Journey to the East (of Jeju Island) - Illustrations and Webtoon-Snippets

This post will be a little different. There's no mention of makeup (gasp!) and there's mostly just photos instead of drawings.

I wanted to introduce the region of South Korea I've been living in for now nearly three years, namely the east of Jejudo or Jeju Island, including Pyeongdae, Sehwa (and its markets) as well as Hado.

Sketch of Sehwa-Ri, 2014

Most of the imagery that's shown of Jeju is somewhat beach-life-related, so instead I'll be taking you on a little tour along one of the countless hiking routes that lead around the whole island. Still lots of beaches, though. The trails are called Ollegil and one of them actually goes by where I live (as in, five meter distance from doorstep to hiking trail) so I'm a bit protective of these. Swiss ambassador for Jeju Olle hiking trails, right here!

On that note: My self-painted doorstep for the Bistro Gris.

The sun is intense on Jeju, so I did slap on some 50 SPF sunscreen (and well, since this IS a makeup blog, too, I'll mention that it was an innisfree one. Surprise.) and a hat. Looking like a ghost I made it through the afternoon without getting burnt (my hands and neck were another story... I need to get out more...)

Selfie before moving out! 

While there are some signs and menues translated into English, you might want to brush up on some Korean vocabulary when traveling outside of large cities. 

When my parents were visiting, I drew them a little language survival map, Jeju specific version. So, let's grab that and go!

First, there's the village we live in (husband, cat and me), Pyeongdae-ri. Located on the north-eastern coast of Jeju in the region called 'Gujwaeup', and Olle gil 21 is the one leading from the village eastwards. While we do technically live in the region of Pyeongdae-ri, we're so far on the outskirts that Sehwa-ri, the next village over, is much closer.

So, that's where we live and where the Bistro Gris is located. On we go!

Leave behind your cat... (sorry)

... and follow the trail until you reach the seaside of Sehwa. 

As with many of the small villages around Jeju, there's a lot of growth happening. While the east of the island is a lot more rural than the more touristy south or west (not to even mention the north and Jeju City), the last two years have seen a bit of an explosion in little cafes, guesthouses, rental houses, cute little shops, fleamarkets, farmer markets and of course tourists. While the large tourist groups (be it Chinese or Korean) visit mostly the south, the east has become popular among young couples, groups of friends or just in general people that want a more relaxed vacation. 

This makes for some interesting contrast, because old and new clash together quite a bit.

There's new dessert cafes next to seafood restaurant that have been there for decades. Agriculture and fishing are everpresent, but so are selfie-shooting tourists and modern guesthouses. 

If you pass Sehwa harbor on a saturday, you'll notice a lot of people gravitating towards the largest pier. That's the '벨롱장' (Bellongjang? Vellong?) flea market happening - which isn't really a flea market, since you won't find second-hand goods.

Missing Hedwig... :'(

 Instead, there's a lot of small stalls selling handmade necklaces, hats, pottery, woodwork, artfully woven hangings, hand-sewn mobiles, embroidery and decorations, as well as food and drinks. 

We even found kebab and mango lassi. There's freshly baked bread, bretzels, lots of juice and coffee, and a little fire to roast marshmallows over. 

The stalls tend to change a lot, so you might want to visit again soon... it's also been growing steadily over the last two, three years (when it started out with only a couple of tables) and keeps on growing!

If Saturday is not an option, try visiting on a day where the 오일장 / O-Il-Jang / Five-Day-Market is held. The 5th, 10th, 15th... and so on of every month. Less cute little stalls, more traditional restaurants, fried food, fresh vegetables, fruit and fish. 

The Oiljang is held in a roofed but open-walled building right next to the harbor - hard to miss, especially on market day!

Well, no luck there today.

So go on ahead for a few more minutes, and take some pictures at these cute little phot zones in front of the seaside cafes. 

Don't worry if you couldn't go to either market - you won't famish on the road. There's a lot of places selling dessert and coffee, as well as traditional restaurants. 

It starts like this...

... and keeps on growing. 

 Now that shopping and eating are out of the way, it's time to, you know, actually hike.

The Jeju Olle Trails are quite forgiving. While there are some sections that take up an entire day of walking, most can be done in three to six hours. And as long as they aren't leading into the mountains, you can more or less walk them in sandals (say hello to bugs and mosquitos, though).

There's simple markers in the form of ribbons guiding the way.

Say goodbye to the sea... for now!

After Sehwa, the trail will lead inland once it reaches the Haenyeo (Diving Women) Museum. If you've got enough time, take a look at that, too. The diving women are a part of Jeju's culture even today and the museum gives some insight into their past, too.

Depending on the season, you'll be able to see them diving in the sea anyways, or pass by large amounts of seaweed drying on the streets. 

An older sketch depicting the avid seafood collecting ajummas.

You'll probably also see locals as well as tourists collecting seafood among the rocks. If you want to have a taste, a lot of the seaside restaurants get deliveries straight from the diving women.

The trail will lead through some smaller hills and fields. Jeju's climate can be near-tropical in summer, but it really depends on what part of the island you visit. While the south sports palm trees, citrus fruits and cacti, the east coast is more of a carrot fields and pine trees kind of region.

There's a lot of stray dogs running around. Don't worry, they've got better things to do than chasing after humans. :)

Another sign to watch out for are these symbols, guiding the way in places where ribbons won't quite cut it.

As you follow the trail, you'll also visit some smaller villages with traditional houses made from Jeju black stone. There's even a fortress just before you hit upon the next larger settlement.

The fortress is a historical site, but people are still living all over the place.

Housing from a generation after the stone wall houses. There's so many of these small little houses all over the island, with the roofs painted either green, red or blue without exception. One housing unit consists of several of these small buildings - one for living, one for storage, one for cooking/working, for example.

Sometimes the color combinations get ambitious.

After about one hour of walking through hills, fields and villages and after crossing through the fortress, you'll reach the coast again at Hado-Ri. You can't miss the sign.
Smaller than Sehwa-Ri, it sports a beautiful beach at the end of the Olleh Gil as well as some old-fashioned guest houses in stone houses.

If you're a bit tired from literally no walking, go have a drink at one of the seaside cafes. Personal recommendation would be the Cafe Isla right there after you've seen the large 'Hado' sign - the couple leading the cafe are avid travellers and their menu card is all the more rich for it.

Found one of the crochet mobilees sold at the fleamarket in Sehwa. Isn't the diving woman cute?

Right on cue, we spotted a whole troupe of diving women / haenyeo after leaving the cafe to follow the coastline road again. They can be found easily - you'll hear the high-pitched sound of their breathing even from very far away. At first, I thought I was hearing sea gulls, but since the haenyeo don't use any diving equipment beyond glasses and have to hold their breaths for a long time, the first intake after reaching the surface is audible before you can even see them. 

Considering that most of these women are well over their fifties, the bodily work they do is even more impressive. 

Another half hour of walking brings you to the beach of Hadori. There's canoes to be taken out into the water, so you might want to make a longer stop here.

Hadori sketch from spring 2016

After Hadori, the 21st Olle Gil continues along the beach, then moving inwards again and up one of the larger hills (Oreum) of Jeju island. 

We were in a hurry, so we didn't follow the way to its end on that day.

Made it home just in time to watch the sunset and give some love to our lonely cat. 

The view from the Bistro Gris ~ 

That's it for this little photography and illustration heavy blog post. 

I really love the region we live in - and Jeju island in general - so I'm happy I could do this little introduction!

Below is a snippet from a webtoon I'd been drawing in 2014, retelling my first time traveling to Korea and Jeju (and Asia in general) with a friend and meeting my now-husband (then-hostelstaff) while doing so. Thematically relevant. Totally.

NEW YEAR, NEW ART - Closing the year 2015 and opening art commissions for 2016

Happy new year, everyone!

How can 2015 be over? I'm in denial and using a planner from 2015 that was too pretty to throw away unused. Will be confused about which day of the week it is for the whole year, but it's probably worth it anyway.

After a very hectic and kind of restless December, January is much more relaxing. I'm back on Jeju after having been away for over a month - don't misunderstand, I love traveling! Switzerland, Paris, Seoul, it was wonderful to be there, but traveling with all my art supplies and several commissions that have to be crammed in while catching up with all my friends and family is always tiring me out.

Yeah, yeah, as if eating and playing around was hard.

Also, my luggage was the strangest beast ever, with a mixture of interior design objects we bought on sale in Switzerland to take to Jeju, gifts from the Korean family to the Swiss family and the other way 'round, the mentioned art supplies, A2 paper, all sorts of food we can't find in Korea and absolutely had to stuff in (who doesn't want goat cheese in their handbag?) aaaand Christmas gifts aaaaaaand cookies from two grandmothers aaaaaaaaaaaand (for the trip from Seoul to Jeju) a CAT.

You talkin' about me? Miaow!

As for traveling:

It looks so peaceful...

... and beautiful...

...with food everywhere.

Everywhere, I said.

With a coffee here and there to change things up.

Food again. (Fondue!)

... You get the drift.

Rant over. I'm so glad to be home and a lazy bum again.

Like this.

As for blogging new year resolutions: I'm very motivated and very intimidated at the same time, haha!

On the beauty front, there are a lot of reviews lined up - especially for some of the newer makeup releases in Korea. Also, I FINALLY own a mirror that isn't a handmirror, so I can now use both hands for applying makeup and everything has gotten a lot less shaky, which makes me want to up my skills and maybe even do some tutorials. As if anyone could learn anything from me.

It's a game-changer.

On the art front:

I've started and finished a variety of things last year. 2015 was a turning point in my 'career', if you can even call it that. I'd done commissions before, but had mostly worked as a Manga artist since my first year of art school. While it was so fulfilling and fun to work on books, it also consumed all of my drawing time and while I have, by now, several books under my belt, I'm still a relative newbie to the whole 'freelancing' thing.

... a deserved (??) art haul
Seoul has the best art stores. My favorite paper!

After finishing my last book in spring 2015, I wanted to try something new. I started working as a freelance illustrator, accepting odd illustration jobs - and slowly, out of those, came projects and art styles I really grew to love. Children's picture books. Makeup illustrations. Blogging as a whole.

One of the makeup illustrations I enjoyed the most! Flatlay feelings!

And a LOT of freedom, all of a sudden. I didn't have to spend every day working on a seemingly never-ending number of comic pages. There were less creative decisions I had to wrack my mind with. I had time to meet friends, to eat dinner with my husband, to study up on my Korean. I even got a cat - something I could never have imagined while drawing comics, which are just too all-consuming.

My ONLINE SHOP is open again, too. So if you don't want custom illustrations,
there's prints and stickers and mirrors....

Of course, I miss it anyway. If 2016 brings me another opportunity to work as an author or manga artist, I'll grab it very, very tightly. I just don't feel quite ready to dive into it head-first all over again, as there are too many other things I love dearly and wouldn't want to sacrifice.

For the moment, I'll continue doing illustrations for smaller and larger companies (some stuff I can never even show you here because it's either copyrighted or would bore you to tears) and hopefully expand on my whole makeup artwork thingy I've got going on here!

You can find my commission rates for social media illustrations (icons, brand logos, personalized blog headers or youtube banners) and portraits in the custom art section of my Etsy shop.

Thank you for reading this very random, picture-heavy and kind of useless blogpost. I wanted to ramble a bit before getting my serious face on for the next year! Hope you have a great 2016 ahead of you!

NaNoWriMo - An illustrated look at my Novel Writing Month

November is National Novel Writing Month. I hadn't known about that little fact up until last year when I promptly decided to take part in it.

I'm not an author, strictly speaking. I have written, drawn and then gotten published comic books, but never before attempted to tell a story only in writing. So, on to new things!

Of course, I had to draw some character sketches on the by...

In any case, I used November 2014 to get going with a story idea I'd been playing around with for some years. Normally, when doing story concepts for comic books, I'd only write summaries, scene descriptions, portions of important dialogue and character studies before then heading into a detailed script mostly comprised of sketches. This works well enough, but every now and then, plotholes remain uncovered, or something from the beginning doesn't quite add up with the following narrative. And, with the publishing world being what it is and drawing being a run against time, changes become nearly impossible if one doesn't want to redraw the whole book once one reaches the end. Being into whimsical, complicated, sometimes overly crowded storytelling doesn't make it any easier.

So for that particular story idea, I wanted to do it right. I wanted to have the time to edit, to adjust and to polish before even sending the concept to my editor.
Writing came surprisingly easy. Not that it's good writing - but I was surprised at how naturally the scenes I'd imagined drawn came to life with just words. The 50'000 words were over way too fast, and the story only about a quarter done.

I had to focus on some other stories (Lost Ctrl was published in 2015, text editing had to be done, and then I started freelancing as an illustrator and working on a Korean fairytale retelling) but with NaNoWriMo 2015 rolling around, I was ready to dive into that little beast of a story again.

Trying to sort out some timeline issues...
I have some kind of mad scientist approach to story planning.
This is only the mindmap of the second quarter, most of the overall planning was
done back in 2014.

Fantasy is a genre I love, especially if religion, magic and mysticism take a front-row seat. But it's also a genre that's not forgiving to half-hearted worldbuilding and haphazard plots. Writing scenes, plot points and dialogue ahead of bothering with even the roughest of sketches helps me to find my way through the maze of my ideas and to bring them together. Adding in scenes from the point of view of secondary characters helps sort out some inconsistencies I wouldn't have noticed otherwise. Writing action scenes (hopefully) will help me to draw them as more engaging later on.

Hit 50k on day 26 - YAY!

I tried, and managed, to write more than the required 1667 words a day, never slacking off even when ahead of wordcount. As I was quite busy working at the restaurant, drawing commissions and freelancing, I forced myself to only start writing once all of the day's work was done, which often meant 11 pm or later. By that point, I was looking forward to an hour of concentrated writing so much that it was hard to stop myself from just keeping at it all night long. I reined myself in and wrote an average of 2000 words a day.

I can really recommend using writing during NaNoWriMo as a reward after the rest of your to-do list is checked off - it makes writing a treat instead of a chore.

Another character concept illustration I'm still in the middle of drawing...

I did squeeze in some quick character illustrations during October and November (can't quite stop myself from drawing after all...) and am now looking forward to keeping on writing in December. I'll be visiting my family in Switzerland, and as I have neither a scanner nor all my materials over there, the amount of drawing commissions I can do keeps itself in check. Which means: Forced Freedom. Vacation. Time to write during the days, hopefully.

I've got three main characters, three women that grew up in the same temple and have the same name. They were like sisters once, but the story starts years later, when they're all at very different places in life. 

I'm really looking forward to drawing their very different points of view. Especially the viewpoint of the blind priestess will be a challenge when it comes to depicting it.

I'm also experimenting with a more realistic art style mixed with my normal manga style, to fit the more sombre mood of the story I want to create. Maybe something like this? Still struggling.

This would be more typical for me (and easier to keep up over hundreds of pages, mind you), but I'll keep doing style tests until I've finished the script.

Did you participate in NaNoWriMo? Would you like to try? What were your experiences?