Calendar 2023
Filled with joy, details and pigs.
Last year I made a small calendar with a minimalistic design, featuring my original characters I was very fond of at the time. My main focus was to prepare everything alone - from drawing the illustrations for each month, designing the pages to printing & binding it together. It was surely time consuming but worth it - not just that I could produce calendars on demand and not store big stocks (space-wise and money-wise it's just not affordable for me), I learned a lot about the process through my own mistakes.
This year I took a different approach. What I wanted was a bigger & more convenient format, where one could take notes and mark important dates, and an easier flipping of pages. This is what I created:
Calendar 2023 is size 23 x 46 cm when hung (as in pictures below). It has a hole on top and a spiral, binding both pages. Top page contains a 21 x 21 cm illustration while the bottom page shows a monthly grid with extra space for additional notes. Paper is suitable for various pens and crayons to write on, making it convenient for every day use.
Calendar consists of 14 pages in total: cover, 12 pages of each month and an extra page that is quite exciting addition this year. On the last page of the calendar you can find over 150 tiny, easy to peel off stickers, that can be used over the year. Some are decorative, others themed.
As you can see, the calendar is filled with pig characters. You might wonder, why out of all the animals existing, I chose to draw and dedicate a whole calendar to pigs. Well, I have a rather long answer to that. In the summer 2022, I stayed a night in a campsite, somewhere on the french mediterranean coast. The camping spot we found was situated beside a canal, which was dry due to the hot summer weather. It was already late in the evening and we had been setting up our tents when I heard unusual noise coming from the canal. To console myself, I thought it's most probably another camper taking a late night walk with their dog. The sound of dry leaves and branches didn't subside. I hate peering into dark holes or pointing a torchlight to aid my vision but I had to check what's going on. A mother with 4 babies was taking a walk. Not human, of course. It was a mama wild boar and her piglets taking a night stroll down the canal! As cute as piglets can be, they frightened me. I've never seen a grown-up wild boar before and her long trunk was fascinating! Although we laughed it off, all being shocked at seeing wild boars in the middle of a campsite during high season, I was scared. They were stuck in my head for days, so I thought I might as well put them on paper. Therefore I drew them. In my style, of course.
Doodle on the right: Mama boar setting up the pitch. Her piglets are peeking out of the tent. The neighbour camper just woke up and is confused with the unusual view.
I grew fond of the pig characters so I drew them some more. And more. Until I didn't draw anything else besides the pigs! They are so easy to draw and can be drawn doing any kind of activity, so I ended up including them to my selection of exhibition artworks for PIN7 show in Nucleus Portland gallery in Oregon, USA. And that sort of led to the idea of creating a collection of illustrations filled with pigs. The special collection is now presented through a calendar but will be turned into prints as well. Here are some of them:
The project required some preparations and lots of tiny doodles. I also had to meet with my long forgotten acquaintance Adobe Illustrator, who helped me prepare the big sticker sheet for printing. This time I outsourced the printing to get the best quality product as well a save some time cutting and handling the paper.
I'm looking forward to spending the whole next year accompanied with these whimsical pigs. I'm sure you would enjoy their company as well.
Thank you for reading. Stay safe. - Mojca
P.S.: This letter was initially written for my website’s blog. I copied the text and images. If you would like to read the original post, it’s available here.