Then, what’s up next is… this.

Anyway, this week, I get to do a pokemon crochet… of which many people have asked for. Previously, I thought Pikachu may have been too complicated to do, but it seems not. This wasn’t that much harder than some of the other crochets I’ve done. Either way, here’s Pikachu!!

Pikachu Pattern

Here’s a list of what I used to make this crochet. It’s not a definite list, so feel free to use whatever you have, as long as it’s appropriate. It’s crocheted in the round, like most amigurumi, so only basic crochet skills are required.

NB. This pattern is created by me, so please give a link back to me if you want to use it or if you want to sell your crochet. Please give credit where it’s due. I should also that I don’t own the copyright to these characters – obviously Studio Ghibli does.

• Yellow, black, red and brown 8 ply yarn
• 4mm crochet hook
• Two pairs of 8mm black safety eyes – 6060 from Etsy is a good place to buy these
• Large sewing needle, to sew the bits and pieces together

Crochet Abbreviations

Here are a list of the abbreviations I use, and what they mean. These are pretty standard, so if you know how to crochet, this won’t be hard to decipher:

• ch – chain
• sc – single chain
• dec – decrease
• * – beginning/end of a repeating part of the pattern

Pikachu Body (Make 1, yellow)

Rnd 1 – Ch 2, 6 sc in 2nd chain away from hook (Magic Ring method)
Rnd 2 – *2 sc in next stitch*, repeat 6 times (12 stitches)
Rnd 3 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 1*, repeat 6 times (18 stitches)
Rnd 4 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 2*, repeat 6 times (24 stitches)
Rnd 5 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 3*, repeat 3 times (30 stitches)
Rnd 6 – 8 – sc (30 stitches)
Rnd 9 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 4*, repeat 3 times (36 stitches)
Rnd 10 – sc (36 stitches)
Rnd 11 – *dec 1 in back loops ONLY*, repeat 18 times (18 stitches)
Rnd 12 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 2*, repeat 6 times (24 stitches)
Rnd 13 – sc (24 stiches)
Rnd 14 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 3*, repeat 3 times (30 stitches)
Rnd 15-22 – sc (30 stitches)

Stuff the body now, and add 8mm safety eyes
Rnd 23 – *dec 1 in back loops ONLY*, repeat 15 times (15 stitches)
Rnd 24 – *dec 1*, repeat 8 times (8 stitches)

Bind off, and then sew the facial features onto Pikachu with black and red wool.

Pikachu Feet (Make 2, yellow)

Rnd 1 – Ch 2, 6 sc in 2nd chain away from hook (Magic Ring method)
Rnd 2 – *2 sc in next stitch*, repeat 6 times (12 stitches)
Rnd 3 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 1*, repeat 6 times (18 stitches)
Rnd 4 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 2*, repeat 6 times (24 stitches)

Fold each foot in half, and sew them together to make a semi-circle. Sew onto the bottom of the body to make the feet.

Pikachu Ears (Make 2, yellow, black)

Using black
Rnd 1 – Ch 2, 4 sc in 2nd chain away from hook (Magic Ring method)
Rnd 2 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 1*, repeat 2 times (6 stitches)
Rnd 3 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 1*, repeat 2 times (8 stitches)

Change to yellow
Rnd 4 – 10 – sc (8 stitches)

Bind off, stuff lightly, then sew onto the top of Pikachu’s head to make the ears.

Pikachu Hands (Make 2, yellow)

Rnd 1 – Ch 2, 6 sc in 2nd chain away from hook (Magic Ring method)
Rnd 2 – *2 sc in next stitch, sc 1*, repeat 3 times (9 stitches)
Rnd 3-7 – sc (9 stitches)

Bind off, stuff lightly, then sew onto the sides of Pikachu to make the arms.

Brown Strip on Back (Make 1, brown)

Rnd 1 – Ch 8 (8 stitches)
Rnd 2 – sc (8 stitches)

Bind off, then sew onto the back of Pikachu.

Pikachu Tail (Make 1, yellow, brown)

Rnd 1 – Ch 9 (8 stitches)
Rnd 2-4 – sc 8, then sc an additional 4 chains off the end of Rnd 4 (8 stitches)
Rnd 5 – sc 8 stitches (8 stitches)
Rnd 6-8 8 sc, then switch to brown. Then sc an additional 4 chains off the end of the last row (8 stitches)
Rnd 9 – sc 8 stitches (8 stitches)
Rnd 10-12 – sc

Bind off, then sew onto the bottom back of Pikachu to make the tail.

 
And Viola! You have a Pikachu to fit into the palm of your hand!
 

And here’s a picture of Dean’s autograph! With mine below…

This week I get to show you… felted cookie magnets. It’s from a kit I bought from a Japanese shopping site, and there’s 4 separate kits in the series. I bought them all, but can’t say there’s a lot of variation between the different cookies. They’re magnets though, so if you’re looking for stuff to stick to your fridge…

Step 1: The boxes. Aren't they cute? Great packaging!

Step 2: Open everything up, and check that it's there. Usually it is.

Step 3: None of these are particularly complicated to sew, but here they all are, all at once!

Here’s the final 12 cookie-magnets:

The original: This was a studio-taken picture Yunyu, which is fantastically done and needs no retouching. The backgorund was a picture of the nightsky a friend took, slapped together in a composite picture.

Step 2: One of the problems with the original pic is that the picture isn't composed well. Yunyu is too small, and while the background is meant to emphasise the milky way, Yunyu is standing directly infront of it. So I cropped the picture properly, to show the foreground and background elements properly

Step 3: The milkyway looks kinda plain, so I flipped the picture around, and added a bunch of glow effects of it to make it pop out more. I also changed the hue to a bluish glow, to even out the diffferences in colour. A nightsky should be bluish...

Step 4: With the milky way now so bright, obviously I need to get the lighting references right. It doesn't make sense to be standing to the left of the lightsource when you can clearly see that Yunyu's lit from the left, so I swapped the picture element around so the light-source makes sense.

Final Step: Since the blue and the red contrast is so strong, I changed the hue of Yunyu's skin and hair to match the bluish glow. I left the red jacket mostly untouched, so that the red will pop out, whereas her skin tone will match the blue glow. And Viola! Click on the picture to see a larger version.

Other news this week will be my new 10-page short story, We Are The Pickwicks. This was done as part of a “Peter Pan”-themed anthology with the folks at BentoComics.com, and this time I chose to do things a little differently. I decided to mix comics and prose together, in a hybrid form I call Graphic Prose.

Click here to read the next page –>

What is Graphic Prose?
It’s a story-telling medium that combines both prose and comics. This is not like a picture book, where there is usually a block of text, accompanied by illustrations that may or may not have anything to do with the text. Instead, this looks to integrate the comics into the prose, to make a single, coherent narrative. Reading both the comics and the prose is necessary.

Now, I’m not the first person to combine prose and comics, but the difference here is that most attempts of this kind I’ve seen have pages of comics, followed by pages of text. This can make for an unbalanced reading experience. In comparison, I did mine with comics and prose integrated on EACH page, which means there’s no prolonged chunks of prose or comics alone. I feel it makes a more immersive reading experience.

How Did This Come About?
In 2010, I was approached by author Kylie Chan, who showed me her (yet unpublished) book Small Shen. It was the prequel to her best-selling White Tiger Fantasy series, and she asked me do something “graphic novel-related” with it. I took this to mean some kind of adaptation. Now, anyone who has ever done an adaptation knows how hard they can be. Generally, it involves taking a hacksaw to the original script and eliminating entire side-plots, so the story can fit under a certain number of comic pages. This has to be done due to time and money constraints, and like film adaptations, there’s little that can help the chopping and cutting.

I’ve always wished things were different, so when I started adapting Small Shen, I tried to preserve Kylie’s “voice” as much as possible, while still bringing engaging art to the story. Prose authors who are unfamiliar with comics can often find adaptations of their work a brutal process – comics can give the impression that it’s 50% writing, and 50% art, but that’s not really true. The real split is closer to 30% writing and 70% art. The reason for this split is because even though you can have the world’s greatest script, an incompetent artist can ruin it with bad story-telling, inexpressive art and panelling that’s hard to follow. Conversely, if you have a good artist, you can elevate an average script into a good story. This difference is even more pronounced when it comes to adaptations – the original author often finds their “voice” reduced to just tinkering with the dialogue, while the artist gives shape and form to everything else. For prose authors, who are used to being masters of their own universes, it can be deeply unsettling.

Small Shen had a lot of un-cuttable conversations, so instead of pages of talking heads in comics, I decided to just leave it in prose. This then led to leaving entire paragraphs in prose, only adding panels and pages when called for, and when I was done adapting Small Shen to script form, I had something that I found quite special. This gave me the confidence to write a short story, entirely from scratch, in such a prose-comics hybrid form. That story was We are the Pickwicks.

 
Click here to read more of my thoughts on Graphic Prose –>
 

I took pictures of some of the art I did, thanks to the new iPhone I have. Since the convention went on for 2 days and was pretty tiring, you can kinda see the quality of the art (and the photography) dribble down through the sketches. Conventions are strange places to be drawing in… some people seem to do well in those kind of environments, whereas I found it overwhelming. There’s alwas people coming and going to talk to you, and generally it’s quite loud and noisy. Either way, I decided that drawing characters from The Legend of Zelda will make it easier for me, and so it was. Drawing Link always calms me down.

Doodled this pic of Link on the back of one of those hotel writing pads...

Zelda was also doodled on the back of a hotel pad... random pieces of paper, teehee.

A fan of "The Dreaming" asked me to draw Mary Spector! Now that was someone I haven't drawn for years!

I was asked to draw two pokemon eating a mountain of food. Pokenmon experts should know who the stars of this picture is...

People bought Link so I had to draw another Link.

Zelda was bought up too, so I drew another Zelda.

A french-themed Pikachu for someone's sketchbook

Let me just say that Link was uber-popular... I had to finish this one quick because someone wanted it when they saw me drawing it.

I think one of these guys is called the "Blue Beetle"? This was something about April Fool's Day?

I drew this pic of a cute little blonde boy. I was so tired by then I could barely photograph this one properly.

This week I show you one of the first things I crocheted, since it was so easy. It’s a pokeball, and I got the free pattern from Wolfdreamer’s blog. This particular pattern makes a rather large ball (the size of your first) at 42 stitches, so for my version I decided to shrink it down to 30 stitches. I found that 30 stitches maximum produced a pokeball that is more like the size it’s supposed to be (ie. fits into the cup of your hands).

Step 1: Crochet the top half of the pokeball. I stopped at 30 stitches though, since I felt that was the "normal" size for a pokeball.

Step 2: Add the black parts then the white parts. You do this much in the same you chance colours during crocheting.

Step 3: Crochet the little black and white buttons in the middle of the pokeball, then sew them onto the ball.

And here we have two pokeballs, one 42 stitches wide, and one 30 stitches wide. You can see the size difference.

This is the third Odd Thomas book I’ve done, titled “House of Odd” and it’s coming out next Tuesday on the 20th March, 2012 (I posted some art from this a while back). This book was drawn in 2011, and like the other two books, In Odd We Trust and the #1 New York Times seller Odd Is On Our Side, it focuses on the adventures of psychic fry-cook Odd Thomas, star of Dean Koontz‘s best-selling prose novel series of the same name. This book is adapted from a script by Dean and Landry Q. Walker, and I thank the both of them for their fine work!

NB.I also got to thank Lala of Review Carnival, and Allen of Jazma Online for their interviews of me! Lala’s is a general interview, whereas Allen’s deals specifically with House of Odd!

• For North American Readers: You can buy it here off Amazon.com
• For International Readers: You can buy it here off BookDepository.com, which has free international shipping.

What’s the Story?
The story of House of Odd once again has Odd and Stormy trying to solve a supernatural disturbance, but this time it’s a disturbance with a difference! It occurs at the site of a supposedly haunted house, which has just been bought and renovated by Nedra Nolan, a friend of Ozzie Boone. Ozzie recommended Odd to Nedra as the resident ghost-busters of Pico Mundo, but Nedra isn’t impressed – she’s an ex-Hollywood producer who instead hires her own (and therefore competing) band of ghostbusters to figure the house out. However, neither Odd nor the ghostbusters are prepared for what will actually happen in the house…

Odd Thomas is a psychic fry-cook who can see dead people, who lives in the Californian town of Pico Mundo. Accompanied by his ass-kicking, gun-toting girlfriend Stormy, he often tries to help the forlorn spirits he encounters by finding their murderers. This involves getting into a fair bit of danger. Luckily, Odd has many (living) friends, many of them quite odd themselves, who help him in his quest. It’s a rather charming, off-beat take on the supernatural, with moments of action and suspense, as Odd finds himslf the target of some truly nasty people as he tries to uncover their nefarious deeds.

Here I Show Off Some…
I’ve got to end this with a picture of something Dean sent me for my work… signed, numbered, first-edition copies of the first 4 Odd Thomas prose novels!! It was so kind of Dean to make this generous gesture, so in return I sent him back some original pages from House of Odd. Mind you, I’ve never owned any first edition books before, and had no idea that they were so big. They’re beautifully-printed, leather-bound and the size of a Britannica volume. Here’s some pictures to share with the Internet. No doubt this is worth a lot!!

The red book is "Brother Odd". It has the prettiest cover design!!

The lightening bolt one is "Odd Hours". The green one is "Odd Thomas", the silver "Forever Odd", and the other red one is "Brother Odd".

The inside covers of these first-edition books are beautifully illustrated, as are the chapter openings. In "Brother Odd", all the text on the pages were in the shape of a church window. I thought it was a real nice touch!

There's only 300 of each of these in th world!! (Well, 500 of "Odd Thomas", 300 of the rest)

This was actually sent to me in December 2011, but I thought I'd save it until "House of Odd" came out to show the world. So here it is!!

Dorothy is available on iTunes and Bandcamp:

• iTunes – Video: http://itunes.apple.com/au/music-video/dorothy/id504609708
• iTunes – Song: http://itunes.apple.com/au/album/dorothy-single/id505056286
• Bandcamp: http://yunyu.bandcamp.com/track/dorothy

What is Twisted Tales?

Twisted Tales is the name of Yunyu’s music album, but it’s not that simple. The story is about what happens when fairy tales come to live in our world (along with the various issues that living in our world has), but it’s not just a music album. Below, Yunyu and I talk about Twisted Tales in our introduction video:

As a manga artist (and a long-time friend of Yunyu), I had the biggest hand in shaping the visual side of Twisted Tales – it’s quite unlike any other project I’ve worked on, and I had some great fun with the material, some of which was quite unexpected. For example, I didn’t expect to do any photo-shopping of Yunyu’s photos for this album, but in terms of publicity shots, it kinda fell within the territory. Below is a shot I photoshopped for the release of Dorothy. I discovered a previously unknown talent for this sort of thing! It was fun to indulge too!

Click to enlarge. I will be posting a step-by-step tutorial for how I photoshopped this picture later on.

The Art of Twisted Tales

I designed the character of Dorothy, which the animators The Commonists then brought to life. Apart from that, my job was to design the covers for the CDs and DVDs, which unfortunately is only available as part of a press kit. The idea is that people are no longer buying CDs, so at least for a while, you won’t be able to buy the CD covers and CD I designed for Dorothy. But that doesn’t mean I won’t show you all that nice art! Here’s a pic of it below:

As for the actual art style, I settled on it a long time ago. It’s rather bright and colourful, but I feel that for a story about twisted fairy tales, that cheeriness works fine as a counterpoint to the dark subject matter. I would cite South Park as inspiration – childlike-graphics, but with mature content. It’s incongruous, like a subversion of childhood imagery, which I liked very much. Dorothy itself is a rather dark song, and the sequence of events that happen in this 6-panel story of Dorothy’s journey through space reflects that. The cutesy art brings that out even more so.

Since the theme of both Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz was travel, I decided to use airmail letters/parcels/stamps as part of the jacket design. The 5 stamps show Dorothy travelling along the yellow star road, meeting the scarecrow (Planet Brain), the tin man (a spaceship), and the lion (constellation of Leo) before she meets the giant blue star – aka the Wizard of Oz. The wizard turned out to be a disappointment, as he was in the original – in this case, the wizard is Death itself. You find out Dorothy’s fate in the final panel, which not coincidently is also the CD itself.

Click to enlarge.

I created a separate cover for the DVD version. Originally this wasn’t meant to exist since the discs were meant to be 2-in-1 or something, but people got confused. So this was whipped up at the last minute, so people can see they’re a DVD and a song on a CD.

Click to enlarge.

That’s it from me, for Dorothy. The next song in the album will be coming down the pike in a few month’s time, so stay tuned!

What: Contemporary Jewllery Exhibition
By: Melissa Cameron – “In Geometry I Trust”
Who: Studio 20/17
Where: 6B/2 Danks St, Waterloo NSW 2017
When: 28th – 17th March, from 11am – 6pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays

Melissa is a friend of mine from Melbourne, and her jewellery designs are quite distinct. Her inspiration is from architecture and the ideas of geometry that comes within that discipline, so her work looks very detailed and delicate. However, Melissa’s not a “typical” jewellery deisgner – her work is all hand-made, and straddles jewellery design and fine art, so not all of her work is wearable. The work that is meant to be wearable, fragile and complex as they may look, are actually quite durable.

Here's a necklace from one her exhibition, which is for sale there.

Here is more work from her line, which shows of her style quite well.

I don’t wear jewellery much, but I find Melissa’s work a breath of fresh air. She has a style that is quite unique to her, and since Studio 20/17 is a gallery that showcases a number of contemporary jewellery designers, you can see a wide range of jewellery designs here. Comparing and contrasting the different styles, ideas and motivations behind each of the jewellery designers is a lot of fun. Since nearly all of the jewellery designs are for sale, jewellery enthusiasts can also go shopping-mad there.

Outside Studio 20/17. There are other small art galleries all around.

Some of the other jewellery design works. There were heaps of work by other designers there.

You can see more of Melissa’s work at her website. There’s many works of hers that aren’t on display at this gallery, and my favourites are always the intricate non-wearable ones like the ones below. I imagine I’d like to hang one of these on my wall!

The Sieve, from 2010

The Fishes, 2011. Antique 800 silver platter, stainless steel. 25 x 100 x 40mm

Anyway, the rest of the gallery was also quite interesting. There’s many, many galleries in the 2 Danks St complex, and since we arrived early to the exhibition, we wandered around looking at the other galleries and the artists on showcase. We saw some really wonderful and innovative artwork there! All-in-all, it was the first time I’ve beem to 2 Danks St, and it was a super-fun experience!

Melissa at her Artist's Talk yesterday

Melissa talks more about her work again.

Melissa's necklace from an earlier line in action!