Margreet de Heer's Blog, page 15
March 4, 2013
Doodles for Two
Is there anything better than doodling? Yes: doodling for two! This is a fun drawing “game” I love doing with other artists – each one draws a first panel in a six-panel grid, then passes the paper to the next person, who continues the story in his/her own style. Usually, this results in fascinating wacky comics.
Lately, my husband Yiri and I had a lot of fun creating these:
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(Translation by me, colors by Yiri)
February 26, 2013
The Comeback of Stella
If you’re lucky as a comic artist, you get to make a comic for a magazine that appears with some frequency. This allows you to build a world, to flesh out characters, to introduce backgrounds and depths.
If you’re really lucky, your comic runs for a few years and builds a readership. A run of two, three, four years is a really good one in this time when magazines seem to re-style at a disturbing rate. (Unfortunately, the comic is usually the first thing to get changed under a new editor.)
And i...
February 21, 2013
A Calendar of Tales
Widely beloved author Neil Gaiman has started the project A Calendar of Tales, in which he invites the world to make art with him. Using the tweets of thousands of people as an inspiration, he has written twelve tales, one for each month, and is now inviting artists to illustrate them.
I love this.
Even though I’m busy enough preparing the translation of ‘Science: a Discovery in Comics’ (to be published in September) and the second print of ‘Philosophy: a Discovery in Comics’ (Yay! A second pri...
February 13, 2013
LOVE
It’s Valentine’s Day! Here are some doodles I made of the loved ones I live with:
The cats, Boris and Toto.
The husband, Yiri.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
February 9, 2013
A Composing Companion
Lately, a friend has joined our little workspace, bringing a whole new discipline in our comics-dominated world: Michiel Mensingh is an old high-school friend of Yiri, and an acclaimed composer of modern classical music.
The new input inspired me to make these cartoons:
The piece Michiel has been composing will be performed by pianist Laurens de Boer on 22 March 2013. More information here.
February 3, 2013
The Sandbox Dialogues
I hardly ever make political cartoons or comics. But when I was invited to comment on the pending Iraq War in March 2003, I made this:
I can only grasp global problems by scaling them down to “sandbox”-size. It all the more emphasizes the pettiness of human behavior and motives – which really depresses me, but at least it makes for an entertaining comic. As you can see, this one was heavily influenced by Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes, both in style and tone.
After being put up on the site St...
January 28, 2013
The Queen turns 75 – Long Live the King!
Tonight, Dutch Queen Beatrix, after a reign of 33 years, has announced she will abdicate the throne in favor of her son Willem-Alexander. Coming Thursday, she’ll turn 75 – what a grand way to celebrate her birthday!
After seeing her speech on TV, in which she stressed that she really enjoyed being Queen but thinks it is time for the New Generation, I made this cartoon.
The Netherlands has had a run of three Queens (Wilhelmina, Juliana and Beatrix) – now for the first time in 123 years a King wi...
January 21, 2013
Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School
What I did last weekend? I drew beautiful half-naked ladies in a warm atmosphere of burlesque show and artistic conviviality!
Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School is a life model drawing event bringing together great shows from the burlesque scene and graphic artists, amateurs and professionals alike. It was started by Molly Crabapple in New York, and has spread all over the world into over a hundred branches. When I found out about it, one and a half years ago, I was shocked that Amsterdam had no br...
January 15, 2013
Translating Digits of Pi
In September, my next book ‘Science: a Discovery in Comics’ will be published by NBM. Right now, I’m in the middle of translating this 192-pager from Dutch into English (using my own new font, yay!).
As always, translating poses interesting challenges – not only does the translation have to be accurate, it also has to fit into the space available. Fortunately, Dutch is a much “longer” language than English. The English wording usually comes out much shorter, which makes it easy on me. Except f...
January 12, 2013
Animation
The New Year already brought exciting new plans, prospects and projects – including the intended publication of my next book at NBM in September: ‘Science: a Discovery in Science’. This calls for a new wave of Promotion when the time comes, and this time we’ll include some YouTube videos about the book. I could just video myself, but this seems a great opportunity to make an animation.
I’ve been wanting to learn animation but never got the time and besides, it’s my brother’s expertise. I have...
