Indiegogo

I created an IndieGogo campaign to help funding the publishing of my illustration book Bulgarian Mythological Creatires (and Where to Find Them).
It has been more successful than I expected! It got funded on 100% for less than 24 hours! And right now it is overfunded on more than 400%... I am extremely grateful to everyone who helped support this project of mine!

Screenprinting session

 Screen printing has been something I really enjoy doing, but I haven't got the chance to do it since I graduated from my university in France. Not until recently, when I booked a session at Portsmouth Uni, and did a few t-shirts and tote bags with a few illustrations of folklore characters that I've previously done in watercolour.

Lettering tests

Work in progress

Some work in progress pictures

Cleaning up [short film] Poster

I have drawn the poster for the short film "Cleaning up". The premiere screening of the short was in London, on the 25th of May, and the poster was printed out in A1 size.

Visual Experimentation (Page 1)

I started this with the the idea of colouring every page digitally (on Photoshop). As I did that though, I found that that I am not happy with the look of it. So i decided to give it a try in watercolour,

After completing a page in watercolour, I found out that this is the look I am looking for. It has kind of a nostalgic feel to it, which adds up to the atmosphere of the main character's inner world. I will continue drawing the pages traditionally instead of digitally.

Research (textual)

Bulgarian Folk Mythology is a collection of academic research texts, that explore the characters of Bulgarian foklore into detail. It was my main resource when it comes to folklore,but what I notice is that the text is quite dry and hard to read. Which is what I think puts people off when it comes to explores our mythology. There aren't a lot of art pieces that can offer a view of those characters, which is one of the reasons I thought I would represent Bulgarian folklore in the form of a comic book.

Scott McCould's Making Comics did helped me a lot when I first started sketching my panels, as it combines textual explanation with illustrations, and the information is very clearly presented. He goes through all of the basics on how to construct a comic book page, characters and stories.

Characters

After going through the characters with my writer (Detelina Shishkova), I decided to do my first attempt of illustrating them. As we would have a couple of flashbacks in the story, I drew both present and child versions of the main characters.

Nikola 

Samodiva

Building the story (Pt. 2)

I've been working with a writer, to help me make the story be intriguing and convincing.

We've been working together on the characters, and the story itself.

We did come up with more problematics that would be explored in the plot, that would tie up together and add more sense and realistic feel to the script. 

At first, the script for the comic book was supposed to be based on a very old Bulgarian story, written by Elin Pelin, that describes a short encounter of a boy from the city and a samodiva. But as we went on developing our own original story, it has become so different than the one by Elin Pelin, so it is almost impossible to say it is based on anything at all. 

To be honest, I did struggle to write to script on my own, but after collaborating with my writer I feel pretty content with what we came up with. I chose to work with a Bulgarian writer, because I wanted someone who already has a lot of knowledge of folklore and mythology, and can successfully include them in the plot. 

Building the story (Pt. 1)

Samodiva would be a graphic novel, based on Bulgarian traditional stories and myths. It is set in modern times, but still holds plenty of folklore elements.

The story follows the journey of a young man, who goes back to his childhood village, and visits his grandmother who he hasn't seen in years. There, he would have a strange encounter with a girl, who turns out to be a folklore/mythological characters, called Samodiva. He would later realise that they did knew each other as kids- that would be shown through flashbacks.
A crisis would happen (such as big storm/ fire) - that is the climax of the story. Resolution- the samodiva would interfere, and at the end- epilogue, where the main character carries on with his life outside the village.

Trying out masking liquid!

A little work in progress using masking fluid 🎨

A post shared by Clementine Petrova (@petrova.illustrations) on Jul 7, 2017 at 6:57am PDT

My university tutor, Jackie Batey, gave me the advice to try out masking liquid. I bought some from amazon and I was eager to test it! I used it for a nature illustration, that is actually part of my book.
I really like it, and now I use it quite often. I am very glad I discovered that!