I spent a long time investigating what paints to use. For the Thai cafe I needed many colours and they had to be extra vibrant, and I didn’t dare try mix them myself in case I ran out and couldn’t mix the same colour again. I also knew I would need to be able to use markers for linework and outlines as well as brushes for large areas of flat colours. The internet helped me find this product called One4All by Molotow. I bought little refill bottles of 30ml in all sorts of delicious colours and a few empty markers of different sizes (that’s the cool thing with the refills – you can refill markers, as well as using the paint normally with brushes). I had tried them out before, drawing on the walls at my office space, and they worked great.

For both jobs, I started out by having a lovely chat with the clients, getting a feel for the site, hearing about what they had in mind, and what the reason was for commissioning a mural. For the Thai cafe, they wanted to stand out, do something a little different, and offer their customers an experience – and it had to be colourful, with a taste of Thailand. For the archway, it was a little more functional – the client (the lodge that owns the building) had been getting random doodles on the walls of this archway – and since it’s used daily by hundreds of members they couldn’t really ignore it. They came up with this ingenious idea – why not commission some art they actually do want to look at every day!

So I sketched and sketched, making changes back and forth with the clients, and once we were all happy, I created mockups in Photoshop of how the mural would look on-site. Then, down at the site, I projected the drawings using a short-throw projector, and traced the outline with pencil.

Then it was ‘just’ a case of painting it. Starting with the large areas of colour and the big flat brush, moving to more and more detail and finally using markers for the bits and pieces like grass and outlines. For the archway, I found it easier to use two different sized flat brushes, and of course things went a lot quicker with only one colour to worry about.

For the archway, it was important to make sure the work was protected from the wonderful Danish weather. Molotow’s matte spray varnish worked well for this, even though I really don’t have the nozzle-pressing hand muscles to be a real graffiti artist – ow!

Well I’m looking forward to next time I get to paint on someone else’s property, it’s quite a thrill!

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The weekend started on Friday with a quick introduction to the basics of making comics by Tom Kaczynkski followed by a skype call with Kirsten Petersen, a teacher at a school for refugees, who gave us a run down of some of the issues kids are faced with when starting school in Denmark. The forty or so participants then teamed up and started brainstorming ideas based on her suggestions. By the end of the night we had filled a wall with post-its and sketched out storyboards, and lots of awesome feedback was given and taken.

Lovely Ditte Lundsgaard Nielsen and I wanted to make a little story about seeing the fantastical in everything – a little colourful fantasy world, and something about making friends. After sleeping on it, we met up early Saturday and went for it, drawing non-stop, with a deadline for a test print at 7pm. Luckily, it was quite easy to divide up the work, since we were going to have a real world and a fantasy world, so having different styles was a plus. Sunday morning was spent colouring the panels in photoshop, and delivering to Jeppe, who would be making the layout for the final book.

It’s the first time I had a go at making a ‘proper’ comic, and I had (and still have) a lot to learn. Ditte has been making lovely comics about her two characters Thomas the Fox and Erik the Badger, ever since her lovely book “Kender Du Sommer” (Do You Know Summer) was published by Turbine last year. I learned a lot from her, and from the other participants who gave really useful feedback. Jeppe and Fabio worked their socks off to get the compilation ready to be published online a few days after, and it’s now on its way to be published as a hardback copy by Nørhaven printers here in Viborg. And all the comics will be available in an app! So there’s a good chance the comics will end up in the hands of lots of refugee children around the country. And Fabio has big plans for the future of Comics for Good – he’s working on a Kickstarter campaign so many more volumes can be made for all sorts of good causes.

This is our contribution, called Dagdrømme (Daydream). You can read all the comics online here.

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