Each night, twelve princesses go out to dance – nobody knows how or where. Each night, a suitor tries to guard them and disappears forever. This is the premise of our story, inspired by the Brothers Grimm fairy tale with a heavy Petre Ispirescu influence.

I had a lot of fun working on this book – including developing a new drawing style, in ink, and then developing a new coloring style (yes, yes, it’s still quite similar to Prâslea) . The long story can be found on the blog.

The book was published in French by Les Aventuriers de L’Etrange, and you can buy it here.

The book is at the printers, it should be done by the beginning of August :).

So I thought this might be a good time to do a short recap of how it came to be.

Legend has it, every book starts with a story, every comic-book starts with a script. There are even older legends that talk about the ”artist who has something to say”. While all this is true, I find that the real germination point is to be found many years before, and its almost always related to passion and curiosity.

All of that to say that I blame Măscărici for Le Bal. It started with me investigating traditional costumes of the neighboring countries. The Vecini Project followed – and so I stumbled upon the Bulgarian costumes of Rhodope. Next was The Imaginary Costume Museum, which was an exercise in style as well as one in ethnography. Then I got a commission for a live drawing event, for which I chose to illustrate The twelve dancing princesses aka Le bal des douze princesses aka Cele douăsprezece prințeșe și castelul fermecat.

See? The story came later. And I didn’t even use that many traditional costumes (the main character wears the Rhodope costume, the princesses are all in 1930 attire – because in my head that is the last time modern and traditional costumes could be seen together on the streets). But I did ink almost everything by hand, because I had grown quite font of the Kuretake brush.

And while doing that, I gathered a lot of sketches which, with a little bit of effort, could be assembled into a (small) comic. A zine, black and white with one colour – I posted it online, somebody found it and inquired about turning it into a real comic book. Which meant rethinking stuff and colouring all the pages and being a ResponsibleAdultTM – translation: printing deadlines :) .

All that is done now. The book comes out middle of August, at Les Aventuries de l’Etrange. I’ll make a proper post when that happens. In the meantime, you can see me inking, colouring and preparing the book for print on Twitch.