as always. And I guess she will wake up in a couple of hours and come over and start annoying me.
Q: Will last saturday's stream artwork be uploaded to the website anytime soon?
A. (00:07:35): Yes, I will upload it whenever I remember. It’s been such a long time since I’ve regularly uploaded anything to the gallery that I’m completely out of the routine, so I keep forgetting. I will, though, if I forget, I will batch-upload everything I’ve done now and then.
Q: How's the drinking water? Is it still contaminated?
A. (0:51:53): Yes, still contaminated, they have now checked the main water tower and they also found E. coli bacteria, you know, the kind that comes from.. poop, *laughs* so everything’s probably messed up, so the water tower has been emptied and cleaned, apparently, and we still have to either boil our water or get it from the water tankers, which I do, every evening. I drink, like, three liters of water every day, I’ve noticed. So yeah, it’s gonna be a little while still, but they did say that most of the water systems has been cleaned, now with the chlorine, there’s still just a few areas that still need cleaning, so obviously since everything is linked the whole system is considered contaminated as long as even a few parts of the pipes are still dirty.
Q.: Do you have a picture of your mascot? The griffin thing?
A. (0:56:51): Yes, I did draw a proper picture of it some time, but I don’t remember where I have it. I’ll have to draw a new one someday because obviously it would be fun having a proper reference to see what it looks like.
Q: Are you primarily Finnish or Swedish? :0 sorry if its already mentioned somewhere haha
A. (01:44:29): No, I don’t think I mentioned it a lot, but I’m primarily Finnish, almost all of my family only speak Finnish, and my parents speak both Finnish and Swedish because their parents both moved to Sweden somewhere in the 70s to get jobs (and that’s why I was born in Sweden) and then we all moved back and nobody lives in Sweden anymore, even though all of my family lived in Sweden at some point. Because of the jobs thing. But yeah, I’m mostly Finnish, but I was put in a Swedish-speaking school when we moved back to Finland, because my parents wanted me to retain my ability to speak two languages. And since we were speaking Finnish at home, they figured I would forget all of my Swedish if I also went to a regular Finnish school. So that’s why a lot of my book-ish information that I’ve learned is in Swedish, but my actual, you know... most of my friends have been Finnish, so my social interaction and regular life vocabulary is better in Finnish. Also, I haven’t really spoken any Swedish in probably 8 years, because I went to university in Finnish.
Q: When is your birthday?
A. (01:46:28): It’s the 9th of January.
Q: Have you practiced your evil laugh?
A. (01:47:02): No. *reads a comment* “Evil laugh is important for Halloween.” Eh, I don’t care about Halloween. It’s not the same kind of holiday over in Finland as it is in America. It’s the older, what’s it called, All Hallows’ Eve, you know, it’s to remember the dead and go to visit graves and that’s it. I guess there’s obviously American Halloween parties for kids and stuff to dress up, but it’s not something adults celebrate. Unless someone really wants an excuse to dress up and go to a party. It’s usually not that much of a thing.
Q: When is Book 2 coming to the Hivemill store?
A. (2:06:26): Once all of the Kickstarter awards have been sent out. which is probably... well, the rewards will be sent out during this month, or the rest of them, so I guess next month the book is gonna be ready for the store. But I can’t promise; it’s gonna depend on if they are ready to add it to the store by then. But that is what we have decided on, that once they send the awards around, the book would be in the store, and all the other items, too: the plush, the charms and that’s it, I think.
Q: Because you own the rights to SSSS, would ever give out the rights to more companies to use it? (like you have for the game, can’t wait btw!
) // Oh I thought you had a couple of people help though, woah, you’re working hard ! XD But I was curious, as I own a games company, was wondering what the chances were of us using the SSSS world as a setting
(but I get you dont want this to turn into business talk etc, so that’s all I wanted to ask XD)
A. (2:57:05): Aha, spoilers!...eh, well not spoilers (laughs). Surprise! I have not given out the rights for anyone to make the game. I make it all by myself (laughs). It’s my side project, I work on it every Wednesday. That’s why the comic went back to updating only four days a week because I really wanted, you know, something to rest my brain with or, you know, think of something else. So, yeah I’m working on that all on my own (laughs). But to answer that question, it really depends on what kind of rights would be given out. First of all, obviously I have a publishing contract, at least partly with Hiveworks in that they have the rights to the, you know, publish the English-speaking book exclusively. They would have to obviously be also agreeing to, you know, some sort of rights, selling to some… for some other projects. But also it would be really important that the rights, that I would sell, would actually be like, licensed that they would only be allowed to use it for very certain things and that they would not infringe on any of my rights, like there can’t be a clause that says I can’t update the comic online for some reason, like you know, some publishers have that, like you know, they want to publish webcomics but then they also demand that it stops being a webcomic, like they want it to move from the web. So, stuff like that would have to be completely absent. I don’t know, I don’t think I would really get into projects like that, because it’s a lot of headache, you need to have lawyers involved to check over the agreements and stuff, and then if someone breaks it and they make like a really embarrassing product that, you know, ruins the brand or image of the comic then you know then it’s really how to fix things like that. I’m kinda happy just being the only person who is doing things involved with the comic, or in the sense that I’m the one creating content that is related to it. Obviously fanwork is completely okay with, like, official stuff, I don’t think I would license it out to, you know, other creators. Like, the worst thing that could happen would be, like, some company wants to make like an animated series and everyone would be like, “ Oh my god, so cool,” and then I would make the deal and they would make a really embarrassingly bad version of the comic and they would change the characters and the plot and a really bad animation, and it would still end up being more known than the comics since it would be maybe on some sort of network and then everyone would associate the name of the comic with that show and then it would just be ruined for everyone, and I would be embarrassed about my own work then. I’m not one of the people who really dream about some other company coming in and doing something based on my work. // No, it’s completely okay. But yeah, I wouldn’t want an outside company doing anything official about the world. The problem is that I have this stupid mentality of “other people can’t do my ideas as well as I can”, and I would always be annoyed by mistakes that other people make that aren’t perfect, and I would never be able to be at peace with the project that someone else was doing if it was going to be released as some sort of official thing that wasn’t labelled as a fanwork. I guess the only time when I feel I would be ready for that would be when I’m actually finished with the comic and am moving on to somewhere else because I would be able to mentally relax a little bit and not be so hands-on about what other people are doing with my brand that I’m so protective of it. It’s also the reason why I can’t work in teams with people, and I can only do solo projects, because I always get that mentality. Even back in school or university when we had to do group projects, I always felt like my idea was the best and the everyone else’s ideas were stupid, and if we didn’t do my idea, I would always just give up and be like a drone and do whatever and not put any effort into it.
Q: If you were given the offer to make your own animated series based off of SSSS, would you take it?
A. (3:03:10): You mean like I would have to animate it? What? No? Like I would have to be in charge of the directing, and other people would animate it? I don’t know actually. I think it would be too much work. My priority is the comic. I wouldn’t give up my ability to work on the comic to work on animation instead. I know for a lot of people, animation is superior to comics. Like comic is a thing you do with the goal of getting into animation or having your idea made into an animation or a movie, but for me comics are the more important part (and mangas). I see animes that are made from mangas as the inferior product, and the original is the real deal, so I would rather have a really successful comic than an animation. I wouldn’t want to stand by directing an animation. Even if it would be a really cool deal, I wouldn’t take it. Video games are another thing, which is why I did sacrifice one day a week from working on the comic to work on learning how to make video games, because I actually personally enjoy video games and do think they are a really great way to tell stories. Not that I hate animation, obviously, I love animations and movies; I just don’t cherish them the same way I do comics and video games.
Q: Do you prefer 2D animation or 3D animation?
A. (3:11:58): I prefer 2D animation. I’m really bored of the 3D animation because almost everything nowadays is 3D animation and it all kinda looks the same (laughs). After some while...way back there used to be at least, you know, you could see a difference between kinda Disney’s Pixar 3D animation and maybe like Dreamworks animation, but now they all look the same. And every movie looks the same, I think. Even in complete different settings they just don’t have different moves that 2D animation used to have. That’s my opinion obviously. The 3D animations are extremely popular and I’m probably in the minority for preferring 2D animations. But 2D animation is only really popular in like, cartoons and TV series, not so much in movies.
Q: Well how do you feel about the fact that they're making a new 3D animated moomin series now?
A. (3:14:06): Aahg, well I didn’t know about it and now I just feel really annoyed. I don’t like 3D reboots. But I guess it doesn’t really harm me in any way, so you know it’s completely (laughs) irrational to me to know about it. But if people like it it’s like, damn, it has to be done. It will be like people back in the day being angry that color TV became a thing and be like “Aagh, we should keep making black and white films again” (laughs).
Q: Since you've been getting into working on game stuff, I was wondering: have you ever thought about making an SSSS mod for They are Billions? I mean more than superficial, such as game mechanics like day/night cycles, military castes like cleansers/mages/soldiers, and perhaps the main cast as hero characters?
A. (03:15:54): No, that sounds really cool, but it would take me as long as just making a game on my own, I think. Like it would take three years probably just to do that because I’m still learning things, even really basic things.
Q: You said you like games? What kind of genre do you like then?
A. (03:18:52): My favorite to play personally is rogue-likes or rogue-lites, I guess they’re sometimes called. My favorites right now, if I had time to play, I would want to play They Are Billions and Don’t Starve. And also colony building games with survival elements in them, examples are Factorio and Rimworld. Those are my favorites. I also really like, on a completely different type, Japanese role-playing games, but I don’t really enjoy playing them myself anymore, you know, Final Fantasy, Pokemon, Tales of Symphonia, those types of games. But I’ve kind of fallen out of--well not really out of love with them--I appreciate all the memories and the visual impact they’ve had, but I don’t really enjoy that kind of playing anymore. I need either a technical challenge or some sort of a building aspect that also has preferably also a survival element to it. The only game I think I would enjoy lately that wasn’t a survival type of game was Stardew Valley. I think there’s literally no way you can lose in that game. It’s just really relaxing farming/RPG kind of game. It’s really fun. Oh, yeah, and I love competitive Pokemon, actually. I don’t play it myself anymore, I don’t have time, and I hate competition with real people because I get really nervous, even in just a video game, but I really love watching other people play it competitively on Youtube. It’s one of my main sources of entertainment, which is maybe kind of a weird thing to watch several hours every week. Other people watch sports, I watch competitive Pokemon leagues.
Q: Yes, Factorio and Rimworld! XD I would want a colony/city builder of SSSS. I think the survival would be cool!
A. (03:22:08): That’s also something I would like. I really don’t know if I would be ready to license it out to a game just yet. Maybe some time in the future when I’m closer to the end, and I would definitely want to have really strict control over the mechanics and worldbuilding and visual direction. It wouldn’t be something I would be ready to commit to for at least a few years. Maybe when I’m done with my game project I have right now and kind of know the ropes a little bit, I would be ready to maybe collaborate with someone to make that kind of a more proper game. Because the one I’m making has the technical battle system, but it’s mostly an RPG that’s pretty heavily reliant on the story and just artwork because obviously I’m learning the codes. I didn’t want to do anything difficult that I couldn’t do.
Q: What about Pokemon Go?
A. (03:23:46): I play it in the sense that, when I go on walks, it’s motivating to have catching in the background, but I don’t actually take it out of my pocket to catch anything because it doesn’t have a technical element to it, it’s just a really simple, brainless mobile app. The actual Pokemon games have a really deep, proper battle system for adults to play. There’s an enormous community of people who play Pokemon on YouTube. That’s all they play on YouTube. PokeTubers, they call themselves. They have hundreds of thousands, some of them, of followers and stuff, and they do proper tournaments together competitively. There’s two going on all the time, every year, for the last five years that I’ve been following the scene, and it’s a never-ending source of entertainment. Pokemon Go is a completely different thing, and I don’t really care about it. Especially since I live in a small village, and there’s nothing really around. It’s made to be played in large cities like New York and capitals and stuff like that.
Q: How would you feel about fans saving the streams because twitch deletes them after two weeks?
A. (03:25:24): I mean, that’s fine I guess. I’m not saving them myself because they’re several hour long videos, and they would eat up all of my backup space, and I don’t want to upload them onto YouTube or anything. I would have to edit out any copyrighted music if it’s just that automatically. It’s fine if you want to save them. I’m not that against it if someone has terabytes of space that they feel like throwing away.
Q: Have you ever sold art/done freelance work?
A. (03:36:22): Yeah, before I started doing my first comic, which was A Redtail’s Dream, and I think I also did some during the beginning of it, I did commissions, but back then I wasn’t good, or I wasn’t really aware that I could have done actual freelance work for any companies. I only did commissions—a few book covers for people here and there, one-off drawings. Basically once I decided that I wanted to do comics as a job, I put all of my energy into that and stopped doing any outside work. And weirdly once I made it my full-time job, I haven’t taken any paid work, and why would I? It’s so much more fun to get to draw your own thing, at least for me. I know a lot of people who do comics, they actually make comics as kind of as a stepping stone, at least webcomics, in the hopes that they would be hired by some company to be paid to do some so-called real work. They don’t necessarily really enjoy the aspect of being your own boss and having to do your own thing all the time. A lot of people prefer being hired as an artist to being the independent part of it. I’m the other way. I don’t think I was really good at doing any kind of commissions or drawing that someone else decides what it should be. I kind of lose my inspiration or motivation, and then the work suffers, and I lose even more motivation because I feel like I’m not doing my best work, and then I feel embarrassed that I got paid for something that I feel wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever done. So I’m really glad I don’t have to do any of that anymore.
Q: Do you have any favorite movies that you have seen?
A. (03:45:12): Recent movies, no, I haven’t watched any movies in a couple years. Actually, the only movie I watched this year was Jumanji, the new one. I have no idea why I decided to watch that one out of all the movies that have been released. It was good. But my favorite movies of all time? Let’s see, I have a hard time even remembering movies. I guess I really liked The Thing. It was a really great inspiration for the horror elements in SSSS and monster design and stuff like that. And I guess I like a lot of the old Disney animations like Lion King. Well, I said a lot, and I think Lion King is the only one I would count as one of my absolute favorites. And I liked some of the 3D animations too. I really liked Kung Fu Panda, the first one. Oh yeah, and maybe a really bad movie to count as one of your favorites because I don’t think it had really high reviews was that movie 2012, the apocalyptic movie. I really enjoyed that, as did my whole family. I remember when it came out we went to watch it. I was living back home back then, still. Me and my mom and my brother and my dad all went and watched it at the movies, and it was so good. I think that year actually my dad also bought an HD TV for the first time, and the first movie we watched on it that Christmas was again 2012 because we all liked it so much, and we wanted to see what it would look like on HD TV. So yeah, I don’t have the most sophisticated or special taste. I have a simple taste. I like things that are easily digested. Oh no, actually I remember, I have one favorite that is maybe less obvious that really impacted me with how well-constructed the movie was. It was that movie Memento where the main character was a man who had a memory problem where he would lose his memory up until a certain point, every one hour or something, and the whole movie was in reverse somehow, and you always got to see one snippet of the action—one of his memory snippets—at a time, but somehow backwards, and the plot was that he was trying to find the killer of his wife who had caused him to get the memory problem, and it was really good. I really recommend anyone who hasn’t seen it to watch it. It was really confusing at first and seemed like the kind of movie that would be really difficult to follow and not worth it, but it was so well-done that it became really easy to follow what was happening even though it was in reverse.
Q: Out of the entire cast, who do you think you'd say you like the appearance of the most (as in, the kind of things you'd look for in a person you want to be in a relationship with) A bit of a personal question, so feel free to say no if you don't feel like talking about it.
A. (03:53:55): I don’t know about personal relationship with, I don’t think any of them really look like that kind of person. But just classically handsome-looking? It would be a toss-up between...well obviously Reynir and Emil are both very good-looking, but Mikkel also has that farm-lad handsomeness to him. But yeah, if I wanted to draw my dream man, it wouldn’t look like any of them. [laughing] I don’t think I even know what I want that to look like.
Q: Hope it's not too personal but you said you have a brother, is he older or younger that you?
A. (04:00:46): He is younger. He’s a little bit more than a year younger.
Q.: Wait, alternative universe? Elaborate? [about City of Hunger]
A. (5:12:15): Well, the story in the game project is obviously not the same universe, it’s science-fiction with the same characters but I want an excuse to sometimes draw a different setting, so they are—it’s a completely different world than the comic, they get to know each other again in a different setting and have a completely unrelated adventure. So yeah, it’s an alternate universe in that sense. It’s gonna be on a completely different planet and it won’t have anything with the more Nordic setting that the comic has. It’s really just the same characters.
Q.: Do you have a patreon or anything similar? I know the kickstarters you’ve had etc, but a monthly payment?
A. (5:19:49): No, I don’t, actually. Patreon is kinda semi-illegal in Finland: you’re not allowed to ask for anything that could be construed as donations online because of some old anti-fraud laws, so yeah. I don’t really have the courage to do that. Some people do risk that the police could come and knock in someday, but I can’t have my living depending on the hope that I don’t get caught. But the comic makes enough money that I don’t need it, so I’m not too sad about it. The books sell well, the Kickstarters go well, I get some ad money, money from various little merchandise; it’s all good. So no need for Patreon.
Q.: If you get Twitch partnership, you allowed subscription money from Twitch then?
A. (5:21:52): Yes, subscriptions are okay because they are not counted as donations. The things that are limited in Finnish law are, like, if you don’t give something in return that has a set price, so subscriptions are okay in that sense. Also it has to be a set price. You can’t have a scenario where the buyer or donator can make their own price, which on Patreon you kind of can, you can give more money than you’re asked for, so that already makes it a donation, which is really unfortunate. Even Kickstarter is really difficult, so people in Finland who want to do Kickstarters have to create a sister company in a different country and do it that way. There was a woman who tried to Kickstart some sort of language-learning book, and it was shut down by the police. It was so unfortunate and unfair. [] funding is such a big thing nowadays! I really wish Finnish politicians would understand that and make it legal.
Q.: You’re doing great, I recognize your reluctance to interact socially, I have the same barrier.
A. (5:24:05): Yeah, it is an annoying problem to have, but I guess it’s one of those things where if you do it, it’s not as bad once you actually get to it, but it’s really nerve-wracking to actually do something social like going out and meeting someone. Not going to happen. The only way you could get me to do that is when I had to go to school. Nowadays, no thank you. It’s not as bad on the internet because I don’t have to make eye-contact with people, and it doesn’t matter what kind of horrible facial expression I’m making accidentally. No one’s going to see it anyway.
Q.: Do you plan on trying another page stream Friday?
A. (): Yeah, I think I will. I’m going to test out if Friday or Wednesday is the day when I want to do page streams, but I’m going to do Friday again. I have a page I can do on Friday without spoiling something important. In fact, on Friday, I think I’ll stream the page that will be on Monday next week, so I can show almost all of it, and you will be able to get the whole thing on Monday. So yes, Friday I will do a short comic stream again. I haven’t added it to the schedule yet because I’ve only done it once, so I don’t know if I’m going to decide on Friday as the set day for comic strips.
Q.: Do you got anything in mind for what you’ll be drawing next Saturday?
A. (5:29:21): I have some ideas. I haven’t decided which one. I might actually pretty soon start drawing the illustration that I’m going to need for the new web-page layout. So it would be like a big cover for the next adventure in the comic with all the characters, a cool background, a little bit of an action-y-looking scene. The one we have right now really static, they’re just standing on the bridge. It’s nice-looking, but I want something a bit more flashy for the next one. And that’s going to will take a few streams to finish, I think, so I might actually start next week already so that it’s done by the time we get to the part in the comic that I actually need it.
Q.: Im doing a masters next year (hopefully), would you recommend Finland as a place to do one ?
(I do games Art, if it helps)
A. (5:44:51): Oh I actually don’t know anything about game art universities. I feel like there wouldn’t be because I think I would have applied to one if there had been when I went to university. There are very few art universities. There’s the graphic design- or not graphic design- it’s industrial arts university, and it has graphic design, cinematography, art teaching, photography, and stuff like that and product design, and then there’s a fine arts school about classical painting, but I don’t know if there is one specifically for game art at all. It’s just such a small country that there isn’t a really big variance in university subjects. It tends to be just the big ones that are established as career paths. There might be some sort of trade schools, I don’t know if you would call them, that are like not really universities but kind of adult schools that you can apply to and do something and you get whatever their degree is, but I don’t think you can get necessarily a proper master’s degree from any of them. But it’s been seven years since I applied to university, so there could be something right now. I’m of no help at all on that subject.
Q.: Just curious, you travel a lot/have a favourite/s countries ? o:
A. (5:51:50): I don’t travel a lot. I have in the last few years travelled to Iceland twice and Denmark once, and I’ve been to Estonia a couple of times, I think, so I’ve only been to countries that are really close to Finland, partly to do research for the comic. I went to Denmark to check out places of the country that need to be in parts of the comic, like Copenhagen and stuff. I went to Iceland for the same reason, but I also went hiking there two years ago. But I haven’t been anywhere recently. I really want to go back to Iceland again to go hiking again. It’s really a wonderful country. I love the nature, but this year I only went hiking in Finland. Like a short home-country travelling trip. I’m not really much of a tourist person. When I go somewhere… I really want to go hiking if I want to go somewhere. Like if I go to Norway, I want to make it a hiking trip. And same if I go back to Sweden, I would go there to hike, not to visit all the things.
Q.: Minna would you ever travel to America? The west coast and Rockies are gorgeous.
A. (5:53:35): Yes, I definitely want to go to America some year. It would have to be kind of a longer trip, like a couple of weeks at least since it’s such an enormous country, and I would want to see a couple of different places, maybe, like nature places, and I want to eat American foods, like fast foods, that I have heard about in different shows that I’ve never gotten to eat. And I want to go to a steakhouse, like a proper American steakhouse.
Q.: Would you ever be willing to post some of your traditional art?
A. (5:54:18): Yeah, I actually have on my DeviantArt that you can actually find if you google my name ‘Minna Sundberg’ that I haven’t used for many years, I only just posted the most recent illustration there last week, and I checked what my other uploads were, they were like three years ago. But I haven’t deleted anything from my DeviantArt, I used to post all of my stuff there, so yeah I have dozens and dozens of my old traditional art there. Some of it looks actually kind of nice. Obviously after many years you would expect it to look ugly, but some of it was really cool-looking. You know, relative to what I had in my mind, it wasn’t that bad. I don’t do traditional art anymore because digital art is just so convenient and traditional art is kinda messy. You have to take out all the paints and wait for things to dry and then you have to clean the table afterwards, and I mess up my clothes, so I have to wear painting clothes, that I don’t mind getting messed up. Yeah, the only reason I would do traditional art is if I needed to get money from selling it, but that doesn’t really look likely, things are going really well.
Q.: I recommend watching “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives” and choosing where you go based on the restaurants u want to eat at. [follow-up on America]
A. (5:56:12): I’m not a restaurant person, because I’m such a picky eater; I have a really hard time finding anything I want to eat at restaurants, like anything with vegetables is just a complete no-no immediately. So restaurants that I’d like to go to are like buffets where I can pick out [] that I like, but anywhere where you have to order something it’s almost always a disappointment. I try to order whatever seems like the simplest, most [] thing and there’s always a sauce or vegetables or something - even if I’m like “Could you live out everything except the meat and the potato” it still comes with a thing inside the potato. And I can’t eat it.
Q.: I will recommend Zion National park, Yosemite national park, Redwood forest, Grand Canyon National park, and the Rockies.
A. (5:57:18): Yeah, I want to go to all of those places. It’s one of those things where you have to have a lot of time and I need to also save up enough money that I can travel comfortably. I don’t want to ruin that trip by having to ride the bus all over, I would have to take trains and planes, because I become nauseous from buses. Really unfortunate. Or I need to learn how to drive and I could rent a car, that’s the other option. I need to get a driver’s license first. It’s in the plans, but I haven’t done it yet, since I haven’t really needed it
Q.: You’re a picky eater, what kind do you like haha? Traditional finnish or more fast food etc?
A. (5:58:20): Fast food is really good, but I also like some traditional Finnish dishes that my mom has made when I was a kid (and my grandmother), and Swedish dishes too, like basic sausages and meatballs and mashed potatoes and Karelian stew and fish soup, and then I like the basic children’s food like fish sticks and fried fish and really simple stuff. There’s a lot that I can’t eat, it’s just that restaurants that aren’t fast food places tend to be really fancy with what they put in the food, and that is a problem with me. I need things to be really plain. The only kind of restaurants that I actually know that I can go to and eat are Chinese food restaurants, because their fried pork and rice - it tend to be the same in every restaurant in every country that I have been, where I have eaten Chinese food, and it is delicious, it is very plain, the sauce is never on the fried pork and it comes in a cup; sometimes, there’re like garnishings on top of the fried porks, but I can just brush them aside and the pork inside the fried thing hasn’t touched the vegetables. But otherwise restaurants are a complete crapshoot, I guess you could say. I hate []. If the worst comes to worst, I order something of the children’s menu and get a super timey [?] play, although once I ordered children's menu thing when I was vacationing with my family years ago and the portion was humongous, it was like three times as much that I could eat. And it’s like, what kind of children eat at this place that you have to give the kind of portion that a horse would eat?
Drawing: Inspirations, Techniques, ProcessQ: Are there are any artists who really inspire you?
A. (00:10:33): Yeah? Right now I don’t have one particular that I’m super-inspired to, I’m following a lot of artists and, you know, a lot of people do great work. But in the past I’ve been greatly impressed by different artists, for comics Don Rosa and Jean Giraud would be the main heroes, so to speak. And for illustration, I’ve had a few different styles over the years of people who have inspired to and really looked up to.
Q: What's the most challenging part of drawing for you in a technical sense?
A. (0:54:02): Hmm... I almost want to say everything, heheh, because I still feel like I need to learn so much. And, you know, I look at other people drawing and it seems way easier. But yeah, and I know when I watch other people draw who seem to be better than me, logically I know that they probably feel the same way, like everything is difficult, because obviously everyone’s always learning, very few people reach that kind of point when they can just draw everything and never even think about it, but, yeah, I still have to think a lot about most of the things that I draw. But maybe the hardest parts are... I feel like picking initial colours always takes me a while. I don’t really have as great an understanding of how light bounces around and influences different things, so I usually have to look at inspiration pictures, photographs and stuff, when I decide on base colour. If I try to come up with something from my head I kinda default to a few colour combinations that I really like, and when I want to try something else I have to do proper research.
Q: How long have you been drawing people?
A. (2:32:16): Actually, I would say since the beginning of A Redtail’s Dream. That was the first time I was really drawing people. Before that, I was only drawing anthropomorphic animals and dragons and different mythological creatures, like fantasy stuff; never people. So yeah, that was really the first time. I guess in school you sometimes have to do art classes where you have to draw a person, but... yeah. A Redtail’s Dream was the first time, and I had so much trouble with that, especially faces in the beginning. Basic gesturing and anatomy and hands were not a problem, because with anthropomorphic animals you learn to draw those as well, it is the human faces that were really a problem in the beginning. But now it’s been like—how long exactly? Like maybe 7-ish years?—that I’ve been drawing humans, mostly, obviously, in comic form, so I don’t have that much illustration experience in drawing humans. You know, comics are good enough for learning the basics.
Q: Have you ever thought about doing a tutorial stream where you show how you draw the outline sketches of your comics?
A. (2:34:41): Hmm, I might, but it would have to be maybe like a bonus comic or something, because the sketching part is the most—not really difficult, but it’s the part that requires a lot of concentration, and if I would try to talk and focus on the stream at the same time, I think the result would actually suffer a little bit, and I don’t want the comic’s quality to go down just because I’m trying to stream the sketching part. So yeah, it would have to be some sort of a throw-away page. But yeah, I could probably do some sort of a one-page or two-page bonus comic just for fun sometime, from start to finish.
[reads a comment] Not asking questions wouldn’t actually help that much, because that’s not the problem. The problem is that when I stream I’m obviously always a little bit aware of the fact that I am streaming, and when I’m sketching I have to make a lot of decisions which sometimes mean completely scrapping everything I’ve drawn and starting from the beginning if I decide that (you know, something doesn’t look good), and that way I get a better result. But if I know that I’m streaming and maybe I’m working one hour on a sketch and then I start feeling like I need to start over to get a better result, I might not make that decision, I might feel like “Ooh, this is good enough, I guess.” And then I have a weaker product because I was streaming while I was in the sketching part. So that’s the reason. Even when I’m kinda sitting off-stream but I can just start thinking about what I’m doing while I’m sketching, even then I notice that I start making weird decisions that I normally wouldn’t do when I am completely relaxed and don’t think about the fact that I’m making all those decisions. So it would have to be something where it doesn’t really matter that I might skip a redraw here and there. And, of course, some of this is just in my head, a lot of those decisions that I make are really kinda small and you guys wouldn’t even notice that one page isn’t as good as it could’ve been, but it’s just a thing that would bother me as the artist, since I would know that I had a better idea.
Q.: [continuation of thoughts on drawing people]
A. (2:36:07): A lot of people are talking about having troubles drawing humans... Yeah, it’s a really tough saying, but actually drawing a comic if you are able to get into the habit of drawing it every day and trying to make at least three pages every week, you will get better because you have to draw faces from different angles and make different facial expressions; there’s like ten different faces maybe on every page, so you’re kinda forced to learn something. As long as you put some effort into it and look at the reference pictures and stuff. So yeah, I definitely recommend doing a comic, even if it’s just a hundred pages (you know, with humans). You will learn a lot. *pauses* I guess I’m saying “just 100 pages” like it’s only a little bit, since I’m so used to making so many pages these days. I just remembered: when I started doing comics, just making something that was 20 pages long was almost impossible, because I didn’t have a really good work ethic back then or ability to concentrate on one project at a time, so I guess just doing a long comic isn’t that easy after all. But if you want to make a comic, just know that it’s a really good way to force some practice in drawing humans, as long as you make it a comic that has human characters.
Q: I think the way you show different facial emotions on the characters are really good.
A. (2:42:56): Thank you! I’m actually pretty proud of that. That’s something I learned by doing the anthropomorphic animals, because a facial structure obviously is different, but what you do with the mouth and the eyes is the most important part, and you can really exaggerated things with cartoon animal faces, and then you just have to kinda find a way to turn it down when you do something more realistic with human faces where the nose is a little thing and the chin actually has some sort of a proper structure. But yeah, that was something I learned early on, before starting to draw humans. And it was fairly easy to translate to drawing humans. So yeah, if someone is learning to draw by drawing just non-human characters, you actually will learn a lot that you carry over to drawing humans; it’s just really hard to get the human face to look right because we, as humans, know instinctively what the human face looks like much better than what the animal face looks like, so we will easily see that something looks wrong. So if you have a nose that is wonky and the eyes aren’t on the same level, it would be really obvious to a lot of people immediately. Whereas if you draw an anthropomorphic dog, its mouth can be of any shape or size and be a little on the side and eyes can be of different size, so if otherwise the face looks interesting, we won’t really notice the wonkiness so easily.
Q.: When I do hours of computer work, I get really tired eyes, how do you manage?
A. (4:49:59): I don’t actually get really tired eyes, even though I’m on the computer for like 12 hours a day. One reason is probably I think my cintiq screen (that I draw on), first of all, it’s not very big, so less light coming into my eyes, and the other reason is... well, it’s probably well-made and obviously calibrated to suit artists who have to stare at the screens for a long time, you know, expensive, and all that stuff. But I do notice that when I have been playing video games, for instance, now and then, for a really long time, maybe 15 hours a session during my breaks, then I do actually get really hurt eyes, like my eyes start watering and be in a huge pain because the salt water would start burning... I think it might be also that I’m kinda leaned back while I’m drawing, so I’m not... I think there’s like half a meter between my eyes and the screen, so that might also help when I’m drawing, and when I’m playing video games my eyes might be leaned a bit closer for some reason, so I get hurt eyes. So I guess my advice would be: try to lean back a little bit if you can, and if you have bad eyesight and need to be close, use glasses instead of having your eyes glued to the screen. And also see if your monitor is actually good quality, because if it has a flicker, even one that you can’t even notice, but it’s there, in the background, it’s gonna start giving you a migraine. Oh, and make sure it’s not too bright, my cintiq doesn’t have a brightness setting, I think it’s just kinda semi-dim by default, but if you have something that can be adjusted, make sure it’s not on full brightness at all times.
Q.: I am particularly impressed with how free your painting style is on this, with all the transparent overlaps!
A. (5:49:25): Yeah my painting style is fairly inspired by the time in my life when I used to mostly paint traditionally with watercolors, and I would do the kind of style where you layer a lot of water colors, kind of like you do when you use copic markers. So I do the same way when I paint digitally. It’s just a lot faster, since when you use traditional water colors, you have to wait between like every layer like ten minutes for it to dry, otherwise it will start flowing around. I guess that’s why my style is kind of loose and flowy and layer-y. I used to paint watercolors and acrylics, used to mix those together. Watercolors first, markers to do lineart, and then I would do acrylics for fine details like whites and dark blacks.
